In the 1980s, Wei Qingshan and Yao Yan lived in Niutou Village in a city in Guangxi. To keep the villagers from bullying them, they racked their brains trying to have a son. When their sixth child turned out to be a girl, they had a sudden idea: they hired people to put on a play at their home to prove that they'd had a boy. Then they raised their daughter as a boy so she could carry on the family line.
Wei Baowang was their sixth child, the "boy" expected to carry on the family line. Before she was accidentally "killed" by someone secretly in love with her, she thought being a boy doted on by her family was pretty great. Only after her untimely death did she finally realize that, with no sense of self, she'd been nothing but a joke.
Reborn at fourteen, she resolves to turn her life around, find a master to teach her a skill, stop being a helpless baby, take on a new identity, change her family's fate, and make them rich!
But she soon realizes that she hasn't done much, yet the people around her are changing. Her awful grandparents have found new ways to be awful, her parents' jobs have changed, and so have her eldest, second, third, fourth, and fifth sisters and their husbands...
Then, somehow, she's hounded every day by an amateur metaphysics enthusiast and hit with a debt claim from a beautiful, disturbed man who suddenly appears out of nowhere. He says, "Babe, don't you think it's time to pay me for that childhood performance, plus damages for the false identity?"
The sense of immersion is quite strong. The author is very attentive and even provides pictures on how to identify pearls. Nice! (♥∀♥)