The Wicked Mother-in-Law Is Reborn: The Whole Village Feasted the Day I Died

Shen Hongxiu opened her eyes, reborn from the flames, just in time to see her three sons holding out a family-separation agreement and demanding she hand over her last half-sack of life-saving grain. In her previous life, the heiress of a prominent capitalist family had been starved to death by her own flesh and blood. This time, she had ten chests of gold bars in hand and a cold smile on her face. “It’s time to recast this little play about murdering your mother!”

She burned the work-point ledger and exposed her eldest son for fraudulently claiming a martyr’s pension. She used a coded message in Russian to lure out her father’s old comrades from the military district, then turned the tables and had the whole village eat steamed buns made with poisonous clay. While her unfilial sons slaughtered one another over the gold bars, a military jeep was already crushing the ancestral hall’s plaque beneath its wheels.

“Mother, we were wrong!” Their cries came in a frenzy of knocking on the door on a stormy night. Inside, the old woman calmly polished her jade earrings. “What’s the rush? When you’re hungry enough to gnaw on your coffins, I’ll treat the whole village to a feast.” As flames soared into the sky, was the woman seated in the cabin, gazing down at the inferno, a vengeful demon or a capitalist queen reborn from the bloodshed?