The Sixties: My Beautiful Sister-in-Law Is Plump and Radiant

[Period] [No System] [Adopted Wife Turned Older Sister] [Sister-in-Law] [Sisters]

[Who says you’ll starve without a System?]

[Who says you’ll suffer without storage space?]

[No grain?]

[The hills are covered in unwanted acorns. Pick them up, take them home, mix them with a little limewater and wood ash, then make buns, dumplings, or steamed cornmeal cakes. They taste better than cornmeal and can even be used as feed for chickens and pigs.]

[No meat?]

[There’s dirt everywhere. Dig it up, fire it into pottery, make cages, and set out some bait. Wild rabbits, pheasants, raccoon dogs, mink, and badgers will all come crawling in.]

[Not enough clothes?]

[Raw hides that nobody knows how to process, the same hides that can only be sold cheaply to the supply and marketing cooperative, can be soaked with acorns, then sewn into fox-fur coats and tailored into mink coats. In winter, when it’s thirty or forty degrees below zero, you’ll be sweating from the heat.]

[Cold when you sleep at night in winter?]

[Dig up the soil inside the house whenever you like. Dig down three or five meters, and no matter how the wind and frost scour the frozen ground outside, I’ve got geothermal heat to keep me safe. Steady as a rock.]

[Hunting?]

[No, thanks.]

[What respectable person goes risking their life in the mountains all the time? Wild boar isn’t tastier than rabbit, and bear fur isn’t softer or warmer than mink.]

[Safety first.]

[Even without a System or storage space, and without venturing deep into the mountains, famine is raging all across the country.]

[Here in the sparsely populated Xiaoxing’an Mountains in 1960, I can still make sure my sisters and sisters-in-law eat their fill, stay warm, live comfortably, and grow up pretty as can be.]

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