Zhang Meilan: The War Sparked by a Smart Toilet

When Lin Shiran, a top UI designer who believed in “user experience above all,” married her “best choice” in life, the gentle and considerate architect Shen Hao, she thought she was about to begin a new life with clear logic and perfect plans.

But she had overlooked the most unpredictable variable of all: her mother-in-law, Mrs. Zhang Meilan.

Zhang Meilan lived by the maxim, “I’ve eaten more salt than you’ve walked roads.” She could calculate a month’s expenses from a single scallion and firmly believed all smart appliances were a “tax on the gullible.” When Lin Shiran “splurged” on a fully automatic smart litter box, the four-figure “cat toilet” instantly lit the fuse of a family war.

A “world war” over lifestyle habits, spending habits, and child-rearing (or rather, cat-rearing) philosophies erupted. Caught in the middle, Shen Hao might be mediating a “litter box sovereignty dispute” one moment, then handling an international crisis over how long leftovers could be kept the next. Lin Shiran tried using her professional expertise to map her mother-in-law’s “behavioral logic,” only to discover that the other woman’s “user requirements” were always changing and never followed logic.

This is a comedy of urban survival about a “high-tech daughter-in-law” and a “hardcore mother-in-law” using their wits against each other in a series of hilariously absurd everyday battles, eventually stumbling their way toward a “strategic reconciliation.” When logic meets experience and code collides with recipes, who will have the last laugh in this bloodless war?