The Wife’s Comeback: Making the Whole Family Rich

After transmigrating into a communal apartment building in 1960, Lin Wanqiu opened her eyes just in time to see her mother-in-law smash the family’s last piece of cornmeal. “You can’t have children? Then hurry up and get back to your parents’ home!”

Looking at her malnourished, gaunt sister-in-law and her father-in-law, who had been denounced and could barely stand straight, she clenched her fist around the crescent-shaped scar in her palm. Her past-life experience as a barefoot doctor wasn’t going to waste!

She cleared land in the coal shed to grow medicinal herbs, traded ration coupons for cash on the black market, and exchanged half a sack of dried sweet potatoes for an old medical book. That book turned out to be the family’s lifeline.

“Wanqiu, the team leader’s wife is having a difficult delivery!”

“Wanqiu, a worker at the brick kiln got crushed!”

With medicinal herbs in one hand and work points to calculate in the other, she dragged a family on the verge of falling apart back on track.

Her mother-in-law gossiped: “Women shouldn’t show their faces in public. It’s shameless!”

Lin Wanqiu slapped down ten jin of ration coupons. “Will that be enough to buy you a new headscarf?”

Her timid sister-in-law said, “Sis, I want to go to school, too...”

She stayed up all night fixing the sewing machine, then made her sister-in-law a new schoolbag. “You’re going tomorrow!”

From secretly trading ration coupons to opening the county’s first herbal medicine shop; from being the family of a denounced “Black Category” member to becoming the respected Dr. Lin.

Standing beside the assembly line at her own factory and looking at the smiles on her family’s faces, Lin Wanqiu finally understood:

There was no golden finger in this era. All she could rely on were her own hardworking hands and a heart brave enough to fight!

As for the gossips?

Hah! Once she moved her whole family into a Western-style villa, let’s see who dared say another word!