The Tough Old Wang Laohu and His Lovely Bride

[A delicate beauty from the White Mountains and Black Waters × a burly, tigerish roughneck | 28 cm height difference | Northeast China’s locals are going wild for this couple]

Li Yujiao has had the worst luck in the world. She became the second wife of Zhang, a wealthy man in Shenyang, only to be framed by his concubine right after the wedding. Her husband actually wants to demote her to a bedchamber maid! What Northeastern girl would put up with that? She grabs a straw broom, gives the concubine a beating, and flees home to the Changbai Mountains in the middle of the night.

Who could have guessed that the ice would give way beneath her as she crossed a frozen lake? Just as she’s about to freeze into an icicle, a burly logger nearly six feet tall hauls her out. His name is Wang Huiyao, but everyone calls him “Old Tiger.” His muscles are strong enough to carry three hundred jin of timber, his temper flares like a winter woodpile, and the first thing he says is, “Look at you, all delicate and dainty. You can’t even paddle when you fall through the ice?”

Li Yujiao trembles with fear, but her family thinks she’s brought shame on them and won’t let her in. Old Tiger draws on his pipe and taps the ash against her family’s doorstep. “I’m buying this woman! Twenty silver dollars, and from now on she belongs to the Wang family!”

And so begins their chaotic “life together” in a little cabin at the foot of the Changbai Mountains:

“Wang Huiyao, you lunkhead! You tossed your stinky socks on my embroidery hoop again!”

“So what? The tiger pouch my wife embroidered is perfect for holding my tobacco leaves!”

“Who’s your wife? I haven’t agreed to marry a tiger like you!”

“Then why were you hugging my arm and crying that you were cold last night?”

When a delicate embroiderer meets a tigerish, fiercely protective man, a wildly entertaining romance sets the White Mountains and Black Waters alight: he drives off her former in-laws for her, and she embroiders for him the whole...