The 1980s Prosperous Family's Stepmother: Building a Career with My Pocket Dimension

Lin Wanqiu, founder of a modern restaurant chain, transmigrates to a southern water town in 1983 after an accident. She becomes the new bride of Chen Jianjun, a recently discharged soldier, and takes on three wary little “burdens” along with him: eleven-year-old Chen Xiangyang, nine-year-old Chen Zhaodi, and seven-year-old Chen Xingchen. Faced with a home stripped bare, a critical mother-in-law, neighbors’ gossip, and the original owner’s rotten reputation for being “lazy and greedy,” Lin Wanqiu rolls up her sleeves and turns her life around. With one hand, she unlocks the hidden space inside her ancestral jade pendant, brings out rice, flour, cooking oil, and other essentials to improve their meals, and uses modern nutritional knowledge to turn the scrawny children into healthy, chubby kids. With the other, she seizes the opportunities brought by reform and opening up, starting with a street stall selling specialty sweet drinks, then opening a snack shop and a food-processing factory, establishing herself step by step amid the tides of change. Along the way, she wins the children’s trust with genuine care, becoming their real mom instead of just their stepmother. She and her husband Chen Jianjun, cold on the outside but warm at heart and quietly protective of his wife, go from treating each other like ice to understanding and standing by one another. In the end, the whole family enjoys meat at every meal and a life everyone envies, while she becomes the brightest “career mom” in the water towns of the 1980s.