After Kicking Out My Scumbag Dad, I Became a Thorn in a Powerful Man's Side

[Her family abandons her in occupied territory, but she single-handedly stirs the winds of a turbulent age]

In 1938, on the night Guangzhou falls, the Yan family flees south in a panic.

Fifteen-year-old Yan Weilan, a concubine-born daughter, is deliberately left behind by her stepmother and half-sister. She also overhears a chilling truth: her father intends to give her to a wealthy Hong Kong businessman as a concubine in exchange for shares in a wharf.

At the end of her rope, she finds a new beginning.

Carrying a copy of Illustrated Materia Medica left by her birth mother, she blends into the stream of refugees. Her knowledge of medicine earns her a place with Dr. Zhou Qiluo, and she seizes the chance to enroll at Hong Kong’s Sacred Heart Girls’ School.

With her exceptional intelligence and gift for languages, she wins the favor of the French consul’s wife. Then, amid the flames of war, she spots a business opportunity, trades quinine for her first fortune, and takes the name “Su Lan.”

As the fires of war rage, she rises in Shanghai.

Moving to Shanghai, she navigates the city’s competing powers:

By day, she is “Miss Su,” the proprietress of a pharmacy; in secret, she supplies medicine to the resistance.

She enters a fake marriage with the mysterious banker Cheng Yu’an, turning it into a genuine business partnership as they probe and use each other.

She also allies with Hong Jie, the intelligence queen of the Paramount Ballroom, using dance-hall gossip to weave a commercial intelligence network.

And when her family falls on hard times, they meet again:

Her once-arrogant stepmother begs her to buy grain, while her half-sister has become a textile worker.

Yan Weilan smiles gracefully. “What I want to see isn’t you brought down into the dirt. It’s me rising, step by step, and reclaiming everything that belongs to me.”

This is the epic tale of a concubine-born daughter’s rise in a turbulent age,

and of a woman who uses wisdom, courage, and capital to forge her own legend amid the tides of history.