A 72-Year-Old Veteran Actor Transmigrates to Ancient Times to Flee Famine and Farm

“When the sky falls, curse it first, then push it back up.”, Su Jinxiu

Su Jinxiu, a nationally celebrated performing artist, died unexpectedly at seventy-two. When she opened her eyes, she had become a forty-five-year-old shrew of a peasant woman, also named Su Jinxiu, infamous in every village for being a wicked mother-in-law who had nearly driven her whole family to ruin.

On her very first day in this new life, three disasters struck in succession:

A three-year drought, a locust plague, and defeated soldiers fleeing south.

Faced with a house full of neighbors demanding repayment and daughters-in-law sobbing, Su Jinxiu slammed down a bowl and pounded the table, her curses ringing through the dilapidated house:

“What are you crying for? Are you going to stay here and wait to die?!”

She sifted through the hundreds of roles she had played over more than sixty years:

From playing refugees, she had learned how to identify wild vegetables and find water;

from playing doctors, she had learned medicine;

from playing a hunter’s daughter, she had learned to make traps...

She had even picked up some martial arts and internal breathing techniques while filming action movies in her early years. All the skills she had painstakingly learned for her roles had now become ways to survive in a world gone mad.

Still cursing, she strapped an iron pot and coarse salt to her back and led her family south to escape the famine before the locusts descended.

Along the way, she taught while she cursed.

In the end, they settled in a mountain hollow. She nitpicked over the location, cursed as they built their house, and complained while they reclaimed farmland.

Everyone gradually realized that the harsher this sharp-tongued, hard-hearted woman cursed, the better they lived; the more she criticized, the brighter their future became.

From caves to timber-framed houses, from digging up wild vegetables to planting medicinal gardens... With everything she had learned in her life, Su Jinxiu built a paradise for them all, grumbling and cursing every step of the way.