After eight years of hard work, she finally owns a home in Nancheng. On her third wedding anniversary, Lin Shuo is greeted not by a romantic dinner, but by her uninvited in-laws, smelling of cheap tobacco, wearing mud-caked cloth shoes, and tossing peanuts straight into her Hermes bag.
Her husband Chen Hao's “My mother has it hard” becomes the only rule in the household. Her silk pajamas are worn into the kitchen, her cosmetics are rummaged through, and her bedroom is piled high with cured meat that reeks of salt and fish. When she tries to reason with them, her mother-in-law holds a kitchen knife to her own neck, while her father-in-law slams the table and curses her for having “studied like a dog.”
Lin Shuo finally understands that reason is worthless when dealing with people who throw tantrums.
If they won't listen to reason, then she'll talk money, law, and rules. She hires a strict housekeeper, installs a fingerprint lock, and turns her husband's salary card into a tool for punishment, making her tantrum-throwing mother-in-law taste “following the rules” for the first time. In this battle over her home and her dignity, she'll smile as she sends every last one of them packing.
