[Both leads are virgins + marriage first, love later + everyday life in the 1960s + slow-burn romance + mutual devotion]
In the winter of 1968, Shen Qinghuan, the daughter of a capitalist family, is sent to a military base by an arranged marriage and weds Lu Ye, a regiment commander she has never met.
Everyone laughs at the pampered young woman for marrying a roughneck, waiting to see her cry and crawl back to Shanghai.
She accepts her fate, too. Her father has just died in prison, and her mother is gravely ill. Being alive at all is already a blessing.
On their wedding night, the roughneck stands at the door with his back to her and says:
“If you don’t want this, you can stay here for now. When things calm down, I’ll send you back to Shanghai.”
She thinks he looks down on her background.
Only later does she learn that this roughneck spent two hours queuing in the logistics unit in the middle of the night just to get her a heating stove.
He traded all the brown sugar coupons he’d saved for half a year for brown sugar, then quietly put it in her water.
On a snowy night, he ran all the way back from the barracks because he was “afraid you’d be scared alone.”
She plants coffee in a broken pig-feeding crock, and everyone in the family compound laughs that she can’t shake her capitalist habits.
Only he squats down to take a long look and says, “Plant some more. Then I’ll drink it with you.”
He has never said a single romantic word in his life, yet he gives her every bit of tenderness he has.
Then, one winter, an urgent telegram arrives.
That capitalist heiress who was sent away for reeducation has long since become the darling he holds closest to his heart.
“You’re my wife. I do what I want.”
