When Lin Yue opens her eyes, she’s a bride in 1983, locked in a woodshed after being traded in a marriage deal.
Her father wants to exchange her for three hundred yuan in bride-price money. Tomorrow, she’s to marry a widower.
She doesn’t cry or make a scene. Instead, she does the math through the door:
“Dad, selling me outright is like killing the hen for its eggs. Let me go to the city and work as a nanny, and I’ll be a hen that keeps laying eggs. Which deal makes more sense?”
Once in the city, she uses her ledgers and sharp tongue to overcome the nanny community’s exclusion, the market’s monopolies, and state-owned enterprises’ suppression.
From nanny to street vendor, from workshop to foreign-trade factory, she steadily becomes her own guiding light.
Only later do the people who once said she was “cold-hearted” realize the truth: her heart isn’t cold. It’s warm only for those who deserve it.
