When she wakes up, Lin Qiangwei, freshly laid off from a garment factory, has become another Lin Qiangwei: a young woman who came from the countryside to the city in the early 1980s to make a living. The good news: she’s ten years younger and has landed in an era where gold seems to lie everywhere. The bad news: she has only two yuan and fifty cents in her pocket, a train ticket she can’t use to go back, and a certificate showing she dropped out of high school. The even worse news: to outshine everyone else at a job fair, she had a moment of madness and made up a fake résumé, claiming to have powerful overseas connections, speak three foreign languages fluently, and know the ins and outs of foreign trade. The result... she gets hired on the spot by the hottest foreign trade company in the Special Economic Zone?! Σ( ° △ °|||)︴
From then on, Lin Qiangwei lives a nerve-racking double life. By day, she’s elite white-collar worker Linda Lin, carrying a brick phone and spouting mangled English that leaves foreign clients stunned. By night, she’s a country girl hiding in her rented room, desperately studying foreign languages on a brick-sized cassette player and poring over every newspaper and book she can find to learn the latest policies, terrified that someone will expose her the next day.
The company’s genuine overseas-returnee executive looks at her with disdain. “Miss Lin’s spoken English has a certain... Texas fried chicken flavor.”
The competitor at the next desk waits every day for her to make a fool of herself. “Her? She knows foreign trade? I bet she doesn’t even know what an L/C, or letter of credit, is.”
Lin Qiangwei: Help! The pressure’s on me now! I really just wanted a job! QAQ
And yet, thanks to her gutsy determination to keep up the lie once she’s told it, along with the ability to read people and handle relationships that she honed from the bottom up, she somehow... keeps making the snowball bigger and bigger.
The first time she manages to win over a foreign client,
