Sweet Marriage in the Seventies: Married First, Fell in Love Later, and the Roughneck Dotes on His Wife

[Marriage before love] [Sweet romance in a bygone era] [A secret crush comes true] [Building wealth]

Forced by her stepmother to marry a country hunter, Su Wantang thinks she's jumped straight into a pit of fire.

But her rough-and-tumble husband hands over his entire allowance, chops wood and hauls water, and puts every meat coupon he's saved over the years into her hands.

Other people just share a life together. Her marriage is a gentle stream of love, with her treasured in the palm of his hand.

What makes her heart flutter even more is the old tin box she finds after they marry:

The half piece of peach pastry she'd casually given him twelve years ago had been wrapped in wax paper for all that time, its edges worn white.

This quiet, taciturn man has turned his secret crush into an affection the whole village knows about.

When the policies loosen, she uses her family's ancestral braising recipe to start a stall, taking it from the village market all the way to a shop in the county seat:

Auntie Qian is jealous and trips her up. A county factory section chief blocks her supplies and cuts off deliveries. A provincial capital businessman tampers with the scales to steal her recipe.

No matter. Her husband can swing an axe, and she can keep the books straight.

The stall becomes a workshop, and the workshop becomes a factory. Just as her braised dishes are about to reach the provincial capital, the city man who forced her into marriage years ago shows up at her door. "Wantang, come back to the city with me."

Lu Zheng pins him against the door, his voice hoarse. "She's my wife. Who are you telling to come back to the city?"