[Swapping brides to rise to the top + marriage first, love later + doting in-laws + everyday family life]
In the late 1970s, Lin Xiuhe, the least favored eldest daughter of the Lin family, was handed over by her gambling-addicted father, Lin Dagui, to pay off his debts.
She was given to the Hu butcher family as a bride for their twenty-year-old simpleton son, who still couldn't tie his own pants.
On the eve of the wedding, she caught her cousin in a compromising situation with her boyfriend. The cousin and her lover came up with a plan, and that very night they carried Lin Xiuhe to the bed of the cousin's fiance.
Lin Xiuhe had already resigned herself to spending her life with a simpleton, but somehow ended up marrying Chen Shanhe, the rough army officer no one in the village dared cross.
She thought they'd just make a life together and take it one day at a time. She never expected this cold-faced man to have a warm heart and cherish her dearly.
Her in-laws looked fierce, but treated her even better than their own daughter.
From an eldest daughter her birth family had traded away like livestock to a treasure her in-laws cherished like the apple of their eye, Lin Xiuhe's life grew brighter by the day.
She raised chickens and pigs, worked the fields, attended night school, and sold goods at the market to earn money. She did it all.
Step by step, she pulled the whole family out of poverty, cured her mother's long-standing illness, put her younger siblings through university, and became the first family in the area to have ten thousand yuan in savings.
Just as her hard times were finally behind her, the cousin who had knocked her out and forced her into the marriage showed up, having fled her husband's family, to switch husbands...
