When she died, she had spent her whole life earning money for her husband's family and her birth family, without a cent left for herself.
When she opened her eyes again, it was 1983. She was twenty-eight and had been widowed for a year. Her mother-in-law was putting a price on her: one sewing machine and a hundred yuan to marry her off to the lame nephew of the grain station director. The Liu family offered three hundred yuan as a bride price, two hundred of which her mother was "keeping safe" for her.
Lin Wanqiu neither cried nor made a scene. She agreed to everything. Then she took on the rotten accounts at the purchasing station that no one had dared touch for three years. Not to settle the books, but to gain a legitimate reason to handle the purchase permits for five thousand jin of peanuts hidden among the bad accounts.
She remembered the prices of every kind of goods for the next twenty years. With a single glance, she could spot eggs laid the previous day and calculate missing funds to the last cent.
This time, she was working for herself. From a temporary worker whose price was set by others to the person who set prices for the whole county, she would collect the forty years of debts owed by both her husband's family and her birth family, every last cent, with interest.
