[Elderly Woman Reborn] [1980s] [Period Setting] [Building Wealth] [Cutting Family Ties] [Family Life]
Lin Xiuying lived to the age of seventy-eight and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she had returned to 1980, the year she turned forty.
In her previous life, she served the Yang family for twenty-two years, getting up early to cook 8,030 meals. Her mother-in-law even stole the thirty yuan she had saved to buy a toy for her grandson.
This time, she was done. She untied her apron and clanged the spatula against the pot: whoever was hungry could cook for themselves.
Her mother-in-law, Wang Guilan, raised a broom, but Lin Xiuying snatched it away. Her husband, Yang Jianguo, tried to scare her by saying no one would take her in if she went back to her family. She pulled out the thirty yuan sewn into her sleeve.
The Yang family thought they had found her weakness, never realizing she had already made other plans.
She left the Yang family courtyard and started out selling food from a stall, eventually growing one shop into a chain of eight. Along the way, she saved a girl named Xing'er who was about to take her own life, took her in, taught her a trade, and helped her get a silver bracelet back from a villain. As time passed, they grew closer and closer. A pair of half-silver lock pendants and a birthmark on the girl's left shoulder blade revealed that she was Yang Zhaodi, Lin Xiuying's own daughter, who had gone missing in 1971.
Her ex-husband brought his whole family to show her their "great kindness" and try to buy her shopfront at a low price. "Sell it to us. Think of it as us saving you." Zhaodi stood in front of her mother. "Even if I have to sell my blood, I'll help Mom get through this." The Yang family laughed at her for meddling, then sent people to bully her. Lin Xiuying rescued her daughter and cut ties with the Yang family in front of everyone, adding Zhaodi to her household register.
In those days, a woman could hardly get by after leaving her husband's family. Lin Xiuying spent fifteen years showing them that only after leaving could she truly live as herself.
By the time the Yang family found their rice jar empty and their shopfront in someone else's hands, the elderly woman they had driven away had become the richest person in the county.
