[Island Life in the 1970s + Food + Everyone's Darling + Rugged Husband and Sweet Wife]
Her fiancé runs off south with the fifty yuan her mother needs to stay alive, leaving behind an IOU for five hundred yuan.
When a bully creditor comes to seize the family home, Su Xiuxiu swings a cleaver and smashes the doorstep, driving off the thugs!
To earn enough food to keep her bedridden, blood-coughing mother alive, she pushes a handcart loaded with an iron wok to a construction site at an island harbor.
From the start, she faces damp coarse rice, bony, bitter fish, and three hundred rough, burly men clamoring for food.
She briskly ties on a white apron, knives flashing as she heats oil in the wok!
Creamy fresh fish soup, golden oyster rolls, rice braised with crispy pork cracklings and potatoes, delicate white fish cakes...
She transforms coarse ingredients into hearty, savory dishes, and the sizzling aromas win over the whole island!
The troublesome old hands who once gave her a hard time race to fetch water and chop firewood, the picky carpenter bows to her in admiration, and the supply clerks compete to approve the best ingredients for her.
She rises from a temporary cook given a trial shift of three days, never sure of her next meal, to the indispensable anchor of the kitchen.
With her hardworking hands and skill, she secures a steady job and even cures her mother's chronic illness.
But why does Captain Huo Zheng, a stern and imposing tough guy who rarely smiles, always linger outside the kitchen window, his ears burning red as he silently chops a whole courtyard's worth of hardwood for her?
