My Mother Is the Real Heiress of a Hong Kong Tycoon [1990s]

My mother was the real daughter of the wealthy Ye family of Hong Kong. After spending forty-two years in the countryside on the mainland, she was finally brought back by her rich grandparents.

Grandma and Grandpa said through their tears, "You've suffered so much all these years."

Only I knew that wasn't true.

My mother hadn't been lost all those years ago. She'd been abandoned, all because a fortune-teller said she was destined to have no wealth. What a ridiculous reason.

It wasn't until later that I learned our whole family was inside a book.

The heroine in the book was the fake heiress. Her whole family loved her, so did the male lead and his rivals, and even the real heiress's husband, my father, loved her. The fake heiress enjoyed a triumphant life, while the real heiress lost her husband and son, and ended up hated by her father and mother.

People said the real heiress was born into a young lady's body but destined for a servant's life. One day she was living a good life, the next it was turned upside down because she got lost. The fake heiress stole her life, took her place in the wealthy family, and even married a poor country bumpkin who farmed for a living. Her sons weren't graduates of Peking or Tsinghua, either. She had nothing to show for all the sons she bore.

She was already forty-six. Half her life had gone by. What good would it do to be welcomed back into a wealthy family now? Could she start over?

She still couldn't get back the life she'd lost, could she?

Who would have thought my mother wasn't destined to have no wealth, but was blessed with prosperity in every way, bringing good fortune to her husband, her children, and herself?

My father, whom others saw as a peasant farmer, had contracted over a thousand acres of land and had assets worth hundreds of millions.

My mother, whom the Ye family thought was destined to be poor, owned thousands of homes. She had houses and storefronts in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Even the most luxurious villa in Hong Kong's best neighborhood belonged to our family, and rental income poured in endlessly.

My brothers, whom everyone thought weren't smart enough to get into Peking or Tsinghua, held PhDs from Harvard, Cambridge, and the Ivy League. They'd invested in numerous publicly listed companies and were the financial world's rising stars.

I watched my parents by the window, counting property deeds: one, two, three... one hundred... two hundred... three hundred. I laughed like a pig.

I wondered anxiously: What should we do with three hundred properties and five hundred commercial storefronts waiting to be inherited?

I also had tens of thousands of acres of contracted farmland worth tens of millions. There was more money than we could spend. We could never spend it all.

I looked over at my three brothers counting ownership shares. They'd even made angel investments in the Ye family's company, and they handed me their stock subscription agreements. "It's all yours, little sister."

Hugging my baby bottle, I slurped my milk. This wasn't some miserable little cabbage growing in the fields. My mother was clearly the heroine of a face-slapping novel on Jinjiang!

[Set in an alternate history after Hong Kong's 1997 handover]

[The heroine has an easy, blessed life and is doted on by her whole family]

[In the original story, the heroine's father never actually loved the fake heiress. He has always loved her real mother.]

Theme: Life is my own, and I'm the real wealthy heiress.