In the Eighties, My Whole Family Was Everyone's Scapegoat

Upcoming novel: The Eccentric Troupe of the 1970s. Blurb below.

Blurb:

Su Xiaoli wakes up to find she has traveled from the apocalypse to the resource-poor 1980s, and that all five members of her family are veteran scapegoats.

Her parents are often accused of all sorts of things. When disease strikes the village chickens, someone brings a chicken to the brigade leader and claims her parents poisoned it! When a field embankment collapses, they say her parents dug it up on purpose.

When Widow Wang from the village has an affair, Su Xiaoli's eldest sister happens to walk by. People accuse her of being shameless and fooling around with a delinquent, then force her into an unhappy marriage.

When the neighbor's child falls into a deep ditch, they say her eldest brother did it.

Of the whole family, only Su Xiaoli, the original owner of this body, has the fiercest temper, and she gets blamed for the most things. At the slightest, if she walks past someone's house and their child starts crying, they claim she made the child cry. At the worst, she gets into an argument while picking mushrooms on the mountain. The other person can't shove her, falls down, and grabs her as they tumble down the hill, yet somehow that's her fault too.

Even her new husband, the only one left in his family, is a scapegoat.

Before the apocalypse, she used to read novels and think the authors exaggerated, with their endless parade of awful relatives and villagers in stories set in the past. Now she knows it wasn't exaggerated at all.

But now that she's here, she won't be the one suffering anymore. From now on, everyone else can suffer!

Not only does she have the abilities she had in her previous life, she also awakens another ability that lets her hear old objects with a spirit of their own speak. From then on, she begins collecting old things and piling them up at home, waiting for the day she can sell them and make a fortune.

The villagers notice that after Su Shuide's youngest daughter hit her head, she became even crazier.

When a wild boar charges down the mountain, she rushes forward alone and beats it until it squeals. At last, she sits astride the dead boar, its tongue lolling out, and glares at the crowd gathering around her as if she were a god of slaughter.

She's also become a sharp-tongued queen who takes on the whole world and leaves people struggling for breath with a single sentence. Even Granny Xue, the village's fiercest arguer, avoids her.

Even stranger, she's started collecting old junk, including wooden bowls and plates, and keeps piling it up at home instead of taking it to the recycling station to sell!

The villagers all feel sorry for the ancestors of the Wen family. Who would have thought their only heir would marry such a spendthrift?

Note: This story is set in a fictional parallel world, with many original liberties. It's a sweet, lighthearted story.

The heroine's golden finger is ridiculously powerful.

Wild animals are eaten in the story for plot reasons. In real life, the author firmly opposes hunting and eating wild animals!

Likewise, the author's heroines must always be the most beautiful babies in their stories!

Upcoming novel: The Eccentric Troupe of the 1970s. Blurb: In her previous life, Chi Xiang was tormented by her son and daughter so badly that she wished she could go back to being single and spared the misery of raising children. Who could have guessed that she would wake up reborn as a recently widowed woman in a large family in the 1970s, more than ten years younger? Before she can even celebrate, she discovers that the original owner has elders above and children below, and every single member of the family is a handful. Every so often, they make a mess for her to clean up. There's also an older brother-in-law from a different branch of the family, widowed years ago, who covets her and wants them to live together as a couple.

Only a few days after being reborn, she's just finished dealing with her eldest daughter's pregnancy after the girl was abandoned by a sent-down youth who returned to the city, when her mother-in-law gets reported by a neighbor for superstition and is sentenced to be paraded through the village. Her father-in-law, who's over seventy, breaks another old man's leg. Her eldest son and his wife fight every few days, while her second son lets his wife run wild and humiliate him. Her youngest son is accused of sabotaging socialism and nearly gets sent to prison or reform through labor. Only her second and youngest daughters seem easy to handle. Wait! She was relieved too soon... She wants to flip the table and walk out!

But in this era, even traveling a little way requires a certificate from the brigade. She can't simply walk away. This chaotic, exhausting life is enough to drive anyone mad.

Fortunately, in the end, she gets to live the life she's always wanted: planting flowers in the front yard and vegetables behind the house.

Content warnings: Fictional setting in a past era, domestic and family drama, lots of awful people.

Theme: As long as you're strong enough inside, there's no hardship you can't overcome!