In the Nineties, I Was the Foil to the Reborn Female Lead

Ren Jiaojiao transmigrates from a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies to the 1990s. Her husband is the youngest and most highly regarded engineer at the Ninth Satellite Launch Research Center, a refined and erudite man. Her father-in-law was among those who went into business in the 1980s and made their fortunes early, amassing considerable wealth. Her mother-in-law... Oh, she doesn't have one. With a handsome man on one side and money on the other, and no wicked mother-in-law to make her life difficult, everyone thinks she's the kind of winner favored by Heaven. Only she knows she's merely a plot device in a book, there to advance the romance between the male and female leads, a foil for the heroine's gentleness, kindness, intelligence, and competence. Luckily, she's no longer "her." * Zhou Lijuan is reborn, but she resents Heaven for not letting her go back to before Ren Jiaojiao married Chen Guowei. She wipes away her tears and tells herself it's fine. With the advantage of being reborn, she can surely expose Ren Jiaojiao's selfish, materialistic true nature in no time and save Chen Guowei from her clutches. But... She works herself to the bone helping her neighbors and finally earns the title of exemplary military wife. Recommended for a job at the residential compound's service center, she gets up at dawn and works late into the night, exhausting herself dealing with every petty squabble. Ren Jiaojiao, whose relationships with the neighbors are poor, is named an honored military wife just because an article she wrote is published in the newspaper. Later, Ren Jiaojiao gets her own column in the daily paper and earns a steady monthly writing fee. She becomes a specially invited magazine contributor, then a moderately well-known author... Zhou Lijuan is devastated. With the advantage of being reborn, why is she doing even worse than Ren Jiaojiao did in her previous life? - A marriage first, love later, with a focus on everyday life. Perhaps it's also a story of the heroine and the supporting heroine seeing each other as rivals, competing in good faith and both continually improving. - The period setting is somewhat fictionalized as needed. Pre-release: Please add "Learning to Be a Stepmother in the 1980s" to your reading list~ Su Tong never imagined that after complaining the previous night about capitalists exploiting workers with 996 schedules, she'd wake up in the 1980s, when the government could still assign you a job. She was so shocked her eyes nearly rolled back... Of course, all she could do was roll her eyes. There was no going back to the twenty-first century. In the 1980s, Su Tong's parents died early, and she was raised by her maternal uncle's family. Things were neither warm nor cold, but she grew up safe and sound. All she had to do was graduate from vocational school, get a government-assigned job where she could coast along, and live happily ever after. Everything changes when her cousin, who married into the Lu family, dies unexpectedly of an illness. Her aunt worries that Lu Yicheng, a wealthy man with a large family business, will remarry and that his new wife will mistreat her grandson. She finds Su Tong and says, "Tongtong, it's time to repay your debt." Su Tong refuses. There are many ways to repay the kindness of being raised, and she doesn't have to sacrifice herself. Her aunt sneers. "Whether you have to or not isn't up to you." Su Tong doesn't believe it. This is an era of freedom to marry. Surely no one can force her into marriage. But then Lu Yicheng finds her and offers her a thousand a month as compensation. She does the math. The current monthly wage is about eighty. One month of this is a year's wages. There's no ordinary path to getting rich. She's in. Being a stepmother may be hard, but even if she doesn't know how, she can learn as she goes. Theme: Make your life the way you want it to be