A Shanghai Family [Period]

Qiu Qiu was born into 1956, but has never been able to fully control her body. She moves and speaks slowly. After her father dies and her mother remarries, she lives with her grandparents. In 1972, her grandfather dies saving a sent-down youth named Chu Chen. Her grandmother falls ill and never recovers. To repay the family's kindness, Chu Chen agrees to marry Qiu Qiu at her grandmother's bedside. By the time the college entrance exams roll around, the couple's daughter is three, and Qiu Qiu is pregnant again. Chu Chen, now the director of the county supply and marketing cooperative, is hesitating over whether to take the exam when Qiu Qiu tells him, "Take it!" His university admission letter arrives: Fudan University, Department of Economics. * Chu Chen is from Shanghai. His family lives in Yixingfang, a beautiful, elegant neighborhood of more than a hundred three-story row houses blending Chinese and Western styles, complete with coal stoves and indoor plumbing. Most residents work in culture, such as painters, poets, teachers, translators, and librarians. By Chu Chen's generation, all that remains in his family's building is two south-facing rooms on the second floor and an eight-square-meter attic room. The bathroom is shared, and everyone cooks in the ground-floor kitchen. There are six Chu siblings, and Chu Chen is the fourth. His eldest brother's wife moved into Yixingfang from a three-story attic room in an old lilong neighborhood in Luwan District. She is especially possessive of the apartment. She even seems to have named her son as a way of staking her claim to it. His second sister has returned after divorcing her husband in the rural area where she had been sent down to settle. She's covered in injuries and mentally unwell. His third brother wants to keep his child in Shanghai for school. His fifth brother is dating someone whose family has demanded a south-facing room for them to use as a marital home. Note: Everyday life in Shanghai in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, with some scenes from before people returned to the city. Reader's guide: Around chapter 20, there are roughly two or three chapters with some basic Shanghainese. Feel free to skip them if you mind. Pre-release: Three-Line Family, an Era Story Xie Su is a man who studied Go under Grandpa Jiang when he was young. He's familiar with the board's 38 horizontal and vertical lines and 361 intersections. He is strategic, a skilled player, cunning as a fox, and remarkably successful. No one expected him to fall head over heels for a young girl. After the split-personality blogger Jiang Yan dies by electrocution, she is reborn into the 1950s. Knowing her history, she calculates that by the time she grows up, she'll probably be sent to the countryside as a sent-down youth, spending ten years bent over the fields from dawn to dusk. To escape that predetermined fate, five-year-old Jiang Yan refuses to follow her mother into the big Wei family when she remarries. She starts skipping grades in elementary school, gets into university at twelve, and graduates before the college entrance exams are suspended. To be safe, she even chooses to work at an elementary school. Just when Jiang Yan thinks everything is going smoothly and she only has to stick to the plan to live without a care, a brick hits her on the head. When she wakes up, eight years have passed. She's in a third-line city, with a husband and child. She's rough and overweight, her child resents her, her husband dislikes her, and even the neighbor's dog rolls its eyes at her as it passes. Note: An everyday story set in that era, featuring an ensemble cast. Theme: Spring blossoms