The 1990s: I Own a Beauty Salon

Liu Yanqing had loved beauty since childhood. She wasn't good at school, but she was skilled at mixing cosmetics and making the creams and lotions people put on their faces. While others were still putting cucumber slices on their faces, she was already making her own lip balm with beeswax.

As an adult, she was the prettiest flower on the street.

The men who wanted to marry her formed a line that stretched to the end of the street.

Everyone said she was sure to have a good life. The man who married her would surely dote on her, perhaps even sparing her from housework.

But she married a man who scraped a living from the fields.

A family of seven.

They were so poor they could barely keep a roof over their heads, and their house was made of mud.

She cared for the elderly, worked in the fields, and kept busy with housework every day, until her slender hands were covered in calluses. Everyone said you couldn't judge by appearances: who would have thought that someone so beautiful would actually be so suited to a simple life?

Later, her husband, Bi Changlin, made money and became a big businessman, then brought the whole family to the city.

Everyone said she was lucky and that all her hardship had paid off.

But when Liu Yanqing saw the pretty young maid at home, the sophisticated secretary who often called at night, and the curly-haired young receptionist at her husband's company, she couldn't feel happy at all.

Bi Changlin put an arm around her and coaxed her. "They're only getting by here because they're young and pretty. There's always been only one wife in the Bi family, and that's you."

Liu Yanqing said nothing. She thought he was full of crap.

When she woke up, she had returned to her younger days, before she had gone blind, accepted Bi Changlin's love letter, and gone to the movies with him. She tore up the letter, ran out to hug her mother, and told her, "I want to open a beauty salon. I want to stay beautiful my whole life, earn my own money, and never have to suffer."

Theme: Rely on your own strength and work hard to live well