A Jiangnan Family's Everyday Life

After transmigrating into the family of a Jiangnan textile household in the Ming Dynasty, chef Xia Lang thinks she's doomed:

Her father is a textile worker, her mother is an embroiderer, her eldest sister works as a face-threading woman in the marketplace, and her younger sister follows a leatherworker, tanning hides. Her fiance has set his sights on a wealthy landlord's daughter and broken off their engagement.

Her grandfather is a gambler, her grandmother favors some family members over others, and her father divorced her mother and abandoned his children just to have a son.

The heartless man left the mother and her three daughters behind. The whole family fell into poverty, relying on her mother doing laundry for others to get by, and could afford only one meal a day.

She got up and set out to make a living:

She bought and sold soybeans and broad beans, then set up a little tofu stall by the street. Gradually, she opened a small eatery, serving Lanxi cured pork and Taicang bamboo shoots; smooth, tender abalones in their shells; spicy, fragrant rabbit; sweet, crispy cloudseed sesame cakes and smiling-face pastries; osmanthus cakes fragrant with flowers; and rich, delicious goose gizzards and webbed feet preserved in wine.

Everyone said the four women in this family were finished. But then they opened a little eatery, took it all the way to Jinling, bought mulberry groves, and acquired silk looms and gauze looms. They raised silkworms and reeled silk, selling their silk to the Dyeing and Weaving Bureau.

When Chen Daqiang prospered, he abandoned his wife and children. One day, he was curled up on the street, gazing enviously at a fine young lady from a wealthy household. She wore a sable-fur hat with a rabbit-shaped ornament, gold and jade lilac earrings set with pearls, a fragrant-brown jacket embroidered with gold and decorated with a badge, and a matching Zhaojun hood. He heard a passerby say, "Isn't that your second daughter?"

References: Mingjian, Complete Treatise on Agriculture

Theme: Good people get good things in return