1990s: Protecting My Five Sisters-in-Law for a Full Larder

1990s: Protecting My Five Sisters-in-Law for a Full Larder Plot:

In a Northern Jiangsu village in the 1990s, 18-year-old Lin Xiaoman held a train ticket to Shenzhen for work, but suddenly got the news—his brothers died in a mine accident, leaving five sisters-in-law with young kids, a leaking mud house, and debt collectors at the door. He was about to run away when he saw a bully push his eldest sister-in-law into the mud. His eyes red, he yelled: “My brothers are gone—I’m their sky now!” So he stayed: selling homemade pickles in town three kilometers away at dawn, hauling goods and carrying heavy bags at noon, stopping debt collectors from demolishing the house at night. He drank with a village tyrant till vomiting to get back Third Sister-in-Law’s seized farmland, even secretly gave his saved work money as food stamps to the poorest Fifth Sister-in-Law. But when life got better, rumors spread like wind: “The brother-in-law running the household—he must be taking advantage of his sisters-in-law.” Lin Xiaoman clenched his teeth, transferred the house deed to the five women, and held up the red document: “I’m protecting them, not taking from them!” When the warehouse was full of bacon and the rice jar overflowed at year-end, the five sisters-in-law surrounded him with hot dumplings, crying: “Xiaoman, this is our home!”