I’ve been reading this very convoluted Chinese webnovel that involves baby switching, national secrets, rebirth, transmigration, genital mutilation, purposefully spreading venereal diseases, and stupid long-term revenge plans.
Seriously: Two dudes have gotten their penises cut off so far. These chicks might not be done.
Let me describe the story:
It begins with Xiaoyue transmigrating into the body of the "real" daughter that was just beaten to death by her "real" parents at the behest of the "fake" daughter Qingqing. And they’ve beaten her because she wasn’t going along with their idea of just handing over her college entrance paperwork and her fiance to Qingqing. And the reason why they even brought her back was because Qingqing failed to get into college and Xiaoyue was the top scorer, so they wanted to take her college acceptance paperwork for Qingqing to use.
And once Xiaoyue takes over the body, she fights back by leaving the family and returning to the house of her adopted aunt and uncle. She can’t get her college acceptance paperwork back because her "real" dad is a powerful member of the military who knows a lot of people, including ones in the education bureau.
And originally, the OG tried to go to the education bureau and get her college acceptance returned to her, but she was dragged back to the house and beaten with sticks until she suffered mental disability. And then the second time, days later, when they beat her they killed her without knowing it, and that’s when the transmigrator from the modern world took over.
And Xiaoyue sets about getting revenge for the OG, which involves revealing that Qingqing is having sexual relations with Xiaoyue’s fiance Shubin (? whatever). And she does it by running out into the street and calling for help from the neighbors because "Shubin is attacking my sister! He’s beating her! She keeps calling ‘No no!’ and he’s on top of her!" And she kicks open the bedroom door while inviting the neighbors to come in and help her sister.
And everyone sees Qingqing and Shubin fucking.
And it’s like the 1980s, so it’s a big deal. And there’s lots of shame and recriminations AND QINGQING LEARNS NOTHING.
Seriously: Throughout the entire story she is regularly caught cheating. She’s just fucking every guy she comes across, and she does it in in such a way that it just constantly ruins peoples’ lives while she’s just like "What? I’m just a little girl!"
Whole families are falling apart around her, and she just keeps going around fucking different men and people keep catching her.
Like, she and her "brother"–the son of the family that raised her–regularly cuddle and kiss and hang out naked together. And the parents find out, and they’re like "Cut it out. He’s married to a woman from a Very Powerful Family. You’re going to destroy his life!" yet she continues to keep getting caught naked with him. And finally his wife catches them and things blow up and he ends up divorced and in prison for 10 years because his wife turns him over to the investigation bureau and he’d done some corrupt stuff.
But by then she’s been found by her "real" family, so she doesn’t give a fuck about her old family, because the new family is more powerful and can be more helpful to her. So she has no problem being like "Pshaw. I let him touch my boobs and have sex with me a few times when I was 16. I paid back all my debts to him. Who cares if his life is destroyed and he goes to prison because I pissed off his wife? Not my problem."
And the crazy thing is that she’s a reborn person. She was reborn to when she was 12 years old, so she’s known since then that they’re not her real family, which is why she has no problem seducing the 5 sons and cuddling inappropriately with the father. Because she has big plans to ruin Xiaoyue’s "perfect" life, who in the "original" timeline was brought back to the family, went to college, married Shubin, and had a fairy tale life where Shubin became the governor and Xiaoyue was the first lady.
Like, she got reborn, so she immediately made contact with her family so that she could arrange for the evil grandma to torture Xiaoyue and cause Xiaoyue misery. So basically, because of her rebirth and her machinations, the OG Xiaoyue was beaten to death, which caused the entrance of the transmigrator, which directly led to Qingqing’s happy life being ruined.
All she had to do was be cool, and she would have had a glorious life!
Because it turns out that the baby switching was all part of a plot by Qingqing’s supposedly long dead grandfather, who was hiding from the government because his family committed treason and were all executed, yet he managed to escape with his young son and daughter, who grew up to be Qingqing’s mother. He took them to the countryside, married a village woman as cover, and left his children with her after he pretended to die. Then he moved to another city and married into a rich family as a second husband so that he could gather information on them that he later used to destroy their family.
Because he’s got long-term plans to take down every family he sees as having been involved with the downfall of his family. And throughout the story, it’s revealed that he’s probably taken out 4 or 5 families. And it’s like, yeah, they did corrupt shit and they deserved punishment from the government. They all seem like they got what they deserved. But he’s the one gathering all the evidence and turning them in and he’s a dangerous creep, so he’s in no way any kind of good guy. Plus there were several instances of his people planting evidence that got families arrested.
Anyways, his plan was to switch his granddaughter–Qingqing–with her fake family, and then her family would raise Xiaoyue. BUT there was a THIRD baby, one that belonged to the fake family, that the dad strangled to death before accepting Qingqing, because the mom had cheated on him and he knew that wasn’t his baby. So the third family thought their baby had been stillborn… but that baby was Xiaoyue!
And the whole plan was to have the fake family raise Qingqing. And she would be close enough that they would be able to monitor her growth, and they would interact with her a bit and ensure she was onboard with their plans. Then later, the third family would find out that there had been a baby switching and miraculously, their baby–Qingqing–was still alive. So they would come and bring her into their lives, which would then give an opening for the supposedly dead grandfather to do his plans.
There was a jade necklace that they for some reason left behind even though they thought the baby was stillborn. I don’t know why they would leave a necklace. But it would be the proof that Qingqing was their baby.
But for some reason, in the OG timeline that reborn Qingqing came from, she never met her grandfather. She stayed in her fake family while OG Xiaoyue was brought back, she went to college and married Shubin, she joined the military dance troupe and starred in a TV drama and became a bit famous, and Shubin became a politician and eventually became the provincial governor. And originally, Qingqing was eventually taken back to her real family where her grandma treated her horribly and she eventually married a butcher and was forced to give birth even though she had a heart condition, and she had children before she left her husband and she slept with a bunch of men and ended up with an unnamed deadly venereal disease and she died in a slum and was reborn to get her revenge on Xiaoyue.
Which she did. Because OG Xiaoyue died in the reborn timeline.
Yet the transmigrated Xiaoyue had read the book where Qingqing was the heroine. And in the book, Qingqing married the hero Shubin and they went to college and she starred in a few TV dramas and became a celebrity, and she slept with a bunch of men and every single one of them helped her in various ways that resulted in her having a great life where she had triplets and a super happy ending. Everyone around Qingqing had miserable endings, but her ending was happy, and there was never any mention of her grandfather or his schemes or anything like that, which is why Xiaoyue didn’t know about them until she started changing things once she transmigrated in.
And the grandfather was suffering from cancer, and he was rushing to finish all his revenge plans before he died, so maybe in the book he died in the background without ever appearing? Or maybe he did make it overseas for treatment and he was just lurking in the background smoothing the way for her.
Because transmigrator Xiaoyue thinking about the book didn’t really like the story, and she thought that there were several inconsistencies that were never explained. Everyone is bending over backward to help Qingqing succeed, and it’s never explained why.
Qingqing and Shubin have a happy ending. And things would happen resulting in various people being arrested or taking the blame for things that Qingqing or Shubin has done, but Qingqing is entirely focused on herself and her good life.
So Xiaoyue knows how the story is supposed to go, and she refuses to let herself be used as a stepping stone. She immediately starts overthrowing Qingqing’s good life, including getting her kicked out of college for stealing someone else’s entrance exam scores. And she reveals to everyone that Qingqing and Shubin are having sex even though Shubin is supposed to be her fiance. And she reveals to the fake brother’s wife that the fake brother and Qingqing have a suspicious relationship, one that in the book allowed Qingqing to use her fake brother’s position in the government for her own benefit, benefits that are now gone.
And Xiaoyue meets and marries the powerful military officer Fu Liye who canonically remained a bachelor and regularly helped Qingqing whenever she needed it, and whose family "mysteriously" all got in trouble and ended up imprisoned or executed by the state. And the Fu family happens to be one of the families on the grandfather’s revenge list.
There’s a lot happening in the novel and I don’t think I’m really enjoying reading it, but I want to know how it ends. There’s just a few things that are really disturbing me or pissing me off and I don’t know how I feel about the author.
Harper Kingsley
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Xiaoyue is a modern woman transmigrated into the 1980s. She uses her future knowledge to start some businesses and make some money, which is fine and all. BUT there’s a woman that gets gang raped by 5 men, and Xiaoyue talks her down from committing suicide, and gets her home where she ends up talking to her and they plan how the woman can get revenge on her rapists.
By giving them STDs.
These are 5 men that have a reputation for going around partying all the time and having "messy" lifestyles. So there’s a good chance that they will probably assault other women. Yet Xiaoyue’s idea is to arrange for a woman with an unnamed venereal disease to sleep with them all and get them sick. And at the same time, though the family refuses to report the assault, they get the 5 different families to pay the woman a bunch of money, which she then uses to go into business with Xiaoyue. And once the families know what their sons have done… they have some assigned to different cities and other ones go abroad.
To spread STDs.
During the 1980s.
An unnamed venereal disease that takes a long while to start showing symptoms.
Like, did Xiaoyue just help spread AIDS across China and the world?!?
And later, the woman is not handling the memory of her assault well, so she goes to one of the men and pretends to forgive him. And she tricks him into going to a guesthouse to have sex with her, during which she brings out the scissors she’s stashed and she chops off his penis.
So does she have HIV now?
Syphilis? Warts? What is the disease they deliberately exposed those men to? How can Xiaoyue think she’s a good person after helping spread diseases across China? WTF?
It just really bothers me. She’s a modern person. She should know better.
And like, there’s a sense of smugness about her. She’s constantly looking around and noticing things about the people around her, and she has information from the original story that other people don’t have, and she just comes across as arrogant.
I don’t think I like Xiaoyue.
She’s the heroine of the story, but like Qingqing as the heroine of the story Xiaoyue read, neither one of them is good people.
It’s an ESH situation. Everyone sucks here.
The novel is called "80s: The Real Daughter Turned Evil Tore Up the Green Tea and Kicked the Scumbag Husband."
I don’t really recommend it to anyone. I just had to get some thoughts off my chest before I blew up with reader rage. That is all.
~Harper Kingsley
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