Back to the 1980s: Leading My Friends to Build a Fortune

Zhou Yuwei was a successful thirty-one-year-old business executive who had built a company from scratch with her best friend, Li Zhihui. Despite her professional achievements, she was a workaholic with a lonely personal life, having been raised by her grandmother after her parents divorced and remarried. While on a vacation trip to Yunnan arranged by Li Zhihui, Zhou Yuwei fell ill and lost consciousness. Upon waking, she found herself in a starkly different reality. She had transmigrated into the body of an eighteen-year-old girl with the same name, living in a cramped courtyard in Beijing during the late 1970s. The original owner of the body had died after being struck by lightning while running out of the house in a fit of resentment over her family’s neglect.

In this new life, Zhou Yuwei discovered she was the younger daughter of Zhou Kun, a carpenter at a state-owned furniture factory, and Lin Hongmei, a cafeteria worker. Her family was financially strained because Zhou Kun’s father and brothers from the countryside constantly exploited him, demanding his wages to support their own families. Zhou Yuwei also had an older sister, Zhou Yulan, who had been sent to the countryside as an educated youth and had recently returned. Yulan was timid and traumatized by her years in the rural labor camps, often apologizing for existing. Zhou Yuwei, retaining the mindset of a seasoned businesswoman, immediately recognized the dysfunction in her new family and decided to take charge. She rejected the victim mentality of the original Zhou Yuwei and began to assert herself against the abusive relatives.

The central conflict erupted when Zhou Yuwei’s paternal grandmother and aunt arrived to demand that Zhou Kun give up his factory job to their son, Zhou Jinshui, so he could marry. The grandmother had historically favored the eldest son’s line, forcing Yulan to give up her recruitment spot to her younger aunt years prior, which led to Yulan’s suffering in the countryside. When the grandmother attempted to physically assault Lin Hongmei, Zhou Yuwei intervened with a cleaver, threatening suicide to force the neighborhood committee and neighbors to intervene. This dramatic act shocked her father into finally standing up to his parents. Zhou Kun, realizing the extent of the exploitation and his daughter’s courage, agreed to sever all ties with his birth family. He sold his factory job, using the proceeds as seed capital for a new business venture.

With the immediate family threat neutralized, Zhou Yuwei turned her attention to economic survival and improvement. She formed an alliance with local boys, including Liu Changyun and Xu Zitao, after helping them in a street fight. Leveraging her business acumen, she identified a shortage of eggs at a local bakery and negotiated a deal to supply fifty thousand eggs within three days. She enlisted her sister Yulan to help coordinate with villagers, providing Yulan with a sense of purpose and agency she had lacked. The venture was successful, generating crucial income for the family. Meanwhile, Zhou Yuwei’s personality shift began to heal her sister’s trauma, as Yulan started to find confidence through her collaboration with her younger sister. The story follows Zhou Yuwei as she navigates the complexities of the reform era, building a new life for her family while reconciling her past identity with her present circumstances.