The Old House Connects to the Modern World: Daily Life of a 70s Village Belle as a Corporate Drone

Chen Qiaoyu is an eighteen-year-old girl living in Yaojiacun during August 1979. Her biological father, Chen Liang, remarried Yao Jinhua after Qiaoyu’s mother died when she was thirteen. Yao Jinhua is cruel and manipulative, having previously sent Qiaoyu’s younger twin siblings, Qingnan and Qiaoli, away to relatives while keeping Qiaoyu and her younger brother Qingyang in poverty. Qiaoyu works tirelessly in the cotton fields to earn work points, aiming to save enough money to bring her siblings back and support Qingyang’s education. She refuses to marry, despite her father and stepmother pressuring her into a arranged union with an older man.

The central conflict escalates when Yao Jinhua secretly accepts betrothal gifts for Qiaoyu’s forced marriage. Qingyang discovers the plot and warns his sister. Qiaoyu, having anticipated this move after a previous failed attempt to trap her reputation, immediately mobilizes support. She enlists Aunt Jin, the village’s influential women’s federation cadre, and her uncle Yu Laifu. Together, they confront Chen Liang and Yao Jinhua in front of the entire village, exposing the forced marriage attempt. The brigade leader and women’s federation officials intervene, threatening legal consequences for Yao Jinhua’s actions.

To secure her freedom, Qiaoyu demands to split the family household registration. The village committee proposes that she and Qingyang move into the abandoned Chen family ancestral house, now occupied by three remaining educated youths: Qi Xiangdong, Zhou Quan, and Zhong Sinian. The house is technically village property, mortgaged for fifteen yuan spent on the funeral of the previous owner. Qiaoyu agrees to pay thirty yuan to the village over six months, a sum her uncle and aunt help her raise. She moves into the dilapidated compound, sharing the space with the educated youths while maintaining a cautious distance from the stoic Zhong Sinian.

Shortly after moving in, a mysterious phenomenon occurs. Two duck eggs placed near the kitchen stove vanish. Investigating the empty stove, Qiaoyu accidentally triggers a temporal displacement, pulling herself into a dilapidated version of the same house dated decades in the future, around the 1990s. She discovers that placing eggs in a specific hollow in the stove acts as a portal. Realizing the potential to access a future era with advanced goods and currency, she tests the mechanism with chicken eggs, confirming the connection.

Qiaoyu ventures into the future, finding a bustling urban environment with construction sites paying daily wages of 150 yuan. She secures a job as a day laborer, hauling rubble despite lacking an ID card. Her first day is physically exhausting but financially rewarding, though she receives payment in future currency that is unusable in 1979. She returns to the past with supplies and knowledge of the future, beginning a dual existence. She uses the portal to bridge the economic gap between the two eras, aiming to secure a better future for herself and her brother while navigating the complex social dynamics of the educated youths and her hostile family.

The story follows Qiaoyu’s strategic efforts to stabilize her new life. She balances hard labor in the fields with risky trips to the future, where she learns to navigate modern consumer culture. Her relationship with Zhong Sinian remains tense and awkward, marked by misunderstandings and his quiet observation of her strange behavior. Meanwhile, she works to reclaim her siblings from their aunt’s care and establish financial independence. The narrative explores her determination to escape the patriarchal constraints of her village while leveraging an impossible temporal advantage to change her destiny.