You ever read a romance web novel for dozens and dozens of chapters, only for the translations to run out just when the male lead confesses to the protagonist? No? Then you haven’t read Small Shop Owner in the 60s (六十年代小店主), and you’re better off for it.
Summary:
Xu Nannan, the owner of a Taobao shop, wakes up and becomes a rural girl Xu Nannan in the 1960s.
Every day they only eat a wild vegetable chaff dumpling. Working from dawn to night, she carry a hoe and went to the field to exchange for workpoints.
Fortunately, her Taobao shop followed her back to the 1960s, and she was finally able to do some sideline work. (Novelupdates)
I mentioned last time that there wasn’t enough face-slapping in Raising Babies in the 70s, which reduces half of the fun of reading back-to-the-past Chinese novels (of which there are many, many). Usually the setup is for them to introduce truly infuriating family members, neighbors and in-laws, whip up the reader’s outrage and then deliver catharsis in the form of consequences, or verbal/physical beatdowns. It’s a satisfying formula when done right, and indeed the soap opera, dare I say much of entertainment, revolves around unpleasant people getting their due comeuppance.
If that’s what you want, Small Shop Owner in the 60s delivers in copious quantities, slowly ramping up from small infractions to much more serious ones. But at the same time there’s a healthy (?) mix of bad and good people, so it’s not a complete crapsack world where everyone is out to get the female lead and her sister.
For example her immediate family is cold, greedy and scheming, and many of the villagers are indifferent, but the main authority figure is reasonable, there is a kind family that helps them, and when they report serious issues to bigger authories, action is taken swiftly and thoroughly.
In fact, on the balance of things there are more good and helpful people than bad ones. The first people she tries to sell illegal milk powder to turns out to be so honest and friendly that he and his wife even adopt Xu Nannan and her sister. Her first boss loves her so much he takes her under his wing, and almost all of her co-workers love her. She never gets caught or into trouble for black market dealings or buying antiques, and so on and so forth.
However the scumminess, clinginess and sheer persistence of the antagonists, particularly Grandma Xu and the rest of the Xu family, more than make up for the niceness of the other characters. They prevent the series from being too saccharine sweet and ensure that we get regular doses of face-slapping scenes to keep our morale high.
Now, on to the romance. In a change from the usual, Xu Nannan doesn’t magically wake up with a husband, and indeed the male lead (Lin Qingbai) doesn’t show up until like 50 chapters in, maybe more. And neither character instantly falls in love with the other, but rather they start out with a friendliness that develops into something deeper as they keep finding excuses to spend time together.
The male lead Lin Qingbai is not the usual cold, unapproachable face-paralysis kind of guy either. He is a bit distant from the ladies compared to his disgusting playboy brother, but that is appropriate for the times. And he can smile, he can laugh, he has normal emotions, he doesn’t touch her inappropriately, he doesn’t get violently possessive when other guys show interest in her, he doesn’t try to restrict her movements, he doesn’t fantasize about locking her up… man, when did my bar for male leads get so low?
The main downside is that he smokes. Normal for the times, but really icky. Also the 10-year age gap is off-putting not because of its size but because she’s 17 and he’s 27, and the difference in maturity is a bit much. 27 and 37 would be a-okay. Plus he comes with an annoying family, especially his brother, but then again so does she (and how!).
In all, it’s a healthy and relatively fast-moving romance, which is helped along by the prevailing attitude of the 60s, which held no truck with this “male friend/female friend” stuff. As soon as you guys are seen together more than a few times, everyone starts asking when the wedding is.
And so, after being together for a while, others start asking questions and Xu Nannan tries to put some distance between them. But then she misses him terribly, she runs into him with his family, he introduces her as his “partner” and takes her away. Then he asks… “So do you agree?” … AND THEN THE TRANSLATIONS END BEFORE WE CAN HEAR HER ANSWER!!!! NOOOOOOO! No updates since August 2021 is just too cruel :’-<
I always worry about the translator/site owner in such cases. Anything can happen to any of us at any time, after all. The cause of a sudden translation stop can range from benign or even positive (won the lottery and moved to an island resort) to very bad. Fans can always machine-translate the rest of the series (in fact the “translation” of Small Shop Owner in the 60s is barely-cleaned machine translation anyway) but a life can’t come back. Stay safe, wherever you are.
So as I said in the beginning paragraph, we get a build up to a confession and then nothing unless you want to MTL the rest. Which I can’t be bothered to do because raw MTL hurts my brain. Engines like DeepL have made great progress, but it’s still hard to read. It’s easy to figure out that Xu Nannan and Lin Qingbai will marry and live happily ever after, but what about all the side characters?
From Novelupdates reviews, I learned that Lin Qingsong rapes Xu Hong and gets away with it, and that Xu Nannan’s birth parents get divorced and her mother dies miserably in poverty, but what about everyone else? The Xu grandparents? Liu Qiao and her scheming daughter Xu Meizi? Xu Nannan’s neglected sister Xu Ling? Her mine worker friends? Teacher He? Etc etc. I’m quite curious, but I already decided to put the series behind me, so I’ll just paper that curiosity over with the next series and move on.
I recommend Small Shop Owner in the 60s if you want a balance of characters and drama in your face-slapping novel. Not too crazy, not too boring. Also if you want non-pushy actually kind of decent male leads because the bar is set in hell these days.
Lastly, a word on the “twist” in this series, which is that Xu Nannan has access to her Taobao (think eBay or Amazon) shop and can buy and sell things there. This does not make as much of a difference as you would expect, mainly because a 15 year old girl splashing around large sums of cash would attract all kinds of questions and lead to horrible consequences.
The level of scrutiny and lack of privacy in those days also means she can’t buy or sell anything too modern, or even use such things in her personal life. However the shop does play a role because taking out useful items like milk powder here and there helps her befriend her benefactors, and more importantly keeps her and her sister from starving to death before they finally get out of the Xu family’s clutches.
So if you’re expecting some dramatic business shenanigans with the Taobao shop, nah, at least not at chapter 89 where translations stopped. The female lead doesn’t use her ability to shop from the future to buy history books and find out what’s going to happen next either, though she does stockpile antiques. It’s implied that she’s avoiding standing out too much or rising too high because of the Cultural Revolution that is coming in 1966-76 (I’d find a way to escape to Hong Kong if I were her), but either way she doesn’t do anything too flashy in the chapters I read. Just FYI.