Bai Xing 百姓

Description:

In a poor little village by the Yellow River, the impoverished Li Lao-Wan has four beautiful daughters and a young son. To arrange a child betrothal for his son, he has fallen eight hundred yuan into debt. While the whole family is at its wits' end over the money, his eldest daughter, Lv Ya, already married, returns to her parents' home late at night with her two little girls, announcing that she is pregnant again and that if this child, too, is not a boy, her husband, desperate for a son, will divorce her. Faced with his eldest daughter's unhappy marriage, and eager to pay off the debt as quickly as possible, Li Lao-Wan decides to marry off his second daughter, Lv-Ye, to a wealthy family... Lv-Ye is not only young and beautiful but also independent and strong-willed. She and Li-Qiu, a young man from the neighboring village, have been childhood sweethearts, their two hearts long bound tightly together. When she hears that her father means to marry her to the wealthy Er-Shui, Lv-Ye swears she will die before she obeys. She hurries to find Li-Qiu, hoping he can scrape together the eight hundred yuan as quickly as possible, but Li-Qiu goes running through the entire village and manages to borrow only a little over a hundred. In despair, Li-Qiu decides to go to the city to find work and earn money, and begs Lv-Ye to wait for his return.