Why the hell am I sobbing? I knew what was coming; it's literally in the title! 😭

This one really worked for me. Thrice Married to a Salted Fish is one of those danmei titles I had always wanted to read, way before it was picked up for official translation. It was always being mentioned in danmei spaces. So I am quite happy to declare that this one was a win for me, and that I am foaming at the mouth to get my hands on volume two.

I don't always love both the MC and ML in danmei equally, but Lin Qingyu and Lu Wancheng are a rare exception. I truly don't know which one I like more - the cold, vicious beauty who daydreams about ways to kill those who disrespect or stand in their way, or the serene, carefree, terminally ill transmigrator who finds said beauty's viciousness their most appealing feature? Either way, I love both of them. I also quite enjoyed how they're extremely capable, but not infallible.

These two have a delicious slow burn brewing between them, and I do mean slow burn. Understandably so. Lin Qingyu was forced into this marriage--the first legal union between two men in the empire--just because it was deemed auspicious for his husband, who is terminally ill. Then we have said terminally ill noble, who so happens to be a transmigrator. As in, a modern soul who transmigrates into a novel after their death. So, that takes some adjustment, too. Neither of them went into this marriage willingly.

Speaking of which, while I confidently declare Lu Wancheng a transmigrator, this novel is, for the most part, an outsider's perspective. For 90% of the story, we follow Lin Qingyu through a third-person perspective, and most of what we learn of Lu Wancheng comes from their conversations. It's always fascinating, especially if you've read quite a bit of transmigrator stories and recognize the tropes (truck-kun, of course, makes an appearance). But even if not, it's probably also enjoyable for a completely uninitiated reader, as you and Lin Qingyu can be of one mind. Lin Qingyu is, notably, extremely smart, and even without having all the information at his hands, he slowly figures some things out, which was also a delight.

The ending, quite honestly, gutted me. Which is hilarious, considering the title of this novel. But while I had always assumed the gorgeous cover (SOB) is of the moment of Lu Wancheng's death, I did not expect it to be this emotional or beautiful. That, prior to his death, he would confess some of the truth to Lin Qingyu and ask him to wait 100 days for him (be still my beating heart). And certainly not that Lin Qingyu would don the crimson clothing, perhaps the most clear declaration of his feeling, even if he is unaware of them... only for Lu Wancheng to never know that he did, for he has lost his sight by that point. Eating a razor blade would've hurt less than this.

Now, I want to geek out about a couple of things that have nothing to do with the plot of this story. First, the intertextuality in the novel is 10/10. As someone who has studied some of China's history and has written a couple of papers on the Jin Ping Mei in particular (a master class in intertextuality), seeing how the tradition has so clearly carried on throughout history is such a fun little extra oomph to my reading experience. You'll see this in most danmei, but I did feel like Thrice Married had such a fun, eclectic range of references, spanning pretty much all of China's dynasties and into modern popular culture.

Speaking of dynasties... I'm not gonna lie, I have put so much effort into placing this Yu Empire in Chinese history (even though this is a fictional representation of historical China within a fictional representation of modern China). Somewhere along the way, I began to wonder if this was a mythological dynasty we were not taught about in university in the West. You see, in my academic classes, we basically treated China's dynastic history as beginning with the mythological Xia dynasty, followed by the Shang and Zhou (and onward). Thanks to Thrice Married, I was able to learn that Shun (of whom I did learn, funnily enough) is attributed to the Yu Dynasty (虞朝). Considering it seems that in the Chinese mythology/history, this dynasty already had a bureaucratic system and the Five Rites, our Yu Empire might be a reimagining of that fictional dynasty. At the same time, there is a specific mention of the Western Xia, which kind of muddies things up. Because Western Xia did exist in Chinese history, and it did exist in the north-western region of modern-day China, as does the Western Xia of Thrice Married, but it existed concurrently with the Song Dynasty, so I am unsure where this (fictional) Yu Dynasty slots in if that's where it's supposed to go. But if Thrice Married's Yu Empire is supposed to be the mythical one, it doesn't really make much sense for a territory named after the Xia to exist, as the Xia dynasty succeeded the Yu Dynasty in the mythology.... Is this way too much effort to expend on an ultimately fictional empire, even if it was modeled after real history? Yes. Was it still fun, and did I end up learning new things? also yes!