Chinese Dramas can be AMAZING; Pursuit of Jade is NOT it.

Note: I wrote this a couple of weeks ago, but then Taiwan Travelogue won the International Booker and I posted a post about that instead. So this has just been languishing in my drafts since then. I’m too lazy to go in and change the references to time here, so this is just gonna be what it’s gonna be.

Last night I finished the hit Cdrama of the summer (perhaps even of the decade), Pursuit of Jade. If you live in Taiwan and have even the tiniest of a toe dipped into the local happenings here, you cannot avoid this drama. My friends in a couple of group chats keep bringing it up. It is dominating my IG feed, from a Pilates class that has posted photos of the hot main lead, to the fact that some tiny eatery in southern Taiwan has a Zhang Linghe look alike, to people lipsyncing to the songs and parodying their outfits… Apparently, there are also plenty of people outside the Sinosphere who are into it too because I see reels made by non-Asians too. BFF Eugenia told me that her mom friends in her suburban Long Island neighborhood keep telling her to watch it.

I will say this about the show: it is beautiful. The people are beautiful (though needlessly airbrushed), the costumes are beautiful, the cinematography is beautiful, the songs are beautiful. And the romance is… fine?

But holy god, it is an unhinged hot mess. I haven’t read the original novel (because so many Cdramas are based on novels/web serials) so I can’t comment on the original writer’s work, but the drama itself is drowning in terrible writing. The pacing is so off (which can be partially blamed on the Chinese government issuing an episode cap for Cdramas at 40 episodes in 2020 (which supposedly they’ll begin loosening up on because they’ve seen how it results in shitty writing)); the structure and overall storytelling make for a lot of confusion and lack of clarity (by the second to last episode, I was still incredibly confused by the main political plot); many details and events are absurd and nonsensical (the female lead does some ridiculously egregious shit that makes zero sense… and gets praised for it, just as one example); the villains are literal psychopaths with almost zero nuance (like the fact that they lack evil mustaches to twist is practically an oversight)… I mean I get that idol dramas can be a bit silly since the central focus is the romance, but really. Does it need to be THIS unbelievable?

Still, it seems like Cdramas are having a bit of a moment now,1 and if anything, I hope this means more people will learn about how wonderful Cdramas can be. After all, they’ve factored in so greatly into my life.

I’ve written an essay on this before, but I was raised on a steady diet of Cdramas. I was introduced to my first Chiung Yao drama, 雪珂 when I was 8 years old and since then, I’ve been hooked. I love the period dramas the most, have never really gotten into any contemporary Chinese dramas tbh. I don’t know if it’s the set pieces, the costumes, the etiquette or the intrigue, the way that the setting feels almost like a fantasy so lends itself to high drama… But, as my mom likes to say, it’s thanks to my summers of binging Cdramas that my Chinese was as good as it was.2 I also learned so much about Chinese culture and history from these dramas, in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise absorbed as a New Jersey girl.

When I first moved to Taiwan, and people asked me why I loved being here so much, I would say, “The things about me that seemed weird back in the States, particularly to white people, are just… normal here.” I’d point to three things: 1) tea eggs 2) private room karaoke 3) Asian dramas3.

As a kid, I instinctively knew that it was an oddity that I liked to binge watch Chinese dramas, feeding stacks of VHS tapes in one after another into our VCR (and having to rewind each one after I watched each episode! The pain of waiting!). If I had told my classmates, “I love Chinese soap operas,” I imagine it would have conjured up some Asian version of Days of Our Lives and I’d be laughed at. So of course I dutifully said I watched Full House and Growing Pains and later, 90210 and Party of Five and Dawson’s Creek.4

In college, because I was friends with all Asians, they “got it” and I didn’t have to hide that I was often staying up til 5 am binging dramas (I’d moved on to VCDs and the occasional, treasured, DVD set) instead of doing my reading for class. But once I entered the workforce, surrounded for the first time in my adult life by a majority of white people again, I found myself lying — about the karaoke and the dramas. It just felt like a thing that made me culturally “outside” of the norm, a thing that I felt the need to hide because non-Asians wouldn’t get it.

So it was with great relief that I could come to Taiwan and be relieved of the burden of hiding these aspects of myself. That I could actually discuss dramas with people I met. That I could get recommendations from friends. It was like this integral part of me that I’d kept hidden could finally just be out in the open and not for it to be niche or strange but actually just…. normal. I even did a whole presentation about Chinese dramas for the Chinese class I took when I first moved to Taiwan because it was just nice to talk about something that excited me and loved and have my teacher look on knowingly. It’s nice, even now, that dramas are something my husband and I can watch together and he doesn’t think it’s like, something weird or girly, because it’s like, part of the culture here!

It’s weird now to see that Cdramas are having a moment; I feel almost protective of it! While I hope this becomes the gateway for more people in the West to discover how amazing Cdramas can be, I can’t leave without giving my top two recommendations for Cdramas that have way better storytelling, acting, and writing.

Nirvana in Fire 瑯琊榜

Truly my most favorite drama of all time. I’ve watched it 3x beginning to end, and countless more times, I’ve just watched random scenes that get me in the feels.

It’s about this guy, Lin Shu, a nephew of the Emperor, whose entire family has been killed because they were framed of conspiring to rebel against the Emperor. Lim Shu is also believed to be dead, killed in battle, but he returns in disguise as a brilliant strategist to help elevate his BFF to the throne, seek justice and exonerate his family. The bromance between the main lead and the prince gives me all the feels (I think in the original web novels they were actually in a romance), but beyond that, the plotting is tight despite its 54 episode arc and the acting is top notch. I love it so, so, so much. It is truly prestige television. Also the leads are all eye candy.

You can watch it on Viki if you need English subtitles. I DO NOT recommend the version on Youtube because there are episodes where the sound suddenly drops out to hide the fact that certain flashback scenes have been cut after the fact. Apparently the actor in these scenes has been cancelled by the Chinese government and had to be removed from the show. Also the subtitles are kind of whack. So yeah, use the Viki link — it is full and uncut, at least last I checked.

Empresses in the Palace 甄嬛傳

I started this one Friday evening, just to check it out. And then next thing I knew, it was Saturday morning and I took a nap and then woke up and continued watching, leaving only to go to the ballet, and then returned to watch and… I finished all 76 episodes in a single long weekend.

The show is about a naive, innocent woman who is chosen to enter the emperor’s harem as a concubine. It tracks her evolution from a wide-eyed, soft-hearted girl to someone cunning and ruthless enough to survive all the scheming and power struggles that happen among all the emperor’s concubines and rise to the top. It was really eye-opening in terms of helping me understand the etiquette of the harem at the time. The main actress, Sun Li, gives a powerhouse performance deserving of all the awards. An award should also go to her makeup artist, who somehow manages to transform her from the young innocent to the powerful consort she becomes through makeup alone.

I have watched this twice, most recently at the postpartum center after the birth of my child. There are parts towards the second half of the show that do feel a bit bloated/draggy (notable a subplot involving her little sister for a few episodes) but it’s mostly really immersive. You can watch it fully subtitled on Youtube (edit: okay apparently in the last two weeks since I wrote this, all of the English subbed versions have been taken down from Youtube so… I have to hunt for another source. There is part of me that is hopeful that this means it’s coming to a big streamer soon). There are some subtitle choices I don’t… love. But overall it does the job. Do NOT watch the weird 6 episode Netflix cut. This is a 76 episode drama and it is weird to cut it down into 6 episodes and it also makes no sense and takes all the nuance out of the thing.

Classic 90s Chiung Yao dramas

Lastly, I will just say that even though the classic Chiung Yao dramas from the 90s are overly melodramatic and the acting can sometimes be a bit… much (especially from the weepy men that populate these dramas), I love them so much. I was never a Return of Princess Pearl fan, but I have a soft spot in my heart for 雪珂 （oh man even the opening music gives me feels) and 梅花烙 and all of those dramas. I learned a love for dramatic irony from these shows. Of family secrets. Of high drama. I also learned how good it feels to cry because of a story. There probably aren’t English subtitled versions of these, but if you can understand Chinese, man these are so good. This channel has SO MANY of them!!

Yesteryear

Yeah, I read the buzzy tradwife book. No, it was not good. Yes, it was fun. No, it didn’t live up to the premise. Would I recommend it? Not really. I could have so much more to say about this but I’m tired, but mostly I’m just sad that a really good premise that could have been a sharp critique and/or examination of the tradwife movement (and all the racial, gender, class, religious issues that surround it) was actually just… I don’t know. A hate-write? It ended up being unhinged in a way that was NOT satisfying. It is confusing to me how many people seem to think this was somehow brilliant, but at least there are lots of other people who seem to agree with me.

Between Pursuit of Jade and Yesteryear, which one is more unhinged? I need to think about it.

Hijack (Apple TV)

My husband and I decided to watch this the other day. The first season is silly, implausible on many levels, and lacking in continuity in places, but it’s saved by the fact that it is incredibly tense, fun, and OF COURSE IDRIS ELBA. We are halfway through the second season, and it is even MORE silly, MORE implausible… Alas, it’s not as fun as the first season? It drags a lot more and I’m less invested all around. That said, it’s still Idris Elba so we will be finishing this.

Junto

For an early mother’s day dinner, my sister and I treated my mom to this truly inventive and interesting Cantonese restaurant. Each dish was surprising yet delicious. There was this crunchy lotus root chicken roll type thing that I absolutely loved. And this seemingly simple egg tofu that was so melt-in-your mouth. And a spicy king crab. I will definitely be back.

Homeseeking has been named one of three finalists for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award! Totally pinching myself because it always seems incredibly unlikely to make any stage of any of these awards, much less the final stage. So so grateful to everyone involved in this process, from the community readers to the MFA students at VCU to the administrators for the award.