Chinese GL

Ning Yuan's food-themed novel Hunger (食, pinyin: shi; initially serialised as 食色, pinyin: shi se) is available for pre-order as an uncensored print edition from Taiwanese publisher morefate (cover art above; more design details here. I'm already salivating). Pre-orders can be made via Feiqin. The web version of the novel can be read here. I reviewed the novel here.

This is a pretty old novel, as webnovels go; it was initially serialised in 2014. So it was quite sweet to see, in the replies to Ning Yuan's post announcing the pre-order, fans reminiscing fondly about when they first came across the book.

One thing I'm curious about is whether the explicit sex scene Ning Yuan posted off-site will be included in this edition. I guess I'll find out when I get hold of my copy.

As a psychological thriller, 365 Ways of Surviving at a High Difficulty Level (三百六十五种高难度活法, pinyin: sanbai liushiwu zhong gao nandu huo fa) by Mo Ran Piao (莫然漂) starts out promisingly, but for me it never lived up to its potential and really flagged hard towards the end.

The novel begins with protagonist Chu Yu being called into a psychiatric hospital to provide a consult on a new and challenging patient. Chu Yu is the head of a small government agency (a position that she semi-inherited from her father Chu Dongren, who used to lead the agency) that works very much under the radar and deals with criminal cases featuring 'unexplainable by usual logic' elements, where the perpetrator appears to be suffering from a major psychiatric condition. She's been called in to deal with a patient named Xia Yihan, whose very presence seems to drive the other patients at the psychiatric hospital out of control, even though Xia Yihan doesn't appear to actively be doing anything to make this happen. In fact, Xia Yihan hasn't really done or said very much since her admission to the hospital. This changes when she meets Chu Yu, whom she seems to develop an instant interest in. Subsequently, Xia Yihan breaks out of the hospital, injures its director quite seriously (and in a very specific way) and goes on what looks like a very targeted crime spree in the region, attacking (but not killing) several people who seem like strangers on the surface but are actually connected through a series of crimes that occurred in the past.

( mild spoilers here )

( major spoilers here; mention of rape and suicide )

The characters were pretty standard archetypes: Chu Yu is the cool, competent (except at cooking) jiejie, and Xia Yihan is basically the Cute and Psycho one. They don't get developed much beyond this, especially Xia Yihan, who sounds significantly younger than her actual age throughout (this got a bit uncomfortable in the extra chapter where they were talking about having sex). It's also not really clear why the characters are drawn to each other beyond the fact that the format of the novel and genre expectations require them to be. For me, I didn't feel that the cat-and-mouse game between them ever reached the emotional heights of Clarice/Hannibal (if you're my age) or Will/Hannibal (if you're younger). The other characters are also not particularly memorably drawn. The best are probably Chu Yu's team at the agency, but they're broad archetypes as well: the tired hacker, the team mom (who is a boy, obviously), and the muscle, who's yet another Cute and Psycho younger girl. And for a character who underpins so much of the central mystery, I never really got a good sense of what Chu Dongren, Chu Yu's dad, was like as a person. Various tertiary characters (chiefly police officers and other investigators) drifted in and out of the text in a way that made me sometimes confused as to who they were, their exact role in the process, and where their sympathies lay.

( major spoilers here; mention of suicide )

The depiction of mental health patients and psychiatric conditions in c-webnovels can be extremely iffy, and on this front this novel does better than average. I'm still unsure though, as to how realistic the depictions of various psychiatric conditions are, particularly the supposedly 'scientific' explanation behind Xia Yihan's ability to affect patients around her, and Chu Yu managing to 'cure' a teenage girl who is suffering from the delusion that she's a weapon (specifically, a mace) by … wrapping herself up in layers of floofy material to reduce the impact of her spikes.

I read the web version of the novel here on JJWXC. There is a partial fan translation of the novel into English here (human-translated, as far as I can make out).

Sometimes you just need a fluffy yet wholesome contemporary romance that's decently executed and doesn't demand huge amounts of brainpower, and My Crybaby CEO (总裁她总是哭唧唧, pinyin: zongcai ta zong shi ku jiji) by Li Qiu Lang (李秋琅) fit that bill for me.

The plot is extremely simple. Our protagonist, Shen Ningxin, is a relatively new intern at a company that makes reflective glass beads for roads and traffic markings (I found it quite endearing that this is a company that MAKES THINGS instead of like, a company doing something nebulous like social media consultancy/PR or whatever). At the start of the novel, she has a run-in with the company's CEO Qiu Yibai, who has just returned from a business trip. Qiu Yibai is one of those cool, aloof, terrifying competent women — or so it seems on the surface.

While messing around on Weibo one day, Shen Ningxin discovers that Qiu Yibai has an alternate, pseudonymous Weibo account (separate from her very corporate, professional one), on which she posts about her true feelings. This Weibo account shows her to be a very different person: lonely, sentimental, easily hurt, socially inept except for business-related schmoozing, amusingly petty. For e.g. she broods about overhearing negative gossip about herself from colleagues, is upset about being excluded when colleagues bring in snacks or treats to share across the whole office, wails when she accidentally spills coffee over herself. This piques Shen Ningxin's interest in Qiu Yibai, and also arouses her sympathy: Shen Ningxin herself is also a rather solitary person, despite being better at making friends than Qiu Yibai. She begins to pay more attention to Qiu Yibai's moods at the office, and tries to make Qiu Yibai feel more included and appreciated on a personal level. Qiu Yibai, for her part, is surprised and touched (though initially suspicious) at Shen Ningxin's gestures. Their romance develops from there, through a series of tropey events (a company trip, a theme park excursion, one of them having to help the other home after the latter has had too much to drink, leading to There Was Only One Bed, etc) that are entirely predictable but nevertheless fun to read about.

There's not much else to say, because this is fundamentally a quite simple love story with two pretty likable characters doing their best to reach out for each other, executed pretty decently given its limited scope. The secondary characters are a bit thinly drawn (though I did rather like the detail of Zhao jie, their auntie-level senior colleague, instantly becoming a queer ally when she learns of their relationship despite not having given such matters any thought previously), but I didn't mind too much. I was mentally comparing it to Jue Ge (绝歌)'s The Flame Tree (凤凰花, pinyin: fenghuang hua) at times, because the latter is also a CEO romance. The Flame Tree strives for greater complexity, both plot- and emotion-wise, but there are execution issues that weigh down the story, whereas My Crybaby CEO aims for simple and fun and largely gets there. It's also refreshing that the characters in My Crybaby CEO (published in 2020) identify quite matter-of-factly as lesbians, which spares us the 'I like a girl... but I'm a girl???' angst of The Flame Tree (published in 2009, and very much of its time in that respect).

I read the web version of the novel on JJWXC, together with the print-exclusive extra from the mainland print edition.

Judge my end-of-summer baihe reading choices! This time, our candidates are:

• And Then the Skeleton Laughed Out Loud (然后骷髅笑出了声, pinyin: ranhou kulou xiao chule sheng), an unlimited flow novel by Li Qiu Lang (李秋琅). I chose this partly because I wanted to read an unlimited flow novel and this was the shortest one I could find, and partly because the title sounded fun.
  
• My Crybaby CEO (总裁她总是哭唧唧, pinyin: zongcai ta zong shi ku jiji), also by Li Qiu Lang. I have this on my shelf and sometimes you just want a (hopefully) cute CEO romance as a palate cleanser for your brain.
  
• That Time I Was Transported into an Omegaverse Novel and Got Marked by the Female Lead (穿书后我被女主标记了, pinyin: chuanshu hou wo bei nüzhu biaoji le) by Xiao Wu Jun (小吾君), mainly because I've been vaguely meaning to read something by her for a while and this seems to be her most popular baihe novel.
  
• To Prolong Life (续命, pinyin: xuming), a historical-set novel with supernatural elements by Yi Tian Ba Bei Shui (一天八杯水). Again, an author I've been meaning to read for a while, I wanted a novel with a historical setting to balance out the list, and this seems to be her most popular historical.
  
• Fireworks in Winter (冬日花火, pinyin: dongri hua huo) by Min Ran (闵然). Hit contemporary tragedy from last year. Reading it mostly to see if it lives up to the hype, and also because I have the print edition.
  
• Of Inkstones and Young Tea (砚品新茗, pinyin: yan pin xin ming) by Shi Wei Yue Shang (时微月上). A xianxia title to round off the list.

Following from last year's Qixi success(?), I got overly ambitious this year and planned one large project, two projects of substantial size, and one minor project. As usual, life got the better of me and the two projects of substantial size have fallen by the wayside.

But! I DID manage to complete the large project, which was putting together an epub for the first arc (the first 36 chapters) of my fan translation of To Embers We Return! The text has gone through a further round of edits and revisions, and it features amazing cover art from skuzzybunny. Get the epub here from the main page or directly from here. It's 160k+ words in total, so a decent chunk of book (if I do say so myself). I'm posting subsequent chapters as I finish them, but am also planning to compile the second arc into epub form, which should hopefully be available around this time next year.

The minor project is just some Embers-related notes and ideas, which I've put up on AO3 here. Would honestly love to see more fic, which is why I'm trying to lure people into reading (hint, hint).

Happy Qixi!

It's JJWXC's 23rd anniversary, so the platform has released its usual series of videos featuring congratulatory messages from big-name authors. This year, baihe was represented by three authors: Jiang Yi Shui, Ning Yuan and Xiao Wu Jun (well, Xiao Wu Jun writes both danmei and baihe with a smattering of yanqing, but I'm claiming her anyway). Jiang Yi Shui, meanwhile, has been having a great couple of years professionally. Her 2025 space opera omegaverse novel turned out to be unexpectedly popular and shot up a bunch of JJWXC leaderboards — then was suddenly and hastily locked, revised and renamed. It's now accessible on the platform again (under the name Thornbirds (荆棘飞鸟, pinyin: jingji feiniao), but I don't know how much has been changed.

You can see their sections of the video here (Jiang Yi Shui), here (Ning Yuan) and here (Xiao Wu Jun).

The full video is available here on Weibo and here on Google Drive.

The baihe tomb-raiding classic Exploring an Empty Tomb (探虚陵, pinyin: tan xu ling) by Jun Sola (君sola) has been licensed for mainland print publication, and the first volume (I assume it's the first volume, given the sheer length) is now available for pre-order! Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:

• Xiron (the publisher)
  
• Boku
  
• Jinse
  
• Wangou
  
• Xiangxue
  
• Xinshijiao

The web version of the novel can be read here. A fan translation of the first ten chapters can be read here.

Also up for pre-order is the Taiwanese print edition of Within Reach (一步之遥, pinyin: yi bu zhi yao) by Jiu Shi Qi Lang (九十七郎), an omegaverse space opera novel. This is coming out from morefate, and will be in traditional Chinese and uncensored. I bought my copy from Feiqin (aka the company that treats customer service as an imposition on their peace of mind, but so far they've delivered everything I've bought from them in good condition), though I assume other proxies are available.

The baihe vertical mini-drama Love Me Against the Night (爱在极夜降临前, pinyin: ai zai ji ye jianglin qian) is now available on GagaOOLala! Here's the official synopsis:

Bei Li is a manipulative heiress who delights in controlling people's hearts. Nan Xun is determined to survive no matter what, and willingly signs a contract to become her bodyguard and servant. Bei Li revels in Nan Xun's absolute loyalty and unquestioning obedience, never realizing that the look in Nan Xun's eyes has never been one of fear. Instead, it hides a love she has carried in silence for ten years.

The drama consists of 59 episodes of around two minutes each, and as the synopsis indicates, is unabashedly catering to the 'toxic yuri' crowd (the first episode begins with Nan Xun crawling on all fours towards Bei Li so that Bei Li can put a dog collar around her neck)*. The main page for the show is here. The first 12 episodes are free-to-view.

The mini-drama is produced by the lesbian dating app Lespark, and was later (as far as I can tell) licensed to a bunch of random media companies, which proceeded to over-localise the subtitles to a heartbreaking degree (Bei Li was named 'Elowen Veyra' and Nan Xun was named 'Sera Kael', among other crimes). So it's nice that it's finally ended up at GagaOOLala and everyone seems to have normal names.

*I can already hear Bobbi Flekman's voice in my head: 'That's right, it's 1982, get out of the Sixties. We don't have this mentality anymore.'