baihe_media | I Think About You Day and Night (朝思慕暖) by Yu Shuang (鱼霜): Review

x_los asked me the other day why I'd picked up this contemporary CEO romance, and I had a bunch of half-formed reasons, none of them super coherent. First, I felt I needed to read at least one Yu Shuang novel (up until this book, I'd read precisely zero), what with her being one of 'Top 10 current baihe authors' on my list, and this is one of her shorter works. Second, judging by the synopsis, I felt it was a novel with a higher inherent level of melodrama than many of the author's other works, and having come off the back of reading a very mannered postwar novel and a profoundly unsatisfying (because lacking in melodrama) anthology of SFFH erotica, I was in the mood for that. Third, I've never actually properly sat down and read a baihe CEO romance (other than Zebra Crossing (斑马线, pinyin: banma xian), which was thoroughly atypical), though I did read many a yanqing CEO romance in my misspent youth, so I felt that was something I needed to remedy. Finally, after my vague dissatisfaction with Snow in the Spring Courtyard (春庭雪, pinyin: chun ting xue), I felt I wanted something for which I would have lower expectations, thus increasing my chances of being pleasantly surprised. And I did, in fact, end up enjoying I Think About You Day and Night more than I was expecting.

The novel begins with our cool, aloof, glamorous CEO Wei Hui rescuing penniless servant girl Shiyi from the household of a business acquaintance, where Shiyi is regularly subjected to physical and verbal abuse, with the threat of sexual violence hanging over her. She does this in much the same way one would scoop up a mistreated pet. Shiyi is timid and easily startled at first, but soon blossoms and becomes bolder under Wei Hui's tutelage and unstinting support, and in the best tradition of the CEO romance, Wei Hui gradually loosens up and becomes warmer around her.

Note: Incidentally, what was in the c-ent water circa 2019? Why are there at least two baihe leads named Shiyi (the other one being from Reading the Remnants (问棺, pinyin: wen guan; reviewed here), not to mention a whole slew of c-drama (many adopted from webnovels) female leads with the same name? That's something

superborb and I were wondering about.

The novel is essentially a particular type of k-drama (one which I think may have fallen out of fashion) in book form: there's terminal illness, birth secrets, an incest scare (no, as it turns out, they're not related by blood, although there's quite a bit made about Wei Hui not being able to formally adopt Shiyi into the Wei family because to her, that would make them related in a way that would preclude a romance), and corporate machinations which somehow don't tell the reader very much about what Wei Hui's massive family conglomerate actually does (me: something to do with... land?? and development???) As with the best k-dramas of this type, the author engages with the tropes seriously (plays them absolutely straight, as it were) and gives them emotional weight and resonance, which I appreciated. I feel sure that if this were a Western--published contemporary romance, most authors would have succumbed to glibness, Whedon-esque quips, far too much lampshading, and weak attempts at 'subversion'. I also found the main characters surprisingly well-drawn, when it would have been easy for the author to let them stay pretty much as stock types. Wei Hui might seem cool and inscrutable on the outside, but on the inside she's struggling a lot with sometimes contradictory familial, personal and emotional loyalties, and very much determined to do what she sees as the Right Thing (I love characters who are obsessed with doing the Right Thing) by every person in her life. Shiyi, meanwhile, could have been a very irritating character in the hands of a less skilled (or less sincere) author, but here Yu Shuang manages to make her very likable. She's naive but not foolish (and indeed we learn quite early on that she orchestrated her first encounter with Wei Hui in hopes that Wei Hui would rescue her), vulnerable and fragile (especially at the beginning) but with an inner core of resilience, and as determined as Wei Hui to do the Right Thing (though her preferred approach is different). I also want to give a shoutout to their sidekick Du Yueming, a socialite who is initially presented as a predatory bitch with designs on Shiyi, but turns out to be a generous, warm-hearted friend.

In one of the novel's first big reveals, we learn that Wei Hui is (1) the only living member of her family, (2) seriously ill with a congenital heart condition, meaning that (3) she can't physically gestate and give birth to a biological heir, which she is very hung up about due to the abovementioned sense of familial loyalty. That's why she initially decided to rescue Shiyi and bring Shiyi home with her — to ask Shiyi to basically be her surrogate and birth an heir for her (

x_los asked about the specific medical details of this — whose egg/sperm, etc — but these were not specified in the novel, which is also very uninterested in the specific details of Wei Hui's illness). Because she's obsessed with doing the Right Thing, she gives Shiyi free choice (or as free a choice as is possible in the circumstances) over the matter. She also wrestles over what would be appropriate compensation for Shiyi for this service, and at one point begins fretting over whether it wouldn't be too cruel to separate Shiyi from her newborn baby. She also, because of this, tries to repress her growing attraction towards Shiyi, because she could not in good conscience use Shiyi as her surrogate while also having a romantic relationship with her, not to mention that the relationship would be highly unequal (not only is Shiyi a penniless servant, she also has had very limited education and very little experience of life generally) and would inevitably be short-lived (due to Wei Hui's illness).

Note: Wei Hui asks Shiyi to be her surrogate in the original version of the novel. In the revised version (i.e. the version currently on JJWXC), Wei Hui merely asks Shiyi to help her hang on to the family business (in an unspecified way), and all references to surrogacy appear to have been removed. I initially thought this was due to censorship, but it is possible that it was also due to negative audience reception (for reasons which I don't really want to think too hard about, there's a segment of the mainland baihe audience which absolutely hates the notion of a main character in a baihe novel becoming pregnant, especially if the mode of pregnancy involves sperm in some fashion). The (censored, mainland) print version of the novel, meanwhile, has Wei Hui asking Shiyi to be her heir.

In the novel's second big reveal, Wei Hui discovers that Shiyi is the daughter of a man who had agreed to donate his heart to Wei Hui's father (who had the same congenital heart defect), and had deliberately engineered a fatal accident for himself to enable this, in exchange for the Wei family giving his daughter a comfortable life. The transplant takes place, but Wei Hui's father dies from complications anyway, and in the ensuing tumult, the family forgets about/fails to take any steps to track down his 'donor's' daughter. Wei Hui feels a tremendous amount of guilt over this, which only adds to the tangled mess of duty and obligation and attraction she feels towards Shiyi. This was absolutely delicious and was precisely the kind of heightened drama I wanted in my reading diet.

Just to reassure you, the novel does end happily, with the two leads kind of trading places. Wei Hui undergoes an unspecified operation that has a 3% chance of curing her congenital heart defect, which is of course successful. While she recovers, Shiyi takes charge of the family business, which she is fully equipped to do now, thanks to the rigorous course of education which Wei Hui put her through earlier (which also does a lot to make them each other's intellectual and emotional equals. It's a little bit like the end of Jane Eyre, although obviously Wei Hui is a much better human being than Rochester).

I had to resort to a pirate site to read the original (unrevised) version of the novel. The authorised (revised) version of the novel is available here on JJWXC. There is, as far as I know, no English fan translation available.

Note on the title translation: The title in Chinese, 朝思慕暖 (pinyin: zhao si mu nuan), is a riff on the chengyu 朝思暮想 (pinyin: zhao si mu xiang), which pretty much means thinking of someone or missing someone day and night. The lyric 'I think about you day and night' comes from the song 'Happy Together', which has already provided the titles for at least two other pieces of gay media, so I thought why not.