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baihe_media2023-12-16 04:04 pm
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Entry tags:
- authors: chu dao 初岛,
- authors: da ying 妲婴,
- authors: lu chao 鹿潮,
- authors: min ran 闵然,
- authors: si bai ba shi si 四百八十寺,
- authors: yu shuang 鱼霜,
- novels: a taste of you 食局,
- novels: burn 烧,
- novels: for the rest of our lives 余生为期,
- novels: i think about you day and night,
- novels: my feelings can wait 余情可待,
- novels: seven years on a desert island 荒,
- novels: she belongs to me 她属于我,
- novels: waiting for you 余情可待,
- recs and reviews: novels
Waiting for You (余情可待) by Min Ran (闵然): Review
I read Waiting for You (余情可待, pinyin: yuqing kedai) more out of a sense that this was a book I ought to read — Min Ran's massive popularity as an author; this novel's massive popularity with the fanbase; the popularity of showbiz romance (of which I had only properly read one very atypical example) as a subgenre among baihe readers generally — rather than any feeling that I would actually enjoy it. As it turned out, I was right: I did not enjoy the novel, although I can perhaps see how it might work for readers who don't have my particular preferences.
The plot of Waiting for You is essentially exes-turned-reunited-lovers courtesy of a handy rebirth and time rewind. The main characters are Ji Youyan, a TV actress who'd been toiling in the mines for some time before finally winning a major acting award and achieving acclaim, and Jing Xiu, a legit major movie star. They met during an idol audition programme, and dated for two years after that before breaking up. At the start of the novel, they've been broken up for five years. Jing Xiu is at her own literal wedding ceremony (to a university classmate of hers, a man named Song Wenyan) when she hears the news that Ji Youyan has died from alcohol poisoning. She abandons her wedding and rushes to Ji Youyan's side, but too late. Then Ji Youyan finds herself waking up, reborn at an earlier point in time — just two years after she broke up with Jing Xiu. She's determined to make amends and win her ex-girlfriend back again, starting with taking part in an acting-focused reality show she and Jing Xiu have both been invited to be judges on.
You might think, after that momentous start, that this would be quite a dramatic, overwrought book. In fact it's nothing of the sort. For my own reading purposes, I've started mentally building up a sub-category of baihe novels I've labelled 'novels about two attractive femme women resolving their relationship issues decorously through Better Communication in a mostly conflict-free way'. Waiting for You falls into this sub-category. The other major title I'd previously put into this category is She Belongs to Me (她属于我, pinyin: ta shuyu wo) by Da Ying (妲婴), which on the whole I think I like better than Waiting for You, on account of it (1) being four times shorter and (2) at least having a couple of big dramatic moments and some k-drama-style romantic setpieces. The main conflict between Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu — which led to their initial breakup — is that Ji Youyan has hangups about showing her many emotional vulnerabilities to Jing Xiu lest the latter stop loving her, while Jing Xiu is too prone to making compromises and sacrifices for Ji Youyan without even making Ji Youyan aware that there were any compromises or sacrifices to be made. A point of contention between them, pre-breakup, is that Jing Xiu wanted to eventually make their relationship public, or at least not have to hide it too much, while Ji Youyan was concerned about the negative impact this would have on her career. Post-rebirth, Ji Youyan sets out to show Jing Xiu that she, too, is no longer fearful about making their relationship public, and that she will be much more emotionally open with Jing Xiu. She succeeds, and she and Jing Xiu get together and stay together. That is... basically the entire story. Nor does Jing Xiu herself change all that much. Some lip service is paid to her needing to be more aware of her own needs, but in the end she simply continues to make elaborate plans to improve Ji Youyan's life and career prospects without letting the latter know until after the fact.
There are of course some external obstacles — Ji Youyan's disapproving parents, continual Weibo scandals, the supernatural/religious reason for Ji Youyan's rebirth and its negative effects on Jing Xiu (I'll elaborate a little bit more on this later) — but these are all dealt with pretty handily, and while we're told at points that the leads are affected by these events, this never seems to have much of a lasting effect. Even the most impactful of these obstacles, parental disapproval, is resolved pretty quickly after only a couple of unpleasant scenes — hardly a long-running or novel-defining conflict. Nor are the horrors of the entertainment industry given much weight. While things like mental health issues, suicide and sexual harassment are alluded to, and happen to a couple of very secondary characters, they don't really have much of a lasting impact on either Ji Youyan or Jing Xiu over the course of the novel. They're said to have been affected by these things in the past, but that's not really shown. For instance, both of them broke into the entertainment industry via an idol audition programme, and those things are famously brutal; yet they seem to have only fond, rose-coloured memories of those times. This meant that the stakes of the novel felt very low, exacerbated by the fact that both Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu are from very comfortable, at least upper-middle class (UK definition) families. Jing Xiu's family, in particular, seems extremely wealthy and prominent, with strong networks within the entertainment industry as well as business circles. She's able to have a fairly well-known director whom she caught harassing a junior actress 'taken care of' simply by asking her grandfather to handle the matter. I found myself thinking more than once: so what if their relationship is exposed? Even if they lose some opportunities, it's not as if either of them needs to make a living, and in any case they still have lots of resources and networks to fall back on! Towards the end of the novel, this is in fact what happens: Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu set up their own studios and agencies, and Jing Xiu turns to directing rather than acting, which she is of course amazing at, even though the novel doesn't really show her working at or thinking about directing (there's one section where she's studying transitions, cuts and close-ups for the film she's acting in, but that's it). In fact, neither Ji Youyan nor Jing Xiu spend much time thinking about craft at all, nor are we presented with details about them working at either acting, directing, songwriting or singing.
I'll be the first to admit that I love a high dose of drama in my baihe (which is why I Think About You Day and Night (朝思慕暖, pinyin: zhao si mu nuan) won me over), but that isn't always necessary: I found the fairly grounded realism of A Taste of You (食局, pinyin: shi ju) engaging too. What I particularly didn't enjoy about Waiting for You is that the author seemed to realise that there were potential high points of emotional tension to be mined — and then chose to let all the air out of them. At one point late in the novel, Ji Youyan admits to Jing Xiu that she always used to feel a sort of competitive anxiety when she was around Jing Xiu — that she wanted to match or surpass Jing Xiu's success, both to be a better match for her, but also simply because she was jealous of Jing Xiu's achievements. After all, she's a woman in a highly competitive and cut-throat industry which you can't really succeed in without fairly competitive instincts of your own. This could have been a really striking point of emotional conflict between the two main characters — and it's such a common thing in close female friendships (at university, a friend got really upset with me for winning a prize that we all thought she'd win, and while we made up fairly quickly, it still sticks in my mind, and I'm sure hers too) — but that wasn't developed at all, as Ji Youyan then goes on to explain that it was all in the past, and she is now completely jealousy-free. Very late in the novel, Ji Youyan goes incommunicado while travelling in Bhutan and Nepal, and Jing Xiu is worried for about three pages before it's revealed that Ji Youyan is fine — so what was the point? Quite early in the novel, we also learn a startling fact about the main secondary f/f couple, Tao Ruoxing/Ruan Ningwei. It turns out that Tao Ruoxing, Jing Xiu's cousin and the CEO of the talent agency Ji Youyan is signed to, had gotten up-and-coming actress Ruan Ningwei to be her live-in girlfriend by the old CEO trick of paying for the latter's mother's medical expenses, and that Ruan Ningwei was mainly staying with Tao Ruoxing out of a sense of obligation and having nothing else to fall back on (the novel does make it clear that Tao Ruoxing isn't forcing Ruan Ningwei to have sex with her, a choice that perhaps makes the whole setup more palatable, but in a way also exemplifies the author's 'let's lean away from any sort of drama' approach). I found this tonally jarring, given Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu's extremely smooth and consensual relationship development, but also expected this to be elaborated on further, possibly as a contrast — yet Tao Ruoxing and Ruan Ningwei soon fade into the background, and later appear at an mostly-lesbian yacht party as a perfectly happy couple without none of their relationship development having been addressed on-page. Towards the end of the novel, same-sex marriage is legalised via a referendum (allowing Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu to be formally married), which I guess makes it clear that this is very much an AU China. Again, this potentially momentous development and any events leading up to it isn't really a feature of the novel. Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu make some social media posts in support of a Yes vote in the referendum, but there's no mention of them engaging in any sort of sustained campaigning or political activity. There are probably limits on how much JJWXC will allow authors to engage in detailed descriptions of political campaigning, but there could at least have been some mention of e.g. Jing Xiu using her family's influence to win over politicians and voters, or Ji Youyan (whose parents are highly respected university professors) doing the same among progressive academic circles.
The sex scenes were not very long, explicit or detailed. Things were more hinted at than described, and I found them less effective than those in Cover Her Face (遮面, pinyin: zhe mian), which I previously reviewed. This was exacerbated by the author deciding to adopt the tired old combination of 'horny horndog gong' (Ji Youyan) and 'maidenly shy and blushing/semi-resisting although she wants it really' shou (Jing Xiu) as the main dynamic between them when it came to sex. The saving grace is that they do switch, and I found it interesting from a literary point of view that while they can both verbally articulate the desire to top, neither ever manages to articulate the desire to be topped. This is especially obvious with Jing Xiu, who clearly does want to be topped quite a lot of the time. Ji Youyan, meanwhile, muses at one point that she doesn't mind one way or the other, but despite clearly enjoying the encounters in which she is the bottom, never expressly says that she wants to repeat the experience. Does the societally-induced guilt that makes women reluctant to admit to a desire to receive sexual pleasure extend even to baihe novels? The author also keeps setting up scenarios in which Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu agree not to have sex (e.g. at one point they agree they can't have sex until the play that Jing Xiu is acting in finishes its run, the implication being that the sex would be so intense, and Jing Xiu would do so much screaming in pleasure, that she'd be too hoarse to act). I found this a strange authorial choice (even though I've come across this kind of thing before in at least one other baihe novel): why would a romance novel take such pains to let me know that the (allosexual) leads aren't fucking? The reason given in the novel wasn't convincing to me either: while the novel did tell me that many of their sexual encounters were ruinously intense, the fact that JJWXC content standards preclude long explicit sex scenes meant it couldn't show (and persuade me of) that.vorvayne suggested that it might be denial kink, but the characters themselves aren't depicted as experiencing it in that way. x_los thought it might be a structural issue.
A final data point I guess is that Jing Xiu is biracial: her dad is French (and I assume white) and her mum is Chinese. As she's the second biracial lead I've seen crop up in a baihe novel (the main character in Seven Years on a Desert Island (荒岛七年 , huangdao qi nian) by Taiwanese author Lu Chao (鹿潮) has a Chinese father and white mother), I thought it was worth noting.
As I alluded to earlier, an in-universe explanation is given for Ji Youyan's rebirth — Jing Xiu begs a senior Buddhist monk to reverse Ji Youyan's fate, at the cost of shortening her (that is, Jing Xiu's) next life by a good several decades. I almost wish this had not been included, and the cause of the rebirth merely glossed over. Not only does it put Ji Youyan in more debt to Jing Xiu, but the supernatural/religious aspect of the whole thing made it read like a very jarring almost-afterthought against the backdrop of the rest of the novel.
So, in short, I did not enjoy this novel and it frustrated me in a number of ways. However, I can see how it would appeal to readers who are after a sort of mostly wish-fulfilment, low-conflict story, with generally good (though not remarkable) prose and characters who are mostly likable (Ji Youyan can be quite entertaining, especially when she's teasing Jing Xiu, or bantering with her assistant, wide-eyed, bad-at-getting-innuendos Lin Yue). Readers who are invested in the social media and celebrity/fan interactions aspects of the entertainment industry will also probably get a lot more out of this novel than I did. I still plan to read Min Ran's other massively popular novel, the age gap romance For the Rest of Our Lives (余生为期, pinyin: yusheng weiqi), but I'm in no real hurry.
I read the Chinese original of the novel on JJWXC here. I'm aware of an English fan translation floating around on the internet, but since quite a lot of is MTL, I will not be dignifying it with a link.
The plot of Waiting for You is essentially exes-turned-reunited-lovers courtesy of a handy rebirth and time rewind. The main characters are Ji Youyan, a TV actress who'd been toiling in the mines for some time before finally winning a major acting award and achieving acclaim, and Jing Xiu, a legit major movie star. They met during an idol audition programme, and dated for two years after that before breaking up. At the start of the novel, they've been broken up for five years. Jing Xiu is at her own literal wedding ceremony (to a university classmate of hers, a man named Song Wenyan) when she hears the news that Ji Youyan has died from alcohol poisoning. She abandons her wedding and rushes to Ji Youyan's side, but too late. Then Ji Youyan finds herself waking up, reborn at an earlier point in time — just two years after she broke up with Jing Xiu. She's determined to make amends and win her ex-girlfriend back again, starting with taking part in an acting-focused reality show she and Jing Xiu have both been invited to be judges on.
You might think, after that momentous start, that this would be quite a dramatic, overwrought book. In fact it's nothing of the sort. For my own reading purposes, I've started mentally building up a sub-category of baihe novels I've labelled 'novels about two attractive femme women resolving their relationship issues decorously through Better Communication in a mostly conflict-free way'. Waiting for You falls into this sub-category. The other major title I'd previously put into this category is She Belongs to Me (她属于我, pinyin: ta shuyu wo) by Da Ying (妲婴), which on the whole I think I like better than Waiting for You, on account of it (1) being four times shorter and (2) at least having a couple of big dramatic moments and some k-drama-style romantic setpieces. The main conflict between Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu — which led to their initial breakup — is that Ji Youyan has hangups about showing her many emotional vulnerabilities to Jing Xiu lest the latter stop loving her, while Jing Xiu is too prone to making compromises and sacrifices for Ji Youyan without even making Ji Youyan aware that there were any compromises or sacrifices to be made. A point of contention between them, pre-breakup, is that Jing Xiu wanted to eventually make their relationship public, or at least not have to hide it too much, while Ji Youyan was concerned about the negative impact this would have on her career. Post-rebirth, Ji Youyan sets out to show Jing Xiu that she, too, is no longer fearful about making their relationship public, and that she will be much more emotionally open with Jing Xiu. She succeeds, and she and Jing Xiu get together and stay together. That is... basically the entire story. Nor does Jing Xiu herself change all that much. Some lip service is paid to her needing to be more aware of her own needs, but in the end she simply continues to make elaborate plans to improve Ji Youyan's life and career prospects without letting the latter know until after the fact.
There are of course some external obstacles — Ji Youyan's disapproving parents, continual Weibo scandals, the supernatural/religious reason for Ji Youyan's rebirth and its negative effects on Jing Xiu (I'll elaborate a little bit more on this later) — but these are all dealt with pretty handily, and while we're told at points that the leads are affected by these events, this never seems to have much of a lasting effect. Even the most impactful of these obstacles, parental disapproval, is resolved pretty quickly after only a couple of unpleasant scenes — hardly a long-running or novel-defining conflict. Nor are the horrors of the entertainment industry given much weight. While things like mental health issues, suicide and sexual harassment are alluded to, and happen to a couple of very secondary characters, they don't really have much of a lasting impact on either Ji Youyan or Jing Xiu over the course of the novel. They're said to have been affected by these things in the past, but that's not really shown. For instance, both of them broke into the entertainment industry via an idol audition programme, and those things are famously brutal; yet they seem to have only fond, rose-coloured memories of those times. This meant that the stakes of the novel felt very low, exacerbated by the fact that both Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu are from very comfortable, at least upper-middle class (UK definition) families. Jing Xiu's family, in particular, seems extremely wealthy and prominent, with strong networks within the entertainment industry as well as business circles. She's able to have a fairly well-known director whom she caught harassing a junior actress 'taken care of' simply by asking her grandfather to handle the matter. I found myself thinking more than once: so what if their relationship is exposed? Even if they lose some opportunities, it's not as if either of them needs to make a living, and in any case they still have lots of resources and networks to fall back on! Towards the end of the novel, this is in fact what happens: Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu set up their own studios and agencies, and Jing Xiu turns to directing rather than acting, which she is of course amazing at, even though the novel doesn't really show her working at or thinking about directing (there's one section where she's studying transitions, cuts and close-ups for the film she's acting in, but that's it). In fact, neither Ji Youyan nor Jing Xiu spend much time thinking about craft at all, nor are we presented with details about them working at either acting, directing, songwriting or singing.
I'll be the first to admit that I love a high dose of drama in my baihe (which is why I Think About You Day and Night (朝思慕暖, pinyin: zhao si mu nuan) won me over), but that isn't always necessary: I found the fairly grounded realism of A Taste of You (食局, pinyin: shi ju) engaging too. What I particularly didn't enjoy about Waiting for You is that the author seemed to realise that there were potential high points of emotional tension to be mined — and then chose to let all the air out of them. At one point late in the novel, Ji Youyan admits to Jing Xiu that she always used to feel a sort of competitive anxiety when she was around Jing Xiu — that she wanted to match or surpass Jing Xiu's success, both to be a better match for her, but also simply because she was jealous of Jing Xiu's achievements. After all, she's a woman in a highly competitive and cut-throat industry which you can't really succeed in without fairly competitive instincts of your own. This could have been a really striking point of emotional conflict between the two main characters — and it's such a common thing in close female friendships (at university, a friend got really upset with me for winning a prize that we all thought she'd win, and while we made up fairly quickly, it still sticks in my mind, and I'm sure hers too) — but that wasn't developed at all, as Ji Youyan then goes on to explain that it was all in the past, and she is now completely jealousy-free. Very late in the novel, Ji Youyan goes incommunicado while travelling in Bhutan and Nepal, and Jing Xiu is worried for about three pages before it's revealed that Ji Youyan is fine — so what was the point? Quite early in the novel, we also learn a startling fact about the main secondary f/f couple, Tao Ruoxing/Ruan Ningwei. It turns out that Tao Ruoxing, Jing Xiu's cousin and the CEO of the talent agency Ji Youyan is signed to, had gotten up-and-coming actress Ruan Ningwei to be her live-in girlfriend by the old CEO trick of paying for the latter's mother's medical expenses, and that Ruan Ningwei was mainly staying with Tao Ruoxing out of a sense of obligation and having nothing else to fall back on (the novel does make it clear that Tao Ruoxing isn't forcing Ruan Ningwei to have sex with her, a choice that perhaps makes the whole setup more palatable, but in a way also exemplifies the author's 'let's lean away from any sort of drama' approach). I found this tonally jarring, given Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu's extremely smooth and consensual relationship development, but also expected this to be elaborated on further, possibly as a contrast — yet Tao Ruoxing and Ruan Ningwei soon fade into the background, and later appear at an mostly-lesbian yacht party as a perfectly happy couple without none of their relationship development having been addressed on-page. Towards the end of the novel, same-sex marriage is legalised via a referendum (allowing Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu to be formally married), which I guess makes it clear that this is very much an AU China. Again, this potentially momentous development and any events leading up to it isn't really a feature of the novel. Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu make some social media posts in support of a Yes vote in the referendum, but there's no mention of them engaging in any sort of sustained campaigning or political activity. There are probably limits on how much JJWXC will allow authors to engage in detailed descriptions of political campaigning, but there could at least have been some mention of e.g. Jing Xiu using her family's influence to win over politicians and voters, or Ji Youyan (whose parents are highly respected university professors) doing the same among progressive academic circles.
The sex scenes were not very long, explicit or detailed. Things were more hinted at than described, and I found them less effective than those in Cover Her Face (遮面, pinyin: zhe mian), which I previously reviewed. This was exacerbated by the author deciding to adopt the tired old combination of 'horny horndog gong' (Ji Youyan) and 'maidenly shy and blushing/semi-resisting although she wants it really' shou (Jing Xiu) as the main dynamic between them when it came to sex. The saving grace is that they do switch, and I found it interesting from a literary point of view that while they can both verbally articulate the desire to top, neither ever manages to articulate the desire to be topped. This is especially obvious with Jing Xiu, who clearly does want to be topped quite a lot of the time. Ji Youyan, meanwhile, muses at one point that she doesn't mind one way or the other, but despite clearly enjoying the encounters in which she is the bottom, never expressly says that she wants to repeat the experience. Does the societally-induced guilt that makes women reluctant to admit to a desire to receive sexual pleasure extend even to baihe novels? The author also keeps setting up scenarios in which Ji Youyan and Jing Xiu agree not to have sex (e.g. at one point they agree they can't have sex until the play that Jing Xiu is acting in finishes its run, the implication being that the sex would be so intense, and Jing Xiu would do so much screaming in pleasure, that she'd be too hoarse to act). I found this a strange authorial choice (even though I've come across this kind of thing before in at least one other baihe novel): why would a romance novel take such pains to let me know that the (allosexual) leads aren't fucking? The reason given in the novel wasn't convincing to me either: while the novel did tell me that many of their sexual encounters were ruinously intense, the fact that JJWXC content standards preclude long explicit sex scenes meant it couldn't show (and persuade me of) that.
vorvayne suggested that it might be denial kink, but the characters themselves aren't depicted as experiencing it in that way. x_los thought it might be a structural issue.A final data point I guess is that Jing Xiu is biracial: her dad is French (and I assume white) and her mum is Chinese. As she's the second biracial lead I've seen crop up in a baihe novel (the main character in Seven Years on a Desert Island (荒岛七年 , huangdao qi nian) by Taiwanese author Lu Chao (鹿潮) has a Chinese father and white mother), I thought it was worth noting.
As I alluded to earlier, an in-universe explanation is given for Ji Youyan's rebirth — Jing Xiu begs a senior Buddhist monk to reverse Ji Youyan's fate, at the cost of shortening her (that is, Jing Xiu's) next life by a good several decades. I almost wish this had not been included, and the cause of the rebirth merely glossed over. Not only does it put Ji Youyan in more debt to Jing Xiu, but the supernatural/religious aspect of the whole thing made it read like a very jarring almost-afterthought against the backdrop of the rest of the novel.
So, in short, I did not enjoy this novel and it frustrated me in a number of ways. However, I can see how it would appeal to readers who are after a sort of mostly wish-fulfilment, low-conflict story, with generally good (though not remarkable) prose and characters who are mostly likable (Ji Youyan can be quite entertaining, especially when she's teasing Jing Xiu, or bantering with her assistant, wide-eyed, bad-at-getting-innuendos Lin Yue). Readers who are invested in the social media and celebrity/fan interactions aspects of the entertainment industry will also probably get a lot more out of this novel than I did. I still plan to read Min Ran's other massively popular novel, the age gap romance For the Rest of Our Lives (余生为期, pinyin: yusheng weiqi), but I'm in no real hurry.
I read the Chinese original of the novel on JJWXC here. I'm aware of an English fan translation floating around on the internet, but since quite a lot of is MTL, I will not be dignifying it with a link.
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I would still like to read this story once it's fully translated but knowing your thoughts on this will definitely give me another perspective on it.
Also, I look forward to your review on For the Rest of our Lives if you ever get around to reading it. It's a very long story so I might have to wait forever, huh? lol
Thanks again for this review.
no subject
Also — since For the Rest of Our Lives is going to be released in an uncensored traditional Chinese print edition, I'll probably wait until that has come out to read it.
no subject
I really do look forward to your opinion after you've had a chance to read For the Rest of Our Lives. I have read the first 30 or so chapters and there's nothing to dislike so far. But that could be because I can relate to the age-gap thing. ha ha ha
Speaking of print editions ... you must have a whole room dedicated to books, right? *jealous* lmao Oh, I've been meaning to ask you. You like Reading the Remnants, right? What do you think of her other stories? I think the author is particularly good at conveying the everyday emotions. I felt this after reading Pat Me Please and feel so again with Night Tide. In some ways, her stories are very ordinary but that's also what makes it extraordinary. I don't quite know how to articulate it. I'm really mesmerized by the writing style.
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no subject
Yeah, I think I read that it was kinda MTL but I just figure that if it was translated properly, wouldn’t that mean it would be even better?? *hopeful*
I can understand why most writers churn out stories for the masse. It takes a lot to get into the nitty-gritty and frankly, not many readers want to invest the time or (emotional) energy into that so why would creators even bother?
I’m really dying to read Burn.
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no subject