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The thread is open.
Spoilers ahead.
The omnibus containing all the open threads for this drama is here: Omnibus thread
Remember, you can always search and pull up the threads from the Categories box.
Enjoy the show.
EPISODE 26
Hah! The woes of dating. I’m glad the teasing didn’t continue for long and the assurances were quick and sufficient.
A point of concern, though,… those were scars of gunshot wounds, but SY is not admitting it. Perhaps he was in a secret force in the army and cannot speak of the battles he participated in?
I’m glad that nice Jiang Yu is interested in Li Meng. They seem quite suitable for each other, both responsible and reasonable.
Once again we see the metaphor, this time of a brand of cereal. When XQ was partially drawn away by SY, the cereal brand that she and Yan Chen favoured was not on the shelf. Now that XQ has totally decided to stay beside SY, Yan Chen finds that the cereal tin in his home is empty. When he asks the store about restocking the brand, he finds out that the factory is closing down.
His opportunities to sway or influence XQ have disappeared. Unlike the factory, however, she cannot be bought over or owned by him or the Meng family.
@GB – I didn’t understand the empty cereal tin epsiode. Aha!
I am glad that JY is interested in LM… I am not quite sure why the shift in his attitude… was it when she was coughing as she gave a talk? Were his protective instincts triggered?
Anyway, it’s a nice storyline.
Hi @Kate,
Yes, the Jiang Yu-Li Meng coupling will be sweet. I can’t imagine them having a dramatic relationship, just a very reasonable, low key thing. He’s quite a sweet guy.
Didn’t you just love it that Song Yan comes right out to announce to his family that he and XQ are together, and with a smile and a nod. Just like he can simply tell Li Meng that Xu Qin is his girlfriend. He has nothing to hide, he’s pleased to be able to inform everyone on his side. (We’ll have to see how XQ manages on her end.)
For all that Aunt had disapproved before, she stuffs Zhai Miao’s mouth with food, so that she cannot complain against XQ. LOL.
EPISODE 26
LOL. SY is able to mess with his superior every time. He’s rejecting the offer to be promoted.
More things I like:
– Jiang Yu bothered to write a card for Li Meng. Nothing beats a handwritten message of care when it comes to leaving the written word to be remembered by. Li Meng teases that it’s old fashioned, but I’m sure she will treasure it.
– SY knew that XQ is insecure and didn’t prolong the teasing. XQ should also note that he keeps to his word and takes her word seriously so if she says to stay away he’d do so. She will have to speak as she really feels or risk getting misunderstood.
SY : “You wanted to blame me for not looking for you, for not texting you and coaxing you. But you’re afraid I’ll find you pretentious and bad-tempered. Don’t do this again. We’re getting married soon and we’ll live together forever. You should never have any worries when you’re with me.”
XQ says she wants more expressive eyes which can convey how she feels.
SY: “You don’t need those eyes. I can understand you.”
= = =
– XQ had told her Mother several episodes previously that SY had made porridge for her and that had finally turned her house into a home. This comes to pass now with SY in her life. He’s prepared to cook dinner every night or at least to eat with her every night, like a real married couple.
Noteworthy:
– Yan Chen asked about Ye Zi at the bar. When he sees her by chance, and hears that she’s selling clothes to get money for the earthquake victims, he buys coffee for her and her friends. He’s more soft-hearted than he looks (Xiao Yi Xiao says this too.) Zhai Miao is among Ye Zi’s friends and it’s likely that she’ll recognize Yan Chen again in the future.
– In the same way that SY won’t accept promotion, Yan Chen does not wish to take charge of the whole Guokun Group. (Yan Chen has to face a possible power struggle against the older guy, Dong Cheng Min who will be afraid of losing out once Dad Meng retires).
The difference is that SY is doing what he likes and he wants to stay put. YC hates his job, but excels in it (because he’s such a perfectionist?). He hardly smiles and says he cannot remember a day when he was comfortable. What a way to live! I fancy that if he had the chance, he’d disappear from the business world, and take up entomology.
@GB – agreed!
He has crossed a threshold and is free to act now in full accord with his true desires.
He’s convinced they can make it happen – he’s announcing it not just for now but for the long term.
EPISODES 27 AND 28
Let’s just say I’m happy. What I guessed came to pass. We’re still in the honeymoon period before the next conflict crops up. 🙂
I’m confused by the part time worker in the brother’s orbit. I thought she worked part time at the bar. And her boss fired her related to her serving alcohol to brother and the boss thinking she doesn’t belong in a place like the bar? And then she was also the driver for hire and acted like it was new information that the brother was so drunk when she was the one serving him earlier? Honestly I have speed watched through these scenes so maybe what I think is one character is two characters?
It was pretty chilling when ML told the brother that the tall building was one the family could drive FL to jump from if they weren’t careful. Episode 28 showed that ML really understood FL’s personality (which begs the question why he wasn’t more understanding for the first 23 episodes – but oh well that would be a much shorter drama).
Adding a comment so can subscribe to this thread.
Hi @Good Twin
I also have to rewatch the last 2 episodes but what I gather about Ye Zi, the part-timer, is that she works multiple jobs. She was the one who accidentally got Zhai Miao into trouble over the fake cosmetics and she and ZM are both trying to earn money to pay back Song Yan for the refunds/fines… that he paid on their behalf.
What I note about Ye Zi
1) She noticed Meng Yan Chen from the beginning at the bar. She seems to like him.
2) She has been a designated driver before and has driven him home in a previous episode.
3) He has noted that she’s working hard and found a job for her with an Art Gallery. She was there for a short while but got out because of the fear of the ‘boss’ there who started to sexually harass her.
4) She found that he saw her and her friends recording video clips to sell clothes in one of the buildings his company owned or maybe it was his office building, so she spoke to him to check if it was okay for her to post those videos. He heard from Ye Zi that they were going to send the proceeds of the clothes sales to the earthquake victims, and he bought the girls coffee as it was a cold day out.
5) Xiao Yi Xiao who owns the bar seems to have noticed that Ye Zi is interested in Yan Chen. I don’t know how… have to rewatch… but it might have something to do with the fact that she looks a bit like Xu Qi whom Yan Chen is very fond of.
Xiao seems to think that she is trying to get on YC’s good side or befriend him as a means to get jobs/money/whatever… behind that is the suspicion that she may be trying to seduce YC and set herself up with a rich boyfriend. She was ‘spoiling’ YC by agreeing to bring the wine when I believe Xiao only wanted him to drink water and not get more drunk. Xiao gets angry that she tried to serve YC the wine. He also fires Ye Zi as a precaution against her having designs on him.
6) Knowing that YC needs a driver and since she has the right to drive under a company that she part-times with, she waits for YC to come out. She re-introduces herself as the driver under the other company’s name ie she’s doing the job in an official capacity and not because she’s trying to seduce him. I didn’t notice her pretending to not know he was drunk.
7) If you’ve watched Episode 28 then you know that YC ends up waking up in YZ’s home. He also suspects her of having designs on him but she tells him that it was he who had refused to get out of the car to go to his own home, so for lack of other ideas, she’d left him at her home and she had gone to sleep in her school dorm. She remarked that it was just because he was a rich guy that it was automatically suspected that a poor girl would have designs on him.
@Good Twin, about Song Yan knowing XQ well and yet not being more understanding of her in the first episodes…
I felt that he was being the tiresome rascal he always was since school days. He was too full of himself, and of hurt over his wounded pride, and what he considered her betrayal. He was probably acting out, in a kind of tantrum, sometimes petty… or in retaliation against XQ. This is complicated because he wanted to stop liking her, to stop feeling the pain of their separation, to follow-through on his promise to aunt, etc that he’d never get back together with XQ again. But he was failing miserably. He could not become indifferent towards her and our good drama kept throwing him together with her so that he had no peace, LOL. He had to settle with being icy cold towards her.
At the same time, he knew (and this I didn’t know until just yesterday when I rewatched other episodes) that among other things, XQ was the kind of person who would follow through on a decision that she made. Once she decided, she would stick with it. That’s why now, he was so confident that she’d never leave him. The thing is, after her drunken tantrum, he had gone to her place, laid his cards on the table and asked if she would wait for him to come to her but she had not replied. So they had remained in a break-up.
I believe that had she threatened injury to self over him, he’d have behaved differently. However even he had admitted to her, that he understood her circumstances, but understanding was not to be equated with reconciliation. IE he knew why she did what she did, but he was still angry. The thing was, she had done it in the kind of way that made him feel that she was just playing with him… without a sincere explanation that he could believe…so that it appeared that once she’d had her fun, she would abandon him. Yes, the ABANDONMENT issue crops up here too.
She had denied that anyone had forced her to break up. So she had lied, and he knew it.
We find out that he’d tried repeatedly to reach her by letter and a note on her window to meet up and talk… but she had not known about these and had been sent off to study abroad, not able to see him again. I’d have thought that she could have telephoned him or written to him too… but…. well… I guess she had been forced to promise Mother to not do that and she had been obedient. We see that she tells Mother that she had obeyed in all things except in getting back with SY again.
That’s my take on why SY acted the way he did. We see it too in how he reacted to Suo Jun’s wanting to transfer. He took it as betrayal. He’s too full of rigid loyalty and expects his peers to be like him.
As expected, when our OTP were not yet together, they had any number of occasions to be in the same place, at the same time. But now that they are supposed to be living together, life gets in the way, even in the dramaverse.
XQ’s Mother is up to her tricks but gets foiled by sister-in-law LOL. I kind of like that incorrigible girl, Zhai Miao. She made a long speech to her cousin before, urging him to at least date and enjoy the present instead of being neither here nor there in the relationship with XQ. It was she who first said that an advantage of just dating was that if they could not stand each other, they could just breakup. So this idea which SY used in encouraging XQ to date him came from Zhai Xiao.
The other interesting person is Ye Zi. She’s hiding that she’s trying to get Yan Chen interested in her, from her good friend, Zhai Xiao. She had lied to ZX about the fact that she had been fired from the bar job. ZX seems to have figured out that the night YZ had been unreachable, she had gone for a concert and was not working at the bar, as she claimed, so there might be a showdown over this later. Of course her lie may be because she does not want to be teased or for a reason that is innocent, however it should have been fine to just say that she’d gone to a concert with a friend, instead of lying.
I guess we’ll have to watch more episodes to see if she really has no ulterior motives in approaching Yan Chen… or rather, to see if her interest in him is fake or real.
Some red flags about Ye Zi besides lying to Zhai Miao:
– It was through Ye Zi that Zhai Miao got into the scamming online cosmetics business.
– We only have Ye Zi’s word for it that Yan Chen did not want to get out of the car and go home. She might have engineered getting him alone in her home.
– She gets quite uncomfortably close to him from time to time that makes it look like she might be trying to seduce him.
However, I’d still like to see Yan Chen happier, and if he really comes to like Ye Zi, and she’s genuinely nice, it will be good that he’s not alone.
I’m also a bit confused by Ye Zi. The character is clearly a bad person in the novel, so I find it interesting that the drama is making her motives somewhat ambiguous. If they change her and make her YC’s love interest, then there’s an important scene later that will have to be changed.
@GB and @Stacy – thanks for the background on Ye Zi – these were parts of the drama that I wasn’t watching carefully but seem to be coming to a head. I thought they were virtue signaling with this character – hardworking, multiple part time jobs, serious, trying to be an influencer but donating her proceeds to charity. I missed that she was the one that got the cousin selling the fake cosmetics. And these last two episodes she seems more manipulative less sympathetic. Will be interesting to see where this leads.
I understand there was some cross over reference to the author’s other novel (also being made into a drama). The name of the man her mother introduced her to to drive them home when SY and his little cousin showed up – is the lead character in the novel Beautiful in Beijing. (I just saw this mentioned – don’t know if it is true or not).
Also did you hear hot best friend (Vin Zhang) tell YY “You Are My Glory”. Lots of winks and nods going on.
EPISODE 29
Hi @Good Twin I rewatched Ep 29, but my subs didn’t have the ‘You are my Glory’ or maybe I missed it LOL. Even with a scarred face, Vin Zhang Bin Bin still looked mighty fine.
@Stacy, @Good Twin, I saw that there were a couple more red flags with Ye Zi over her relationship with YC.
– In Episode 29 she lied that Yan Chen had broken her vase in order to finagle a meeting and a treat out of him.
– During their 2nd meeting after a noisy live performance, she gets more information about his hobbies and tries to get permission to enter his home, either to tidy it up (tidying being what she claims is her hobby) or to see his butterflies. He wisely says no.
– She goes up real close to him to show him her face, asking if she needed plastic surgery or not. What she probably expected was that he’d say she was pretty enough without any surgery but he disappointed her by saying he didn’t know and it was up to her.
Despite his seeming indifference, later on he engineered having someone propose a less than honest business of manipulating influencers into doing plastic surgery to line the pockets of businessmen, to see what she would say. It was an indirect way of telling her to not be taken in by people who said she needed plastic surgery.
YC is quite a nice, upright person. He’s also pretty uptight. I’d like to see him really loosen up. YZ is probably not the right or good person to help in this regard. She seems more suspicious now that I’ve rewatched this episode.