Xi li ren qi

An & Rui have been married for awhile, now. They are the perfect couple & have a perfect little girl. He is a manager at a cosmetics firm & she keeps the home. An is practical. She knows how to manage a house & she knows how to stre++++ch a dollar. She adores her husband & daughter & works ceaselessly on everything related to them & their home. She's just stopped working on /herself/. When the couple agrees to house An's cousin's daughter, the trouble begins. Wen's parents divorced long ago & remarried. They have new families now, so Wen has no family to call her own. As she stays w/ her cousin's family, she gets a sense of what she's missing & gradually makes moves to take what An has for her own. Wen is young, hot, & very available. That's hard for a man to resist.

Inside of ep8, I was very uncomfortable. 'This sux,' I was thinking. I'm so glad I stuck w/ it. The show is actually wonderful.

I love Sonia Sui as FL Xie An Zhen/An & her character. She is optimism personified. She has an exotic beauty, but by mid-show I wanted to shake her & drag her to the beauty salon for a revamp to look as good as we know she can. The hospital gown she wears in one ep is more attractive than her pajamas. Believe you me, unlike many Kdramas in which the female lead stays underachieved throughout, they give us lots of satisfaction here. This actress is stunning. James Wen is her husband Wen "Rui" Fan. He plays the attractive-but-weak edge well.

Chris Wang is Lan Tian "Wei". By ep27, I loved this guy. He isn't emotional, so it takes awhile to warm up to him. He understands that wallowing in sorrow won't do any good. He kickstarts An into working on herself. That's always, ALWAYS the answer: Work on yourself. Eventually, Wei realizes that he over-analyzes everything. When it comes to love, he must only ask if he's happy. (Many of life's quandaries are a matter of head vs heart). Patrick Lee is Rui's bro i/l & friend, Hao Kang De. He's fun. Perhaps too fun... Karen Hu plays his wife / Rui's sister / & An's friend, Xuan. Her coloring is gorgeous. She has large liquid eyes framed w/ sable makeup. The effect is rich chocolate silk.

Amanda Chu plays the young siren, Lai Wei En/Wen. I got tired of her, but I think we're supposed to feel that way. She's not the prettiest one in the series, but she seems to be a walking pheromone factory. Man can't resist her. She's complex. That's what pain does to a person. We know about her history & understand that she came from damage, & that's all she knows. An lends practical shoes to Wen for a job interview. They're a bit tight, so after the interview doesn't go well, Wei takes them off & thoughtlessly leaves them in the elevator. Later on, she's having lunch w/ Rui & An is late. Rui explains that An's trying to find the shoes. He explains: "...she cherishes everything & everyone that belongs to her. Including you." Wen knows that An cherishes her. There are some holes that love alone cannot fill, however. I'm officially a fan of Director Hsu Fu Chun, who also brought us Office Girl-7.5 & The Rational Life-7.

Affairs aren't fair. They don't just disrupt the marriage. They disrupt kids, the wider family & the circle of friends. They are always a detour to a dead end. Even if a person leaves their spouse & commits to the nu-thang, that just resets the cycle & makes it easier to repeat the pattern. When confronted w/ temptation or a difficult moral decision, people often don't consider their life beyond that decision. What does the next moment look like? The next day, the next 10 yrs? Temptation can be intoxicating, but the best thing to do before blowing up your life is to run. FLEE! Rui is sincere & sacrifices everything for love. Perhaps it was part love / part pride - he needed it to work or be more humiliated. But he is all-in. He really didn't think it through.

As the episodes continued, I respected the writer more & more. First of all, here's a light touch, while at the same time, the subject matter is treated seriously. The tone is rather remarkable. It covers a lot of bases: How the attraction can happen. How the wife always knows. How it changes the relationship forever. It also covers the gravity of marriage. What is love? It's partly the willingness to take this oath (marriage vows) & the determination to honor it until the end. Marriage is optional & one should think it over 80 different ways sideways before entering in. "You're using her as an escape from your life." Rui married An when he was trying to change himself, which is not the right reason. These things are tricky, & they're not always completely conscious. If you're hesitant, don't do it! Things will drive you crazy that you've never thought of, even if you can't see any wrong in the person ~at all~ on the day of your wedding. If things already grate at you, you don't have a chance of making it long-term.

Over the living room couch are empty frames, like the pretty frame they put around their empty marriage. It's metaphoric. "If I only focus on my goal I might neglect more important things along the way." The rut: The moment marriage becomes transactional, it's no longer a love relationship. Meanwhile, if wives get bogged down by neverending responsibilities & forget about se×, men /never/ will. Don't lose sight of the love relationship or the intimacy. Letting oneself go is not love. It's disrespect. What should be done to reverse course? Starting w/ good nutrition is never wrong, weirdly enough. My health journey has proven to me that our food supply is making us sick. Living on organic vegetables & meat while avoiding sugar grains for a few months will promote weight loss, better health, & a better mood. Once that baseline is established, branch out to more self-improvement from there.

I'm sick to death of people trashing housewives. Everything they do is work that must be done. Are there housewives who let themselves go & allow their worlds to become too small? Absolutely. It's an occupational hazard. It takes a tremendous amount of self-motivation & discipline to make a successful go of it. Working in a cubicle is often more demeaning & soul-sucking, though! Rui gets the housewife experience. "It feels more tiring than going to work. It looks simple but you don't have any sense of achievement when you're done. You go to market early in the day & it's already afternoon when you're done cooking. After all that trouble, you finish the meal in less than 20 minutes. It's the same w/ cleaning. After cleaning, you see that there is some hair & dust there." Women also tend to lose their sense of humor in a marriage; not b/c they are flawed, but b/c, just like water vapor turns into clouds & rain falls, it always falls on the woman to hold the family together. It's simply counterintuitive to let oneself go & expect a happy, successful life, however. The best people never stop working on themselves.

Enter Wei.

Elegance. The show encourages us to become more elegant. After her marriage falls apart, Wei puts An through charm classes, of a sort: A lady shouldn't yell in public, ladies should always be graceful, a lady should bend down & pick up her keys this way... (It's crazy ironic, since the way they met was fighting over a vase at a shop - She exhibited none of those traits. It was her spark & spirit that caught his attention. None of that means he's /wrong/ though). He makes her wear heels. "Finish a book. Finish a movie. Finish a class." He says he'll be testing her daily. An isn't easily convinced. Change is HARD. "The most important thing for a modern woman is the thirst for knowledge," Wei hits back. "People who aren't interested in the world will not be of interest to anyone else, either." Wei doesn't pay for An's new, expensive clothes nor serve it all on a platter for her. She has to /want/ it. She has to put in the effort & investment. She applies her own Band-Aids to the new blisters on the back of her heels. I'm a born rule breaker, so I've never bothered w/ a lot of this stuff. One thing I've noticed, though, is that breaking the rules is no fun once everybody has forgotten them. We have forgotten what CLASSY is. It's sad.

TFW is funny. An ends up on TV in a cooking competition. They have a clip of friends & family cheering her on as part of her intro. Rui Xuan & Kang De are hilarious. He even takes pot lids & mimics the wind-up monkey banging the symbols. It made me laugh out loud.

The soundtrack is well above average. Sometimes the beautiful music stops abruptly when the scene changes, which is jolting. They should have had smoother transitions. I started watching this show at the same time as Two Fathers-7.5, making a head-to-head comparison unavoidable. I enjoyed TFW less at first, but it ended up moving me more. The last half is quite profound & full of lines that are worthy of quoting. It looks like it's shallow & then the viewer becomes unexpectedly submerged in its depths.

QUOTES📢

Men are so dumb.

Actually, perfect women are quite boring.

People that are too smart usually aren't happy.

Only losers complain about fairness.

Love Is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices w/ the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars. ~Tagore~

The only way to surpass pain is to forgive the people that hurt you.

〰🖍 IMHO

📣8 📝8 🎭8 💓🦋🎨6 🎵/🔊8.7 🔚8 ▪ 🌞5.5 ⚡3 😅4 😭4 😱2 😯4 🤢1 🤔6.5 💤0

Shazams: Wounded by Freya Lim.

Age 13+ Marital infidelityLanguage: it's mostly clean but they do drop occasional coloRuiul verbiage including some F💣s

Re-📺? Not out of the question.

I loved this show! When taking Chinese class in high school, my professor told us to watch more shows and listen to music to become more immersed with the language. Initially, I wasn't sure if I was going to like the show- the main character was not someone I could relate to and it was quite different watching a show produced in a country that wasn't the US. Over the episodes, I ended up understanding that people evolve through different situations and the end of the series was pretty good. I'm glad they made a follow up video- which was also good!