The crew of the TV drama Born a Perfect Match had been shooting on location at Beishan for half a month now, and they figured it would take the better part of another half-month to wrap.
It shouldn’t have dragged on this long, but the male lead, Jian Yi, the one the backers were pushing so hard, had been in terrible shape lately, which had slowed the shoot down a little.
Jian Yi had been genuinely blowing up these past couple of years. His fans said it was because he was diligent, hardworking, and talented. His haters, meanwhile, quietly speculated that Jian Yi had latched onto some deep-pocketed sugar daddy’s leg and cut some kind of shady deal. After all, ever since Jian Yi debuted, nearly every drama he’d shot had paired him with a serious, capable actor, but Jian Yi’s own acting was so weak that not only could the veterans not carry him, they occasionally got dragged into the ditch along with him. A few older actors had genuinely racked up a couple of career low points just because they’d shared a set with him.
As the acknowledged poster boy for garbage films, any production with Jian Yi in it could basically be written off unwatched. But his looks packed a punch, his fanbase was huge, and his slightly dopey antics on a few variety shows had actually won him a lot of fans. He’d split people into two extreme camps: those who liked him liked him a lot, and those who hated him wished the authorities would ban him outright.
The director of Born a Perfect Match, Wei Gaofeng, was working with Jian Yi for the first time, but he’d been in the business long enough to know Jian Yi had a bit of pull, and to know his real backstory, that he was indeed the current darling of the big money.
As for anything deeper, like whether there’d been any casting-couch arrangements, Wei Gaofeng had no idea. All he knew was that he was paid to do a job, and once it was shot, he was done. He’d seen clips of Jian Yi’s earlier work, so he wasn’t holding out hope that this dimwit would deliver some earth-shattering performance. As long as Jian Yi could get his lines out clearly, Wei Gaofeng could call it a wrap, the fans would eat it up regardless.
But Wei Gaofeng had noticed Jian Yi acting strange lately. On set he often looked poorly rested and drowsy, and yesterday he’d even come over clutching the script to ask whether he’d gotten a scene’s emotional beat wrong the day before, and whether they should reshoot it.
Emotional beat?
Wei Gaofeng had never held Jian Yi to that kind of standard. In this drama Jian Yi played a graceful young gentleman, though so far he’d been playing it more like a graceful idiot. Wei Gaofeng had been turning a blind eye, so he’d never expected Jian Yi, forever brimming with confidence as he flailed blindly through his scenes, to actually start reflecting on himself.
Since Jian Yi came with the backers attached, Wei Gaofeng was naturally very polite to him, and since it was Jian Yi’s own suggestion, he did him the courtesy of reshooting the scene. A few days earlier, because Jian Yi had looked so exhausted, Wei Gaofeng had even rearranged the schedule to give him two days to rest properly. He just didn’t expect Jian Yi to look more worn out the more he rested. It was like the man had seen a ghost.
What Wei Gaofeng didn’t know was that Jian Yi really had seen a ghost.
Three days without shooting any of Jian Yi’s scenes had left Wei Gaofeng feeling refreshed. The thought of having to film Jian Yi again was sheer mental torture, and he couldn’t help cursing under his breath at the wicked capitalists who used money to lord it over his noble soul.
But to Wei Gaofeng’s great surprise, this scene, already shot once, where last time Jian Yi’s lines and the character’s emotions had both come off unwatchably bad, this time actually got a passable interpretation from him. In a few shots, Jian Yi even carried a hint of the clean, handsome bearing the male lead was supposed to have.
Wei Gaofeng couldn’t help rubbing his eyes, thinking he was seeing things. He couldn’t very well ask Jian Yi where he’d made such a breakthrough during his days off, could the man have been holed up in his hotel frantically practicing his craft? Wei Gaofeng looked at the dark circles under Jian Yi’s eyes and the undeniable fact of his improvement, and felt there was some small chance of it.
During a break while the female lead and the second male lead were filming, Jian Yi sat in the rest area, chin propped in his hand, yawning.
His little assistant, Xiao Hao, came trotting over from the side with a cup of iced americano and said obligingly, “Brother Jian, here.”
Watching Jian Yi take a sip and still look every bit as sleepy, Xiao Hao offered, “Brother Jian, how about I tell the director to let you head back to the hotel and rest first, and they can shoot something else in the meantime?”
Once this scene wrapped, Jian Yi was up next, so going over to ask the director to shoot something else now would be cutting it too close, the props and everything probably weren’t even ready. But Xiao Hao said it as a matter of course. He’d been Jian Yi’s personal assistant long enough that he’d seen Jian Yi call for an impromptu rest before. He knew some tabloid gossip accounts used it to paint Jian Yi as a diva, but there wasn’t much to be done about it, right now Jian Yi had people backing him.
To his surprise, Jian Yi said, “I’ve got all my lines memorized. Resting now would just hold things up.”
What Xiao Hao didn’t know was just how utterly done with life Jian Yi felt right now. These days he was running between two crews, day and night. Compared to the eerie, ghost-ridden, terrifying, and strict crew of the nighttime, the daytime crew now felt as friendly to him as a children’s playground.
Once the daytime shooting wrapped, the second male lead finished all his scenes. Wei Gaofeng got along well with him, so the two of them agreed to go grab a meal together as a send-off.
Wei Gaofeng had his arm slung around the second lead’s shoulder and had just named the restaurant when he saw Jian Yi walking over, yawning, and given the distance, he’d very likely overheard them talking about getting food. Wei Gaofeng felt obliged to invite Jian Yi along, only to see him take a boxed meal his assistant handed him from behind and say, “I’ll pass. I’m heading back to the hotel to rest in a bit.”
With that he climbed straight into his van. Before the door closed, Wei Gaofeng and the second lead could see Jian Yi already spooning food into his mouth, as though he really did mean to go straight back to the hotel to rest, squeezing out even his mealtime.
“People used to say these mountains were haunted and I didn’t believe them,” Wei Gaofeng murmured. “Now I’m wondering, is there something to it after all?”
The second lead didn’t think much of Jian Yi, and just then his face was full of bewilderment too.
Just past eight o’clock, Jian Yi pulled back the covers and lay down. Before long he felt a chilly draft blow in through the open window, raising goosebumps on the back of his neck.
Eyes shut, Jian Yi felt his body drift and float, hovering upward. When he opened his eyes again, he found that, sure enough, he’d left his body once more.
Lately, at just about this time every day, his soul would be drawn out and carried away from the hotel. After the better part of half a month of it, he was an old hand by now. At first Jian Yi had thought he was just having nightmares, but after a full week of it, with his daytime state clearly suffering, even a skeptic like him had no choice but to start thinking along supernatural lines.
Jian Yi had pulled some strings to get a few masters to help him. At first they all said he had indeed run into something unclean. Since he was on a shoot and couldn’t let the reporters staking him out catch him meeting with a master, that side had mailed him talismans and claimed to be negotiating on his behalf, but it all came to nothing.
A few days earlier he’d secretly gone to a temple to pray, and that night the ghosts hounding him had mocked him for it, saying that clutching at Buddha’s feet in a crisis [1]scrambling for help at the last minute jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931960_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931960_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); was completely useless.
Jian Yi had all but resigned himself to his fate, hoping only that satisfying those ghosts would put an end to it.
But those ghosts were so hard to deal with!
Jian Yi’s whole life had been smooth sailing, and with a huge crowd of fans adoring him, the flattery they piled on him across every platform each day could circle the earth several times over, when had he ever been cursed out to his face, dressed down until his head was drenched? He’d always thought pretty highly of himself. But those ghosts gave him no such deference. When they got fierce, they could nearly reduce Jian Yi to tears, and it made him start doubting himself deeply.
On unsteady feet, Jian Yi followed the little ghost who’d come to fetch him toward the ghost crew. He asked cautiously, “How’s the director’s mood today?”
The night before last, one of the cameramen’s cameras had reportedly been smashed by the local ghosts, giving Jian Yi plenty to imagine about a bloody brawl between the two ghost factions. The camera trouble had held up filming to some degree, and combined with the fact that Jian Yi’s acting was so painful to watch that ten horses couldn’t drag it around a corner, it would be a wonder if the director were in a good mood.
The little ghost was on familiar terms with him now, and bobbed his head as he walked ahead, back turned. “Heh, could it be good? Those local ghosts are so poor their grave mounds are about to collapse, how could they afford to pay for a camera? He’s saying he’ll take them to the authorities. Nothing but trouble ahead. You’d better just watch your own hide.”
Jian Yi groaned inwardly at that, and sure enough, once he reached the crew, the director cursed him the moment he laid eyes on him: “Two li, and it takes you ten minutes to walk it, were you born a turtle?!”
Jian Yi’s mind went numb, but he didn’t dare talk back, or the director really would start pummeling him. He walked over carefully and asked, “Director, which scene are we shooting today?”
“With acting like yours, what scene wouldn’t be a struggle? You’ve got no scenes today,” the director said, hands clasped behind his back. Just as Jian Yi breathed a sigh of relief, thinking he was spared the torment for the day, the director pointed at a few ghosts standing a short distance off. “I’ve brought in some teachers for you. Go and study hard. If you don’t learn well this stretch, don’t bother going back, just die here on Beishan!” He even made as if to flick Jian Yi on the forehead.
It was terrifying. Tears nearly welled up at the corners of Jian Yi’s eyes as he darted off without a backward glance in the direction the director had pointed, anything to get a little farther from the man made him happy.
These days he’d been drilled by the ghost director until he questioned his whole life, but if he had to name one upside, it was this: after being cursed out, Jian Yi felt he’d genuinely gained a slightly different understanding of acting.
The daytime crew of Born a Perfect Match had very simple characters for the male and female leads, the utterly clichéd bickering-lovers setup, no depth required. That little bit of new understanding was already enough to let Jian Yi make some progress there. But over at the nighttime ghost crew, the role he had to play was a little ghost who’d scraped and clawed his way through the lower depths and tasted the full range of ghostly warmth and coldness, a very three-dimensional, morally mixed, complicated figure. Jian Yi’s insight naturally fell short.
Jian Yi had been sizing up the ghost director’s temper, figuring the teachers he’d brought in were probably no less frightening. But to his surprise, the two teachers, one man, one woman, looked rather kindly. The male teacher wore a long robe and had a distinctly old-fashioned air, there was no telling what era he’d died in. The female teacher was like a perfectly ordinary old lady, with a smile resting naturally in her eyes and brows.
They had Jian Yi do a simple performance, and naturally he came off as very unprofessional. He’d taken some acting and diction classes back in the living world, but clearly they’d done no good, those teachers had never actually pinpointed his faults, never diagnosed the root of the problem.
These two teachers were different. Amid their earnest strictness there was kindness, and their few pointers were almost right on the mark [2]cutting straight to the heart of it jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931960_1_2').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931960_1_2', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });. They even demonstrated for Jian Yi in person, and for the first time in an acting class, Jian Yi felt a sudden sense of clarity.
There was just one thing. The male teacher in the long robe was fine—Jian Yi couldn’t place him. But the more he looked at the female teacher, the more familiar her face seemed, and seeing how kindly and gentle she looked, he asked cautiously, “Teacher, I feel like I’ve seen you before.”
The female teacher glanced at him and said with a smile, “It’s possible. I acted in some television shows in the past, decades ago, now. My name is Huang Yuemei.”
Oh, Huang Yuemei.
Jian Yi nodded in understanding at first, then suddenly his eyes went wide. Holy crap, Huang Yuemei!
Even though he wasn’t formally trained and had never known much about the TV world, he’d heard of this name that had shaped an entire era of film and television.
“I, my mom and dad both love you so much! Teacher Huang.” Jian Yi was so excited he stammered. His head spun with thoughts of how he could possibly deserve this, and, weighed down by a guilty conscience, he hurriedly promised, “I, I’ll definitely study hard and not let you down, senior!”
Huang Yuemei said with a smile, “If we’re talking seniors, Mr. Zhang is the true senior.”
She knew that, at Jian Yi’s age, there was no way he could know Mr. Zhang, so she took it upon herself to introduce him.
Listening to the string of titles and prefixes long enough to fill a whole train car, credentials worthy of being written into the history books, Jian Yi felt his already-detached soul detach all over again. Being dragged off by ghosts to act no longer seemed so fantastical, being able to receive pointers from these titans of the industry with his very soul, now that was fantastical.
Under the guidance of these master teachers, after just one night, by the time Jian Yi woke in his hotel the next day he already felt profoundly changed, resolved to study hard.
He had no scenes that morning, so he didn’t get up right away. On his phone he casually opened one of his own dramas, one he was nearly at the finale of, to look at his performance from back then and see what the flaws were.
It would have been fine if he hadn’t watched. But barely two minutes in, Jian Yi’s toes had already curled the entire Eight Scenes of the Shadow Mountains into the bedsheets [3]cringing so hard his toes scrunched up jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2931960_1_3').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2931960_1_3', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], });.
That bug-eyed, pouting person making that moronic face was him?! Why had he ever thought he’d actually acted pretty well?!
Clutching his chest, Jian Yi shut off the video in agony, feeling like he’d just lived through a horror story in the span of two minutes. He even started, just a little, to understand how his haters felt, this stuff really was unwatchable.
So much so that when Jian Yi picked up his phone again and saw the front-page trending topic his team had bought for him, and saw his fans’ fervent flattery and the cringeworthy hyped-up clips in the topic thread, he couldn’t stop his hands from posting a Weibo.
Jian Yi: #JianYiIsSeriouslyAmazing# This? And this is supposed to count as good acting?!
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