Frost_edelweiss

What annoys me most at this point is the ones here who put in a .1 rating already from start. Who seem dead set to gun down the drama and form cliques to paint everything black. This is what was reproached to well known bots like ShenLi going under several registered names, at one time. Will we have to hunt for same sort here and warn new audiences against being negatively influenced by such ?

Personally, I never rate a drama before it's reached the end clap, even though I may be tempted to gush a 10 for some exceptional ones in my opinion (there's another one I'm watching eagerly that makes my fingers itch to break my rule, 😂. I am not commenting much on it, since it is... almost perfect. Will perhaps add some explanatory videos links from a dedicated fan.)

But. No, Ok, this one here will probably not get that high, but neither would I gun it down with a .1 rating.

57 raters already and 10 episodes to go yet. Perhaps 7.9 (8) will be the verdict. Not everyone among the 1255 international audience will bother leaving a rating. I'll just wait for the Douban one which is not out yet. Enjoying the music meanwhile and humming some songs from the past.

Dear Sanoya I suppose you were targeting me since you blocked me. So, let's be clear , this will be the open letter from me for others to read (blocking goes both ways, you likely won't be able to read this, maybe for the best if you can't take difference of opinion.)

"Baby" I already asked you to please abide by the rules of courteous exchanges as per MDL rules.... Everyone may not dislike or like the writing of the drama but still enjoy watching the shenanigans of the characters interactions. Agree to disagree with people without jumping to ad hominem attack and please stop attempting to shame whoever pipes up to dissent 😔

I don't disrespect your and your followers opinions btw, and don't pretend everything is perfect in this "business drama" with no romance in view for the tired hearts who wish such entertainment and have opinions on the screenwriting vs original novel?). Sometimes I felt you were rash, while still pretending to support "Lead actress" (why not name Seven Tan/Tan Songyun?) in her efforts here, through watching on while shaking very vocally your head. I wouldn't dream of branding you "a bot", for your numerous comments here.

Exchange of courteous but not unanimous comments is the rule here on MDL.

They contribute to making this page get more views, so .... all good ?
Hope you enjoy the music nonetheless. The songs reminded me of my 1990s-2000s.

My comment was for mochachen.
Sorry that you feel the comments section is difficult to read.
Hope you enjoy the drama nonetheless, and if you want to listen to the OST, I have put the links up in the Discussions section. Enjoy !

Btw, going to your page, I saw you complain of being hacked? I seem to remember one ShEN LI who was particularly virulent and totally unreasonable (but I thought that "user" or rather certified anti-fan bot, had been kicked out from MDL? ) We seem to have same Chinese actors/actresses favorites (quite a crowd for both of us. I too became almost cross-eyed from too much drama watching at one time, need glasses now 😂). I don't think the bot names you mention appear on Tan Songyun drama pages, fortunately.

Wishing you continued enjoyment with whatever you watch, and smooth sailing the seas of this drama, of course.
Only 10 episodes left now.

I'll attempt a short summary of who's who, the couples being largely irrelevant except to cause a stir around the notions of marriage, divorce, morality and can an unmarried woman have freedom of her choices.

By ep.20, it gets... bloodily melodramatic (repeat from first episodes HB scam) before Liu Zhu steps out, hopefully for good as n°3 (?) arch villain after Han Bin and Huang Yaodon, flanked by the awful bully madam Nan.

Blood related He family of FWZ are a greedy lot who don't fit the "deserving poor" ideal : father He Yongwang and sisters He Hua and He Xiaoqin. But they have bred a good soldier and an ambitious young lady who will also seek her fortune in Shenzhen Eldorado SEZ (Special Economic Zone, salaries 3x higher than on the rest of mainland - actually, there were a string of SEZs, Shenzhen is the most well known since it is now the home of Huawei company).

So, the good guys here are the jailed and returned "brother from the Peak"Li Xingke, soldier Zhou (RIP), the other soldier blood relative of FWZ Yang Hui (off to his own destiny) , and Gao Xiang the patient observer and probable suitor who has not come out with a proposal yet. Li Juan is a model of virtue while Hao Qianqian is the opposite but a good singer

We have a lot of new characters appearing in the international oriented company where WFZ just got promoted to a possibly difficult role as VP after being PA of President Yan Ziwei.

And, there is a big white cat called "Xiao Pengyou" (Little Friend).

One perspective from Douban conversations which mistakenly heated up around the sacred notion of marriage and the conventions of divorce (pay back bride price etc) to blame the promiscuous Qianqian and the "rapist" Liu Zhu:

"The screenwriter was a bit lazy here. He thought there would be a better reason for the sisters to separate, but it turned out that it was still a matter of marriage and children. But today I saw that the Liu family was worried that she was not pregnant with a son, so they did not get a marriage certificate from her [HQQ] Things suddenly became funny 😂The Liu family treated marriage as a deal, but instead gave Qianqian a way to get out. This was not a matter of separation or divorce, and everything was simpler. Fortunately, Qianqian's brain did not completely faint. Although she had stepped on the wrong footing and been with Liu Zhu, she was able to cut her losses in time. And she doesn't look like someone who would be trapped by a child. When she leaves that "boss" again, she can be with her sisters and plan her life well." (translation)

It gets... bloodily melodramatic before Liu Zhu steps out, hopefully for good as n°3 (?) arch villain after Han Bin and Huang Yaodon, flanked by the awful bully Nan.

If you can read the Hanzi, there's a character correlation chart up in the Photo section : https://kisskh.at/photos/g0pwg1_3 But it is not translated into English and seems to stop before Episode 19 when the main protagonist Fang Wanzhi sees another change in her destiny.

Thanks for having shared the newsclip in Photos section ! 😊

The commercial intermediary, or "agent", can indeed get rich... But it's true that the drama over simplifies business transactions even up till Ep.20. After all, it's just fiction and intended as light entertainment, not meant as a business tutorial. 😊

Agree. I think along your lines + remember she was rather wild and domineering in early childhood, still very much a naive child when mishap destroyed what she believed was her family. Away from them, it was all too easy for HB to play her in a way that finally also destroyed her faith in academic impartiality, hence her long reluctance to "get that damn paper" to finish her studies. She wanted to prove she was able to be a "self-made woman", which also allowed her to be able to interact with people at different levels of society including her less educated friends and Gao Xiang whom she at first probably suspected to be as scheming as HB 😇

Since this exchange is spoilerish for those who have not made their own opinion and not reached same episodes as we, I put my views under spoilers.

Ok so she was dumb when just entering college and dreaming of boys without restraining from dear dad and mom who belonged to Cultural revolution puritanical era when even a touch meant anathema... They were well educated in their way, getting up the ranks of the CPC as they did, but little girl had experienced a kind of freedom as the "princess of the Peak", being scolded for that, reluctantly realized they were not wrong, but still that sense of freedom had been lost.

As for the dear mom, she had never warned her daughter that she was going to die. She left a letter destroying what her daughter had most believed in, that she was truly their daughter.... Actually, that letter was extremely ill- timed, and the way the dad kept it from her at first was one reason she stopped short seeing him as a trustworthy dad. It is a pity that these elders did not handle their family matter better before the crisis which was compounded by the duplicitous "suitor" and that her god-brother Li Xingke had to suffer years in jail for attacking that turtle egg. She is as before happily single and free to "misbehave" as she sees fit. There is no legal reason why she should go back to the feudal torturing and imprisoning family. It is a twist on the tropes of the 2000s when women were more at risk of getting unwittingly divorced by their misbehaving spouses than the contrary. That was a big thing then. Women who sought divorce were still the minority but gold diggers were plenty already.

Now, we reached ep.20 in which FWZ has grown a bit wiser. There will still be dubious persons to handle, she almost lost her first high paying job in a cunning deal which her boss forgave her, because he still saw some value in her beyond getting a new running partner in the compound. The brother (Li Xingke, now Yu Dan) was back and saved the day for the girls while we learned that some backward bumpkin families still held feudal wedding feasts in lieu of proper marriage certificate. Hao Qianqian has grown too, got legal counsel, and is not at risk of stabbing any longer, since both hospital and two witnesses hang as a sword over Liu Zhu if that violent wife-beater misbehaves again.

Navigating the high seas of companies looking to overseas business is a new world for FWZ. Will the cold CEO Yan Ziwei become a friend or a foe? LJ always suspects hidden motives although the Prince and Cinderella trope would be probably too trite here. The settings do look a bit like vertical drama thriller series: fast-paced, glitzy, more superficial than deep. Awaiting ep. 21 to see what gives next 😂

I have added some more songs to the full OST playlist that I posted links to in Discussions section. If you like music, you can relax with the BGM too, or if you don't know the songs, but can read Hanzi (I did not find MVs with English translation for all), you can discover them in that Discussions item. There are at least a couple of songs that I heard snippets of along the way but had not taken note of, and re-watching to hunt them up takes time (+I am ill, have to take care of myself first ...), so if someone else wants to add the overlooked songs in reply, it would be fine.

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Oh btw you should remember to abide by MDL rules and stay courteous in your exchanges. Your point 2 "may" come out as haughty and discourteously dismissive attack of any dissenting views from your own...

Have it your way then. glad that despite your aversion you still are onboard and judging a naive girl for what she is, while still believing she is smart. For that, I agree: she is both naive, childish in the first part, and sometimes surprising smart, and even lovable, such as when she daringly deflects the drunk customer who might have caused trouble in the end of episode 7. with some human warmth that her elder "sisters" would not have tried, despite Qianqian showed with Gao Xiang end of ep.6 what could be done to avoid a public brawl with possible police interference. (Will that drunk customer reappear later ? he gave her a card and his promise to help in need, but this 8 years old timer in the city is probably not the best one to rely on).

The stepdad agreed that he was at fault first not explaining why he had such rejection of her first date in university. He brought the trouble on himself for not communicating well, but was not ruined, thanks to his daughter's tape recording.

Doing business with questionable characters known as philanderers was not very smart, but could she have foresight that Nan's boss and sugar daddy was going to abscond the way he did leaving everybody in the lurch? Her first successful deal with that Huang had given her too much confidence in herself: hubris. She certainly ought to have listened more to Gao Xiang and his warnings, but he himself admitted he had not been explicit enough at the time. Perhaps, if he had, she would have avoided the huge losses, a hard experience, but one similar to what many young entrepreneurs might go through with dishonest partners who run with the money.

Wang Jingson is a great actor, perfect in his role here, making audience react to the character he plays as if he was a real person, eliciting complex feelings from audience. The dad had been too rash in his reactions after his wife's death, causing in part the estrangement from his adopted daughter. The busy and incorruptible man had to try and understand his daughter's choices, hoping it would turn out well for her and the rising generation he'd meet at the canteen and at her new rental shelter, by episode 20.

Why are you so hung up on college ?? Did you really want a morally perfect and (extremely conventional and boring) character ? The story is about a growing experience with trials and of course errors. She is not nasty at all, but extremely opinionated still, until life will make her more cautious. She is in fact more loyal than one would expect to her (extremely nasty) biological family, trying to help and finally taking in her reluctant niece . She is more broad minded than LJ, about Hao Qianqian's behavior, setting friendship before all.

As for the huge loan consented, this is indeed unrealistic without backers. But the story is fictional and needs to move on.

Sorry you had to live through such a harrowing experience if it was yours? But perhaps we should refrain from bringing such wounds to judge this drama, and peremptory judging it to be "dumb" .

It is about the growing experience of a girl of the times . Of course she makes wild choices and errors. (Personally, I may have done worse, although since I also saved a few lives,I followed the path to do better than "build seven stories pagodas" in conventional and dutiful morality). FWZ is not a teacher, so has no responsibility for her friends choices who join her fully knowing the risks she spearheads. Through trials and errors come progress, and she does not give up even faced by prospects that would cower most.

She is a believable character because she is very human with obvious flaws (too rash, too opinionated until at least episode 20, why does Gao Xiang still have a weakness for her? ), and the character is a composite of real people models used by the novelist.
YFZ's experience reminds me of the song that was sung everywhere in 1991 when I did my first months long roaming across the provinces of China , here for you to lift your mood : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ8Hxm2W5Ts&list=RDKZ8Hxm2W5Ts&start_radio=1

I have added the songs and bgm recordings in the Discussions section, with direct links to them + to the famous Tianmi Mi mentioned, and to the Zhang Jie cover of the original Anson"Tiger" Hu's "My future is not a dream". Notice : two songs are sung by Seven/ Tan Songyun herself ! one together with Dong Qing and Xi Wang (who play Li Juan and Hao Qianqian in the drama)
I also added the links to an MV with lyrics of the lovely Cantonese duet song "Love In the wind and rain" Enjoy !

Some background info, although My Mountain and Sea (我的山与海), is not a documentary drama. It is a realistic drama that draws inspiration from real-life experiences during China’s Reform and Opening-up era, but is still an adaptation of a novel with fictional characters, including that of Fang Wanzhi. Nevertheless, the story reflects the journeys of many real women who left rural areas in Southwest China to build new lives in booming cities like Shenzhen. The drama portrays the struggles, resilience, and personal growth of such women, making it a powerful reflection of historical social change rather than a direct biographical account. Therefore, the drama does not center on a single real person, but it is rooted in authentic experiences of a generation.

The melodramatic start of the baby abandoned on a remote mountain peak in Guizhou because she was one mouth too many to feed reminds that females were not valued much in the countryside except as laborers or wives, besides which despite the one-child policy did not apply as strictly in the dirt-poor remote and not well regulated remote and difficult to access parts like mountains, there still was officially only a 2 kids tolerance in the countryside in the 1980s. Of course, the family might have been ethnically from one of the groups (in theory, all 55 ethnic groups apart from Han were exempted from the policy "one child policy in towns, two children if first one was a daughter in the countryside"), since Guizhou is home to many ethnic groups. Although the exemption was sometimes looked away from and local authorities sometimes applied the restrictive policy. This inconsistency reflects broader challenges in implementing national policies uniformly across diverse local contexts. This made in effect, for example, for some groups of Miao girls to live without a birth certificate and a hukou document, the lack of which prevented them from normal schooling and health care benefits.

Perhaps it was what happened to Qianqian in the drama, who said she did not get any schooling, although primary school was compulsory in China, as per the 1982 Constitution. Even if the was a little older than FWZ she should have benefited from the Nine-year compulsory education, which includes primary and junior secondary education, that was formally implemented in China after the promulgation of the Compulsory Education Law of the People's Republic of China in 1986. Although in remote areas of destitute countryside, they would have to rely on voluntary teachers (often sent as a voluntary service from teachers colleges, to alleviate the misery) to implement it, and some only completed primary, as Li Juan in the drama.

The story reflects the journeys of many real women who left rural areas in Southwest China to build new lives in booming cities like Shenzhen, which is the main city here, and a special one as the hub of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) These were designated areas with market-oriented policies designed to attract foreign investment, boost exports, and test economic reforms. Established in the early 1980s under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the first four SEZs—Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen—were created along China’s southeastern coast to serve as experimental hubs for capitalism within a socialist framework. Shenzhen in particular, close to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, evolved from a fishing village into emerging as a global tech and financial hub, home to companies like Huawei and Tencent. The drama portrays the struggles, resilience, and personal growth of the driven individuals who wanted to seek opportunity in the booming town still being built in the beginning of the story.

The end 1990s ((depicted by some observers in the booming 1990s as "the Wild East") ) were still a harsh period to get jobs in and "strike it rich" like FWZ wanted. But they were also still the period of those sentimental songs we heard sung by Qianqian, such as Deng Lijun's "Sweet as honey smile/ Tianmi Mi" harking back to 1979, although Anson Hu's "My future is not a dream" was first released in 2004. So yes, the young at the time viewed the future as something to conquer. Diplomas helped of course, but some people achieved their goals without them.

Such as Zhou Qunfei, known as the "touchscreen queen," who is a Chinese billionaire who built her empire from rags to riches. Born in 1970 in rural Hunan Province, she lost her mother at age five and had to support her family after her father became partially blind. At 16, she dropped out of school and moved to Shenzhen, where she worked in a watch lens factory for just $1 per day, enduring grueling 16-hour shifts. Other inspirational stories of people who used drive and own genius before academic training to make their mark in the cut-throat Chinese business environment : https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/china-personalities/article/3284838/china-rags-riches-narratives-spotlight-first-woman-billionaire-and-peasant-turned-tycoon (news from Nov.2024)

Please remind me when a rapist died in this show? Perhaps I was inattentive, can't remember a rapist here....

aah Gao Xiang with his students playing thugs like the saying "kill the chicken to scare the monkey"! 🤣 🤣 🤣 I am amazed at his persistence to help FWZ despite she repeatedly slights and even stands him up cold one festival night when he'd set time to join her first at the "sashimi dumpling" restaurant and next at her request to enjoy the view from a height. He is so good to look out for her and warn her about problems later, which she does not heed, her ego being so towering.... Well, by episode 20, she starts to have "learned some lessons" but one redeeming trait is that she is indomitable and resilient even faced with the prospect of going to jail in her "trial year" (zodiac year, which occurs every 12 years after birth, and is traditionally viewed with joy and fear by natives of that zodiac year, who are advised to at least wear "something red" or all-red throughout the festival, as a superstitious charm against calamities.)

Is that so? Does he play the Zhou village elder or just as background extra?

Sweet !