Frost_edelweiss

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 !

One small quibble. The subtitles are perhaps imperfect. Such as the Xiao guy telling FWZ he can't drink tea because he has "neurasthenia" (wtf!) Ep.12 Anyway, that's what C-drama audiences have to put up with : guessing what was really said, if they can't switch off subtitles and understand the original. (There are worse translations in other dramas, and other platforms such as Mango TV, btw:, some that are even hair raising off. Here, it is "mostly acceptable".)

Those who drop a 1 before the show is over and with only bile and spite to explain it since they obviously did not watch it ought to be banned from MDL. It is possible to signal the obnoxious behavior to the platform.

+1 -- but as things proceed by episode 13, I am happy to be on board and will likely give it a very good rating here. BUT I never add ratings before I watched the WHOLE show.... So whatever ratings are here as of now hold scant validity for me.

You are too judgmental. Old Liu and everyone approved of Li Juan's choice to wed a soldier, he even gave her a wedding gift before the match was sealed.

Bah no. Old Liu was in that business for the money first. He only hoped the still unmarried son would at last find someone to his liking among his "hardworking employees" who anyway needed to be approved by his bosses first. He did not force any of the girls, provided a relatively safe housing for them, and scolded his son who did a wrong move once.
I have misgivings about young Liu's eventual choice since he first declared he was NOT interested in other girls than FWZ. But because like attracts like, the match was understandable since both the son and his eventual bride were money driven and wanted a kid, although I don't think the girl will stay stuck in the village forever...

+1 :)

Yes, agree.