Frost_edelweiss

Well, I tried to satisfy your request, but some bug seems to have deleted the whole addition with links to more. So maybe another time I'll attempt a simple compilation...
抱歉(bàoqiàn) !
Ah no. Don't know what happened, but it looks like you can still find it through this direct link to MDL discussion : https://kisskh.at/discussions/where-dreams-begin/105281-history-bacground-for-where-dreams-begin-the-youth-memories

Someone mentioned about the nostalgia stirred by familiar songs.
So there's the one in Ep.3 20:10 played on the violin by He HongLing. It's one of the most liked patriotic songs which you can listen to in full in a spectacular flashmob version recorded in Wuhan bullet train station for Chinese national day Oct 1, 2020.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok4j_0qCwpw
There are subtitles on screen to understand the lyrics which in a nutshell illustrate how Chinese people view their country.

The song was created for a movie about Korea war when Chinese soldiers were surrounded for several weeks running out of food and ammunition.
Here's the snippet from the movie where it was first heard : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXXwBgyCYf0 The title is simple : 我的祖国 Wo de zuguo (My motherland) and if you'd like to know the lyrics with a transliteration into pinyin, plus credits to composer etc, it's here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yEHLZ9a0Pk (together with pretty landscape views)

(Beware that this is not the other likewise patriotic song 我和我的祖国 Wo he wode zuguo (My motherland and I) which is also often sung including in flashmobs in China)

Actually, it's interesting to know that the Chinese official national anthem the "March of the Volunteers" is also from a musical movie of the 1930s!

Well since I am at it, here are links to listen to those other two "national anthems" :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3zw4BcGTz0 (我和我的祖国 w pinyin and translation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obZOFnp64vc (义勇军进行曲 w pinyin &translations)

At that period, there was not even really a list of specific books to hunt down as banned : everything including music records, decoration and clothes, could be construed as "feudal" evil and destroyed on the spot. Temples were leveled down or burned. Many precious artifacts of Chinese cultural heritage were destroyed or hastily hid and forgotten to rot or reappear in construction work excavations, or bootlegged and sold away.
Zhou Enlai tried to protect some buildings from these excesses and also managed to protect some courageous librarians and museum keepers who sealed away books and artifacts so they would not fall into the hands of the Red Guards. He was like a go player who skillfully played his hand staying near the "center" throughout the most troubled times, while he apparently supported the policies, took care of government as he could, and earned the respect of Mao and immunity from the Jiang Qing led Red Guards who were targeting Zhou Enlai too, along with Lin Biao and Deng Xiaoping (Zhou Enlai's friend and comrade from their time of work & studies in France).
The truly learned and well-traveled, well-connected intellectual politician sometimes nicknamed the Red Prince, also went out of his way to extend the umbrella of his power to protect quite a few important people, and relics. That's also why his death caused a genuine stir of mourning from many, fearing that the Gang of Four with Jiang Qing might rampage unfettered and bring even worse times than the dreaded peak of the Cultural Revolution.
So that's why the caretakers ex librarians let the young intruders off, "with a warning", after having ascertained that this was not a Red Guard preparing to burn down the dusty store room. That's also why the young woman could find books about the job of nurses, and the biography of Florence Nightingale...

It is indeed the title on the WeTV platform and it is listed as alternate title by MDL.
The nice title Where Dreams Begin is actually not the exact translation of the original title which was more something like "The sea in the Dreams".
Dramawiki has it like this :
Title: 梦中的那片海 / Meng Zhong De Na Pian Hai
English title: The Youth Memories
Also known as: Where Dreams Begin
Dramawiki also has a more complete cast list.

My contribution to these History notes as background info for the curious:
Some useful timeline to remember : The story of Xiao Chun Sheng is set to begin in December 1975, one month before the death of PRC Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, whose mourning sparked the first unrest among the youth, who wanted to shake off the yoke of the Gang of Four’s nefarious political activism (led by Jiang Qing, infamous wife of Mao who acted increasingly as his mouth piece during the Cultural Revolution, using the brainwashed Red Guards as their henchmen. They tried to keep power after the death of Mao in September 1976 but were arrested, convicted and Jiang Qing spent the rest of her life in prison).

Also, it is worth to know that the Tangshan earthquake in July of that year 1976 did shake Beijing too ; it is shown in the movie Sunflower (one of my favorite bc it also deals with the rise of contemporary art in China, around a painter modeled loosely on Zhang Xiaogang).

We briefly see a mention of May 7th Cadre School in Ep2. This was one of the maoist "social experiments" between 1968 and 1978 to "redress the disconnect between the bureaucracy and the common people" by sending educated people to be "reeducated" in the rural "communes" when schools and universities had been closed. A directive issued by Mao on October 4, 1968, described cadre training like this : “Sending the masses of cadres to do manual work gives them an excellent opportunity to study once again; this should be done by all cadres except those who are too old, too weak, ill or disabled."

These were the heydays of the fantasy production figures when the communes vied to look good on paper while many or most were starving because everything had to be decided after political meetings where the old village cadres or the young Red Guards were more concerned by fighting "feudalism" and age-old ways of doing things than really do agriculture and efficient manual work.

It was also the period when TCM was most promoted and used by "barefeet doctors" in lieu of modern health care ; it worked, sort of, surprisingly well sometimes, for not too severe illnesses and injuries, but of course, many did not survive, especially if they fell foul of leaders and ventured to object to directives.
Deng Pufang, son of Deng Xiaoping, was thus targeted and thrown from a window at Beida university where he had been student until 1968. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair ; with the change in the Four Modernizations and the 10 year Plan and goals to the 2000s from 1978, following the ousting of the Gang of Four, and the economic U-turn initiated by Deng Xiaoping, Deng Pufang became the chairman of the Disabled Peoples Federation.

In those years "Each and every citizen of the People's Republic of China was assigned to a unit that would provide for his/her work, social, and cultural needs." The word danwei 单位 , is still in use as "work unit", although it is not often like before a workplace and housing spatial unit.

The communes and "producer cooperatives" survived after the end of the Cultural revolution, although often barely recognizable behind the walls of the mushrooming cities and suburbs in the 1980s. They were formally replaced by "townships" (all level xiang 乡 or urban zhen 镇) in 1983. In the 2000s, the "cooperative units" with their "production brigades" were mostly forgotten as a thing of the past. The old "villages" (xiāngcūn 乡村, or 农村 nóngcūn) may have later evolved and mushroomed into for example hi tech urban districts like Zhongguancun 中关村 in Beijing, a technology hub famous for computer and tech companies office buildings and sales centers.

You're right !! That does look like a TV newscast of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressing the US Congress on December 21, 2022!! And on the other screens there are what looks like the blue and yellow Ukraine flag, and maps of the Crimean peninsula in red with an explosion animation. For the life of me I can't fathom why this would appear in this fluff. Why would the company in the drama concern itself with these unrelated news and the company president's "uncle-brother" leave such news on when his "nephew" arrived? It is so weird.
I can't see how production has a stake in the conflict. Just random showing that China does show the conflicts in the world on prime time to inform the Chinese about the state of the world ?
Chinese students were living and studying in the Ukraine : for instance Zhou Shen who went there for dentistry but stayed on to study voice and opera before morphing into the world famous Chinese singer he has become.
But these ties have zero connection to the story in the drama.
The only takeaway is that this sequence in Episode 11 must have been filmed Dec 21-22 2022...

Starting on ep 1 - This is a good retro drama!
"How Pavel met Tonia" is a reference to a novel that everybody knew by heart then, which also sat on Song Qingling's shelf in the mansion she was housed in Shichahai on the banks of the BJ lake, at the time (it also sat on Doris Lessing's shelf back when she lived in Rhodesia. The book was known in many countries)
-- Pavel and Tonia are the couple in " How the Steel Was Tempered or The Making of a Hero", a socialist realist novel written by Nikolai Ostrovsky.
With 36.4 million copies sold, it is one of the best-selling books of all time and the best-selling book in the Russian language. That novel was adapted to movies that were screened extensively in many countries and the book of course was not banned during the Cultural Revolution.

Did I now?
But some time ago I did suggest putting up somewhere on MDL a glossary of these drama insiders' "codes", perhaps in the form of a game to challenge those who like to look cool with trending new ones or half forgotten old ones, and inform the newbies in a funny way. Would you like such a game?
Something in the way of : choose the right code and find the right title (i.e. OOL / TOOL ?) perhaps with link to drama description when choosing the adequate box and getting a score out of 100 items. It could even be linked to other trivia such as Webdrama vs TV drama, popularity rankings etc. Just some ideas. I am a lazy person, too busy watching half a dozen dramas and doing other stuff on the side, so I will likely not work on this project immediately. If others want to try doing it, I am not copyrighting my ideas... as long as the results stay free to play.

Watching on two screens Insomnia ep9 & HuaRong ep1 : my head is going to explode in schizophrenia !! 😂 or... which of the two is going to win in the competition?
Wishing you fun drama watching too.

Ah yes, the long awaited one. Tks! I'll add it to my decoding list 😂

So you mean a slander campaign from a competing company? Bc I can't see how it would benefit iQiyi if it was their own product and they 'd try to suppress it. -- Looks like there are very many wars going on in c-ent? Motivation for this one?

I feel like you, juggling fluff of Insomnia and cybercrime Reba + TCM generation inheritor and Janice Wu doing her usual stuff with Vin Zhang. Sped through a Maid's costume drama with a bizarre end (amputated?) and various other items. Curiosity CAN kill the cat. I know I should take better care of my Qi and eyes and let go of drama addiction. Just... not yet, lol

Ok, heading there to check out this drama, then 😂 !

Yes, I agree about SOTM. Had trouble keep attention for it till the end. Despite Vin Zhang's lovely deep voice in the theme song. 😂 l

please disclose the code : what is SOKP ?

Interesting. So that's why I did not notice this title despite having subscribed to iQiyi VIP? And it must have been lost in the avalanche of titles that landed on the recoms (this one was not included perhaps). So only JJY fans would take notice, and I am not in that category - have not watched enough of her work yet to make my opinion : only a couple dramas that were not awful to me, but not eliciting enough admiration either.
How and why would marketing accounts "make this drama dirty" ?
I am puzzled : marketing is usually there to do the contrary : the purpose of marketing is to help a product get noticed and sampled, if possible helping the sale. Can you elaborate for my information?

correction : Here We MEET Again.
Anyway there are no new episodes until Monday.
BFTB is slightly boring for me, I am still preferring TTEOTM.
My rave of the year still goes to The Forbidden Flower (and L&P).
and I still enjoy Houlang though I will not rate it n°1
I had clicked on an "old" drama with Ju Jingyi (the slightly silly In a Class of Her Own) for "random fluff", mostly because of the handsome male actors, including Wang Ruicheng lol, and it was funny to stumble upon an acupressure class there just as I was watching all the acupuncture and TCM stuff in Houlang. Now I clicked here for info about this Hua ROng one because of the recently posted song "Longevity by mistake" posted by Peachy with lyrics, pinyin and translation. Ju Jingyi again : must be fate, although she was not included in the list of actresses that I keep track about.
Perhaps I'll give it a try 😅

You are right : it used to be that Chinese people had no or almost no retirement funds or life insurance and elder SON with adequate prospects was burdened with these monetary and housing responsibilities and finding and paying personnel for them in their old age, as a form of compulsory filial duty "piety". It's less heavy nowadays with general health and living standards having risen, and daughters also shouldering a part if needed after the upheaval in family patterns caused by the over-long one-child policy.
But the new wave of youth raised as Gen Y (also called Millenials, born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) have a new mindset that can be quite egoistical and uncaring about their elders, in addition to wanting their own way without interference from the old outdated systems : be free to choose whoever they like as spouses or companions, have children or not (because "children are noisy, dirty, and costly" lol, worse than pets!!!)
So there is a definite clash of civilization between the old and the younger who resent being burdened with family problems just because they were raised, well or not, by these old "turtles". The young do not necessarily heed or admire or love as a matter-of-fact these old people whose mistakes can be glaring. Sometimes the old ones were even abandoned in their villages or towns, away from descendants who did not care about them. The problem became acute enough that a law was passed in the mid 2000s to compel children to visit their old parents at least once a year! Whether this helped with the care for old people or increased the problem of seasonal migration at Chinese festival periods, is another matter.
Retirement homes are still few, most elderly and handicapped people still rely on the family network, elder son being at the forefront, liking it or not.
It can be a cause of divorce in mixed marriages, if the foreign spouse does not accept the transfer of part of family revenue abroad, to take care of the Chinese spouse's old parents and, sometimes, help with siblings' or nephews', nieces' studies, and even lend the starting funds for small businesses. Or it can lead to Chinese spouse getting totally cut off from family clan if they fail to perform dutifully. Even within China, and with new generations' new ways of living, the clash may happen.
In this drama, the father of LQ is clearly callous in his feeling entitled to bleed his son for money, but he represents that fringe of backwards bumpkins who lorded it over their countryside families because they were too stupid and stubborn to get successful in the village hierarchy (which also could be toxic with jealousy and gossip). To put better perspective on his character, it may be interesting to re-watch the story of Qiu Ju in the old Zhang Yimou movie ; plus the adaptation to present-day in the Story of Xing Fu drama that starred Zhao Liying and... Zhang Xi Qian also there as a stubborn old peasant dad, but less unmovable. Zhang Xi Qian was also the watermelon carrying homeless dad whose son was ashamed to acknowledge, in Reset.

It's been fixed less than an hour after premiere on Youhug, " so if you tried to listen without before, you can now check your listening comprehension ! " and I also appreciate that the subtitles are not horrible unchecked machine translation.

Cute, tropey fluff available on Youtube till ep.3 later today, till ep 7 elsewhere for chef's Kiss :-)

Oh, but it did not cure my insomnia! Next, I'll get me some Prosecution elite special police
after latest installments of Here we meet again that left Xiang Yuan (Janice Wu) watching Gao Lei leave the police station, and standing beside Xu Yanshi (Vin Zhang Binbin who turned out to be good at kisses), and Toutou brutally turning off the light on the expected kiss in Houlang.
This one is dessert to add sugar to the copious long meal of C-dramas on screens that's eating away at my nights. Perhaps I ought to turn it all off too, to do something more serious? I do, on and off : I am so reasonable ! Ooof, not. lol