#yi lei

[socratitti]

“Maybe we need only to strike a match

For my world to flicker in your sky,

Visible finally, and eye-to-eye.

Breachable, finally, the border between us.

What if we touched? What then?

Would something in us hum an old familiar song?”

-Yi Lei, “Between Strangers” from My Name Will Grow Wide Like A Tree (trans. Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi)

[davidlavieri]

They are like heaps of stars. My flat roof is a private galaxy That stretches on stubbornly forever. The universe created us by chance, Our birth, simple happenstance. Should life be guarded or gambled? Lodged in a vault or flung to the wind? God announces: Happy Birthday. Everyone raises a glass and giggles audibly. Death gets clearer in the distance. Closer by a year. Because all are afraid, none is afraid. A pity how fast youth sputters and burns, Its flame like the season’s last peony. A bright misery. You didn’t come to live with me.

Yi Lei, “A Single Woman’s Bedroom”

[dreamingsnowflake2013]

Give me Shadow Love RIGHT NOW! Cheng Lei's amnesiac king serving and protecting Song Yi's female general of the enemy country! I'm eating this up already.

Power couple/enemies-to-lovers/star-crossed lovers!!!

He hugs her to protect her back from getting stabbed with his own hands! This is a show by my heart.

Song Yi finally not playing yet another quirky, annoyingly positive heroine, which she has been typecast as for years, and I'm so here for it.

The director is milking every drop of Cheng Lei's awesomeness and charisma. That's what I call visual feast.

Please, everyone, pay your taxes and don't have hidden children you've abandoned somewhere in the US.

[lyxurious]

Follow Your Heart - ep. 9 (incorrect quotes)

[crouching-fandom]

Follow Your Heart | Episode 40

In these three bridal sedan chairs are three brides. You three grooms need to find your own bride by watching from afar, without approaching or touching.

[casualavocados]

so i've been going down several translation holes while giffing kiseki... finding different sources which have their own translations, etc. then trying to choose the words that fit the meaning of the scene im giffing best.

i just wanna talk about two lines in particular that have made me tilt my head and wonder about nuances, so here we go:

the first line/translation i want to mention is from ep9, and is to do with the meaning and intention of the characters/story. it's when chen yi is confronting ai di after he gets out of prison about the time ai di slept with him four years before. i found three different versions of what ai di cuts him off with:

these all contain insanely different meanings in english. i was losing my mind trying to figure out the subtleties of what ai di was saying here, so i reached out to a very helpful speaker of the language who has made kiseki translation posts before, @nikkotinamide , and they said this about it:

and i just got so excited about that...the nuance! the specifics! referring to it as "settling accounts" is likely where the first translation about "the past" comes from, but the other two are closer to the true meaning. however, if you simply went with the revenge line you would miss the complexities that are being suggested in ai di's character.

thinking of that night as a debt he owes to chen yi and has to pay back... as something to be settled - something he isn't even really asking about but more expects chen yi to follow through on... it makes this line so much more poignant to me because it describes his guilt and heartbreak about what happened between them - about what ai di chose to do - in a much more specific and cutting way. ai di expects anger, rejection, and retaliation from chen yi, and tries goading him into reacting in those ways bc he believes he has done something unforgivable (and also that chen yi doesn't (and will never) love him), so he would rather chen yi push him away than risk being that close again.

(un?)luckily for him chen yi is absolutely smitten with him and doesn't let him get away with it. ♥️

the second translation i want to focus on is in ep12 & has more to do with words that don't translate exactly into english, but i went on a similar bender trying to decipher it:

specifically the translation of the last two characters: "堂口 (táng kǒu)" - the word translated here as "office".

bc outside of youtube i found those characters also translated as "headquarters," "gang," and "hall", which are all, again, wildly different from each other. so my best guess was that it was actually a very specific word that highly depended on the context it was being used in, and that context was being translated generally so that non-speakers in the audience would understand. but i wanted to know what that specific word and context was!

so i reached out to a bestie who did some more digging and she found this:

which IMMEDIATELY made me batshit insane because of course that's what it means; of course it's that specific!!

"office" is too professional for where chen yi lives - it's a car garage; it's their front as an auto shop. but it's also not yiyun's "headquarters" because that's the building with the spa where chen dongyang and his husband operate out of: the true central point of the gang. but because of this other line in episode 3, we know chen yi (and ai di too through association; they're a pair, do not buy separately, etc.) leads a specific division of yiyun gang:

so when chen yi asks ai di in ep12 if he's going to the bar or to "堂口" he's asking if he's coming home to the auto shop: their specific division of the gang, (which we knew all along was what he was talking about in the first place).

(...and this is just me continuing with the meta side of it, not the translations, but i also think this connects to what xiao jie and ai di were both talking about when they brought up chen yi's succession as the leader of yiyun:

because chen yi is currently just a leader of one branch of the gang, and young (25 at the point where cdy retires), so to me it makes sense that older, senior members of the gang - possibly even leaders of other divisions - would want that spot. but chen yi is practically cdy's son so get wrecked guys the gang passes to him. 🥰

and that's also why cdy is urging ai di to just come back and be a member again. bc he raised both chen yi and ai di (they are a pair, do not buy seperately) and because chen yi is gonna need ai di to watch his back as he takes over full responsibility. ...im mad we didn't get to see more inter-gang dynamics. that could have been so COOL let me IN.)

anyway those are the two translation bits that have left the biggest impression on me while i've watched and giffed kiseki so far. i just think language is so fucking neat.

[weeguttersnipe]

Zhen Ping stopping Fei Liu from kidnapping the messenger pigeon in Nirvana in Fire (Chinese drama, 2015)

[feng-huli]

[simply-zhouye]

Zhou Ye with all her harem of male costars who's at Weibo Night 2023, feeding her CPs well with a selfie from each of them! With Cheng Lei, Dylan Wang, Wang Xinyue, Lin Yi and Tan Jianci ~

[romchat]

Director Deep Dive: The “Feminine Gaze” of Zeng Qingjie (A Familiar Stranger, Butterflied Lover)

What does it mean to film something through a “feminine gaze”? 

Unsurprisingly, this is a tough question to answer. In filmmaking, the feminine gaze is usually offered as an alternative to the “male gaze” or the ways movies and tv depict women as passive sex objects. Although filmmakers and scholars disagree over the definition and even value of the term, I like to think that, in its most basic form, the feminine gaze is visual storytelling that subverts or redefines how gender looks on screen.

I think one director whose visual storytelling often taps into that feminine gaze is Zeng Qingjie so I thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the stylistic choices that make his work unique.

I first came across Zeng’s work via the short dramas A Familiar Stranger and Butterflied Lover.

What struck me about these two fantasy romances is how different they feel despite having relatively standard plots for their genre. Both dramas are dreamy and refreshingly sensual and intimate. They touch on taboo topics like menstruation, abortion, and the dangers of pregnancy while also quietly challenging traditional gender roles. But most interesting to me is how they center their women protagonists not just in the plot but in the way the camera captures their image. These are women stories and it's evident down to the cinematography.

Style Element: Subjectivity

For instance, Zeng's visual storytelling often uses subjectivity.

Subjective cinematography is when we the viewers see what a character sees or feel what a character feels because of the camera’s position, movement, lenses, etc. It’s considered a critical feature of the feminine gaze because it forces us to recognize the thoughts and feelings of women characters who are often overlooked in traditional media.

Zeng adopts several cinematography techniques to put the audience in the mind of his women protagonists, and together these techniques encourage us to empathize with them, especially in their darkest moments.

One of my favorite examples of this is an early scene of Butterflied Lover.

In the drama, Tang Qianyue, the FL, has been infected by a poison that turns people into monsters known as "butterfly slaves". Qianyue knows she has been infected but to appear normal in front of her loved ones secretly suppresses her monster form. One day, however, she begins turning into a butterfly slave against her will.

As seen above, the scene of her transformation consists of many long shots that showcase the full horror of her monster form.

But the scene ends with a close-up of her face, the camera lingering on the anguish she feels at her body betraying her. Look at how the camera keeps her face in focus but her claws blur with the background, her blood-red eyes hidden in shadow. Zeng wants us to understand how she feels in this moment, not what danger she presents. She might be a monster but we feel pity for her rather than hate or disgust because of the humanizing subjectivity of the camera language.

(Side Note: I don't think it's an accident that most of the infected people shown in their butterfly slave form are women given that monsters in media often symbolize the unknown or uncontrollable elements of the feminine experience. It makes me wonder about the role of female monsters in Chinese myth and whether there are parallels to their patriarchal meaning in Ancient Greek mythology.)

I think another good example of this humanizing camera language is in the sexual assault scene of A Familiar Stranger.

Unlike many shows that depict sexual assault in an erotic way (i.e., filmed to make us sexually excited about a woman’s powerlessness and nakedness), Zeng uses a combination of close-ups, shallow depth of field, and canted angles to make us feel the violation. With the intimate but disorienting effect of these camera techniques, we feel Shi Qi's duress but also clearly see her attacker's abuse of power. We feel what she feels and therefore have a better understanding of what it's like being a woman trying to navigate the world. It’s an awful moment but one that doesn't objectify or visually disempower her as a character.

Style Element: Sexuality and Feminine Desire

(Side Note: Woot woot pregnancy sex)

Zeng also challenges the ways women's bodies are typically objectified on screen by how he portrays his characters' sexuality. In his dramas, women aren't sex objects but instead subjects who experience sexual desire and express their sensuality.

I love the intro of A Familiar Stranger for this very reason.

The show opens with the camera languidly panning across a line of bare legs and scantily clad bodies, their owners posed seductively. It’s a stereotypical example of the male gaze reducing women to their bodies.

But then Zeng's subverts this male gaze when he has one of the women look right into the camera in a subtle fourth wall break.

According to filmmaker-critic Joey Soloway, such moments are an example of "returning the gaze" and are a way for women characters to articulate how they feel about being seen as objects:

"When a female character breaks the fourth wall, they acknowledge the reality that they are being watched and are refusing to remain passive in that. Instead of being gazed upon, they remind us of their agency by directly addressing us and giving us insight into what they’re thinking and what emotions their actions are being motivated by." (Mariel Cipriaso)

Through this technique, we learn that the seductive performance is not for the benefit of some man on screen (or in the audience) but instead themselves. These women, who also happen to be sex workers, are posing for a portrait as a cheeky way to celebrate their own beauty and sensuality divorced from the services they provide male clients (with some sapphic undertones to boot!).

They are in control of the camera not the other way around. 

Ultimately, these are stories where women find pleasure, and the intimacy scenes reflect that.

Everything is softly lit and impressionistically shot as if the characters are lost in the haze of their mutual desire. The use of close-up and extreme close-up shots further play with our senses, giving us the tactile feeling of skin on skin, breath against breath. Unlike stories filmed through the male gaze, Zeng’s camera doesn’t reduce his women characters to body parts and mere receptacles of male desire—they’re active participants who desire and enjoy their partners just as much.

And what I find particularly interesting is that the scenes don’t just “center” these women’s POV but instead show how sex (and touch more broadly) is a vehicle for emotional intimacy and the impact of that intimacy on their male partners. (That hand flex below is giving Mr. Darcy.) Sex and physical intimacy between men and women is transformative not exploitative.

In these two dramas, women aren't objects of desire that men use for their own pleasure but instead subjects who are seen as such by the other characters* and, most importantly, Zeng Qingjie's camera.

(*Side Note: See @well-dressedwords' excellent analysis about the ML in A Familiar Stranger. His intuitive trust towards the FL is an example of seeing her as a subject. He doesn't recognize her for superficial reasons like beauty but her character, which he was able to glean when they first meet and she saves him--hence the title A Familiar Stranger.)

[akatsuki-shin]

when you know, you know

[soracities]

Yi Lei, from "Nature Aria" (trans. Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi) [transcript in ALT]

[lasenbyphoenix]

July is my birthday so this month we're getting our favourite men in my favourite colour - purple!

@xcziel @fan-man-huaisang new poll is up! And if anyone else wants to be tagged when these polls release just let me know!

[night-rider-lily]

Blood of Youth is so special～

TO THIS DAY LI HONGYI AS XIAO SE IS HAUNTING ME～

[ginsoakedgirl80]

Jiang Xinbai is like ex-wife, not in front of everyone

While Shang Bieli is into it

[lostinadrama]

𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 (2024)