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Review: Sparrow (麻雀) (2016)
This drama had some good things going for it. I appreciated that the story was complex enough to give each of the characters unique relationships with each other due to their political and personal backgrounds. There was also some really great acting in this drama.
However, there were some flaws in this show that might bother some people. The production value wasn't the best. It was fine, but there were some anachronisms that bothered me and this drama also had that typical cdrama lighting that didn't really immerse me in the setting (I was constantly reminded that the drama was taking place on a set and not in a more realistic location). The script was also not perfect. While I did like some of the character writing, there were some parts of the plot that weren't the tightest.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this drama to people due to the lower production value and overall execution. But I think this would be a good drama for those who don’t normally watch Republican Era cdramas because it had decent character writing to accompany the heavy political themes that are often up front and centre in Republican Era dramas.
This is going to a messy no-edit write up, apologies in advance. And there will be spoilers.
Story
The story was focused around three political alliances. One was the puppet government backed by the Japanese, one was the Kuomintang, and the last was the Communist Party. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party wanted to retrieve a secret Japanese document, and the entire story revolved around that. Through a series of losses, the plan was ultimately passed on to the Communist Party.
As I mentioned, however, there were strong character stories overlaid onto the political one. Our main character, Chen Shen, was an undercover member of the Communist Party. His brother and sister-in-law died while carrying out their duties and that propelled his sense of patriotism. He had saved the life of Bi Zhongliang in war, and became somewhat of a sworn brother. Bi Zhongliang was an officer in the Japanese puppet regime.
Chen Shen had previously had a romantic relationship with Xu Bicheng, who was his student at the military academy. She was an undercover Kuomintang officer, posing with Tang Shanhai as a couple. She was also the niece of Li Moqun, a higher ranking officer than Bi Zhongliang in the government. Tang Shanhai was in love with Xu Bicheng, but she still had feelings for Chen Shen and vice versa. However, for much of the show, Xu Bicheng had kept her false relationship with Tang Shanhai a secret for the sake of their operation.
Li Xiaonan was an aspiring actress who was madly in love with Chen Shen, going so far as to helping him set up ruses for his undercover operations. She was aware that Chen Shen was in love with Xu Bicheng, but she was still fully devoted to Chen Shen. It was revealed that Li Xiaonan was also an undercover Communist officer and the younger sister of Chen Shen’s sister-in-law, implying that she likely had wanted to become close to Chen Shen for political reasons. Nonetheless, it put their relationship in a totally different context. More on that later.
Su Sanxing was another officer of the government who was very politically ambitious. He was ruthless about moving up the ladder. His weak spots were his sister and his romantic love for Li Xiaonan, who constantly rebuffed him.
Tang Shanhai was found out as a Kuomintang officer, and by extension, Xu Bicheng was assumed to be one as well. After Tang Shanhai’s arrest, Bicheng went into hiding. Tang Shanhai was eventually executed. Li Xiaonan was also found out to be a Communist officer, and subsequently executed.
In the end, Chen Shen was able to get pictures of the Japanese plan, which had been hidden in Bi Zhongliang’s house. After a confrontation, Bi Zhongliang was killed while trying to protect his wife who had walked in. Chen Shen snuck the plan out to his allies. He continued his undercover work. I was a little puzzled about the ending but my guess is that Bicheng as a Kuomintang officer was not moving her target from the puppet regime to the Communist Party.
Like I said, my main praise of the story was its ability to make every character unique in their background and political values, so that each person had a unique person with everyone else in the main cast. And there is a big enough main cast with members from every political party to keep the suspense fun.
In terms of the espionage, it carried out in a number of operations, with each operation acting like a mini arc. They were more personal in nature at first, particularly since at the beginning, several of the operations encountered problems due to Bicheng’s hasty behaviour. But towards the end, the operations were more about retrieving the Japanese document, or about uncovering identities. The last 20 episodes or so of the drama were very fun as the operations became more suspenseful. I appreciated that these operations also had some variation. Some involved having to wait for the opponent to act first, some took advantage of other personal happenings. There was good variety.
The romance was also alright. It wasn’t the most well-executed, but I appreciated the direction. I’m sorry, but Zhou Dongyu is the major weak link here. I think she was too young-looking compared to the rest of the cast to seem a believable love interest, but I think the bigger problem here was likely that she just wasn’t as good of an actor as the rest of the case. Her script also affected that. I’ll talk about this below but I think her character was most poorly written out of the main characters. So her being the target of affection for two of the major characters was unbelievable and relied heavily on the partners.
Chen Shen and Xu Bicheng had a prior romantic relationship and that romantic relationship remained after everything. The only reason it didn’t amount to much in the first half of the drama was because Xu Bicheng was supposedly married to Tang Shanhai and off limits. Chen Shen was not a man to go after a married woman. Nonetheless, he was still very friendly with her and helped her out a lot.
Tang Shanhai at one point had to seduce Liu Meina to get the key to the archive room. It was a bit dragged out but he had to convince her that he was not in love with Bicheng and would run away with her. Meina did suspect his love, but Shanhai convinced her that he was true to her, and it was painful to watch, particularly because we knew that Shanhai loved Bicheng and was just using Meina, when Meina would throw her entire life away for Shanhai. But it was through his relationship with Meina that Shanhai understood what it meant to love and be loved by someone. Even if he didn’t necessarily return it, he understood the sincerity of Meina’s feelings and he appreciated all that she did for him in the end, teaching him to love.
Tang Shanhai’s romance towards Xu Bicheng was one-sided. He was cold and he didn’t agree with her hasty behaviour, particularly when she went out of her own way to act on her personal feelings and put operations in danger. He was also a little possessive, and very wary of Chen Shen. But his professionalism (i.e. his devotion to being a spy) backfired against him, because Bicheng would use that reasoning to put distance between her and Shanhai. She didn’t like that Shanhai was always suspicious of Chen Shen. She thought he was a trustworthy person but obviously to Tang Shanhai as a spy, he had to be suspicious of everyone. Bicheng really started to appreciated Shanhai towards the end, when he walked into a dangerous situation and got arrested. She realized that he really was devoted to both the cause and to her, and that he would give up his life for both.
It had become widespread knowledge that Chen Shen and Bicheng had had feelings for each other before. This did not deter Xiaonan as Chen Shen’s lack of affection for her did not negate her feelings for him. Chen Shen and Bicheng’s relationship grew warmer after Chen Shen found out that they weren’t a real couple. They even had some cute moments where they walked home together holding hands.
But I think things really took a turn when Li Xiaonan was revealed as a Communist officer. I think Chen Shen had previously taken Xiaonan’s affections for granted because she was so exaggeratedly infatuated with him. But I think he realized that she had sacrificed so much to get close to him. And I think through finding out about her identity, he realized how much effort it took to really love someone. Did Chen Shen really deserve Xiaonan’s love? You don’t know what you had until you’ve lost it. I think that’s what Chen Shen felt. After Xiaonan’s identity reveal, their relationship became so genuine and I loved it. I think to some degree, Xiaonan realized that Chen Shen was on her side and helping her. I think because she managed to truly trick Chen Shen, that she understood his person and understood that he really was helping her because he wanted to. But anyway, after this reveal, Chen Shen said that he’d understood that Xiaonan had truly become his closest person. Not only because she was related to him through family, but also because he’d expressed his innermost thoughts and intentions to her. Even if he obscured them, he was most natural with her because he never considered her a player in the political game. Even though Xiaonan deceived him, Chen Shen realized that all she had done had come from the same place as his intentions. They truly were the closest, even if he only realized it after her death (he only found out she was his sister-in-law’s sister after visiting Pipi at the orphanage).
Xiaonan and Sanxing’s relationship didn’t really get closure but that was the point. Xiaonan continuously rejected Sanxing, though not in the same way that Chen Shen technically rejected her. Chen Shen said he rejected her in private, but in public he did technically propose to her and they did technically live together. However, Su Sanxing continued to pursue Xiaonan after she had become engaged. Though I think Xiaonan understood where he came from, she didn’t accept his advances and that angered him. But he didn’t have a chance to act on that anger as Xiaonan was found out as a Communist spy. He had wanted to torture her a bit, as revenge for making him into a fool. But after her cover was blown, Xiaonan had no ounce of sympathy for Sanxing, just goading him into shooting her quick and fast.
The ultimate showdown was always going to be between Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang. Bi Zhongliang did suspect Chen Shen, though overtly he knew he couldn’t. Chen Shen had saved his life, and his wife was extremely fond of him. Chen Shen told Bi Zhongliang that he would always be a traitor working for the Japanese regime and those were his true thoughts. Bi Zhongliang died without much closure. Both Zaixiang (Chen Shen’s sister-in-law) and Xiaonan had told him that he would die by Maque’s hand, and he did. He was dying for being a traitor but we didn’t really get deep thoughts from him on patriotism which kind of made his death a little flat. He did however die as a man who loved his wife and that’s not the worst.
Ok but some of the writing in this show was sloppy. I think there was a lot of sloppy writing that was just unchecked towards the beginning. For example, there was confusion over whether Bicheng had been a good or bad student at the military academy. Chen Shen had implied that she was a bad student, and Bicheng had once said that the only thing she was good at at the military academy was communications. But there had also been a line of dialogue that had praised her as a good student. I think it was just a mistake, but it was sloppy.
The biggest thing that drove me up the wall were the characters who approached politics with the black and white morality of a child. This specifically is about Xu Bicheng and Liu Lanzhi. There were many times in which Bicheng didn’t want anybody to get hurt, and she would become very upset at the thought of any collateral damage. She was very open with her emotions and it made her a terrible spy. She also seemed unwilling to understand why Shanhai would ever be suspicious of Chen Shen and that’s just dumb. Liu Lanzhi did have her moments where she questioned Bi Zhongliang’s suspicions towards the people in his own department, including Chen Shen. I get that she loved Chen Shen a lot, but at her station, she should really understand that politics has no mercy. These characters had really annoying preachy monologues at times and I hated them.
Some of the coincidences in the espionage were a little too much. For example, there was a time when an officer had to spy on Chen Shen and Xiaonan when they were living together as an engaged pair. Chen Shen asked Xiaonan to act out a dialogue to trick the officer, so Xiaonan said something loudly so that the officer could hear from outside their two-story building. That seemed a bit too easy. There were instances of characters overhearing things at just the right moment. There were several instances of people’s faces being blocked by walking pedestrians or poles on the street or beams in a building that were also very coincidental. There was also one part when Su Cuilan was looking for Xiaonan at her place of work and a staff member randomly knew Xiaonan’s address off the top of her head. That was poorly written dialogue.
I also felt that the omniscient narration might have been too heavy-handed. The story could have done just as well without the narrator telling us how the characters were feeling, because that should already come across well enough if the actors are good.
So overall, sloppy writing but decent overall concepts.
Production
While watching this show, I realized my issue with Republican Era cdramas. Many of them feel very much like dramas that are filmed on sets. The buildings and roads are always too clean, the lighting always feels a bit claustrophobic. I never feel like I’m in the big city of Shanghai, but a small set. So that’s one reason why this production fell flat.
The poor prop quality was another reason that I didn’t like this production. Blood was extremely red, the lighting was always super bright and clean. And in poorer quality production Republican Era cdramas, the props always feel a bit anachronistic, a bit too modern. I see those green lamps in literally every single Republican Era cdrama. The chairs feel a bit like modern imitations of what grand furniture would feel like. And some of the clothes feel too modern as well. The guys in suits were definitely wearing suits that were too modern. And some of the women were wearing outfits that were too modern and impractical as well. Su Cuilan in particular was poorly outfitted. She was portrayed as somewhat of a modest and not well-educated woman who mostly just took care of the household, but she was dressed quite fashionably in a qipao with a very high slit and high heels. She would NOT be wearing that in real life.
The version I was watching had a lot of audio issues, the sound often cutting out for long periods of time and that was very annoying. However, I also didn’t think the audio was very good. The dubbing was fine, it’s average cdrama quality. I don’t know how many of the actors dubbed themselves if any. But the music choice was questionable. There was a scene where there was a party and of the musicians, I remember there being a trumpetist, a saxophonist, a pianist, and a singer? That implied that jazz music should have been playing at the party and it very much was not! It was something more pastoral to a ¾ beat and that bothered me so much. The audio department couldn’t even both to find music that suited the band.
Overall, production value was not good if they wanted me to take it seriously.
Characters
Chen Shen
Chen Shen presented himself to the world as a useless playboy, someone who was just here to have a good time, not someone to be trusted with responsibility. Deep down inside, he was a man who had lost nearly everything due to war. His sister-in-law had made him promise to continue carrying out that work, and he took on that responsibility solemnly. He of course was originally a Communist due to patriotism and love of the country, but his family connections made him even more devoted to the cause.
The only indulgence that Chen Shen allowed himself was perhaps his love for Xu Bicheng. She was his only love. He wouldn’t touch a married woman, but everyone could tell his affections for her. But it was only after he found out that she wasn’t married that he became the loving man he always wanted to be. He was protective of Bicheng. Chen Shen never really thought too much of Shanhai, for lack of a better way to say it. He never saw himself as a rival with Shanhai, though the same could not be said for the reverse. Chen Shen didn’t see himself as a player in the game when Bicheng was already married, but Bicheng revealed the truth behind the marriage to Chen Shen because she loved him so much, and that confession affirmed that Chen Shen had always been the only man in her heart, in which case Shanhai was not his competitor.
Chen Shen couldn’t really do much to push Xiaonan away. He didn’t love her, and I think he thought of her as an annoyance. There was a time when he wanted to send her away and Bicheng tried to convinced Xiaonan that it was because Chen Shen liked her too much. But I think at the time, it was just because Chen Shen needed her out of the way. I think he appreciated her more when she was able to help him evade suspicion and carry out operations. It was only when her identity was revealed that I think Chen Shen realized he hadn’t treated Xiaonan in a way a person should treat another person. Chen Shen should have done more to reject a woman he didn’t like, but he had still accepted her because he knew that Liu Lanzhi liked her and he needed to keep an in with Bi Zhongliang. He also took for granted all of Xiaonan’s help. When her identity was revealed, Chen Shen realized Xiaonan had shaped her entire life around him to get an in for her own operation. And I think he realized that she had given up more than he ever had. And at that point, he was the only person who could ever understand her because he was the closest with her. I liked their relationship a lot after the reveal because I think it was the first time Chen Shen had been fooled and the first time he had to do some self-reflection on how he treated the people around him.
Chen Shen’s relationship with Bicheng after Xiaonan’s death was still close but not so affectionate. I think Chen Shen realized that he had to prioritize the operation always to prevent more people dying. With the help of Bicheng, Biantou, and his crew, Chen Shen completed the mission and escaped with his life, while also saving his nephew Pipi. And he continued his duties as Maque, despite all that had happened. Because his duty was all he had left.
I think Chen Shen was a decent main character. He kept his values and goals buried but they were unmoving. Never once did he waver on his goals. He was very firm in his beliefs. He was kind to people that he felt had good hearts, and he was very sure about people who betrayed the country.
Bi Zhongliang
Bi Zhongliang was interesting in that he was not really a big bad villain in archetype, and yet he was always going to be the final boss. Bi Zhongliang owed his life to Chen Shen and as a result, his family accepted him. However, as an officer, he was suspicious of everyone. He was even suspicious of Chen Shen at the beginning when things were not heated yet, and that was just naturally because of his occupation.
As I mentioned above, it was a bit of a pity that we never got Bi Zhongliang’s feelings on patriotism. Chen Shen and his allies saw Bi Zhongliang as a traitor to the country. But what about himself? Why did he pursue this line of business? I didn’t feel that he was as career-driven as Su Sanxing. I didn’t feel that Zhongliang was constantly trying to climb up. I really felt that he was just trying to do his job properly. So what did he think of the Japanese? That was never addressed, and I think it was a pity, because it would make his flashbacks at death hit that much harder. Chen Shen accused him of being a traitor to the country and we didn’t know what his defense was. We didn’t know what his tragic flaw was. Was it truly just career ambition? Then why did his death hit so differently from Su Sanxing’s?
The one characteristic of Bi Zhongliang we can be sure of is his love for his wife. I mean, she was the only other thing in his life other than his job. But he tried all he could to keep her in the dark about what he did. That being said, I think at one point, she tried to convince him to leave for another job and stop working for the Japanese and it just wasn’t something he was interested in, but he didn’t elaborate. But it was true that he cared for her truly. When Zhongliang realized his wife might be in danger of being sniped, he rushed to protect her. So even as a traitor to the country, he was at least a man who loved.
Tang Shanhai
Tang Shanhai was a Kuomintang officer working undercover in Bi Zhongliang’s department. He was cold and professional, but he did have a weak spot for Xu Bicheng. Right when he met Chen Shen, he realized there was something between them, and that activated his jealousy and insecurity. His feelings for Bicheng were the only thing that could ever foil his dedication to his job.
I honestly felt kind of bad for Shanhai at the beginning because Bicheng made so many bad decisions due to her overly sympathetic behaviour. She made hasty decisions, taking advantage of her connections and using Shanhai’s name to make them sound official, and both Shanhai and Chen Shen had to pull overtime to fix all of her issues. But Shanhai was in love with Bicheng, so what could he do?
There was a major plot in which Shanhai was supposed to seduce Liu Meina. It was painful to watch because he was clearly not in love with her and she was so blinded by her love for him. She missed all of the red flags and let herself be led around by the nose by him. But it was through Meina that Shanhai felt what love was. I think he realized that Meina was throwing away everything for him, and at the very least, he appreciated what she did for him. As Meina lay dying, she revealed that she sort of knew that Shanhai was deceiving her, but she wanted to indulge in him and that was why she went along with it. She had been shot in the shootout and was bleeding out, and her request to Shanhai was that he kill her to put her out of her misery, which Shanhai did.
Shanhai was eventually caught and I think he realized he was willing to give his life, both for the cause, but also if it would keep Bicheng out of harm’s way. Just as Meina gave her life for him, this could be his way of showing his love, and he was more than happy to do it because all of this proved his values. He was devoted to his cause, and he was devoted to Bicheng, and he was more than happy to die for them.
Only at the end of their relationship did Bicheng really appreciate all that he’d done, in the same way that only after Xiaonan’s reveal did Chen Shen realize what he’d taken for granted. Bicheng realized that Shanhai had always done everything in his power to protect Bicheng and fix her mistakes and she had taken it all for granted.
Xu Bicheng
Oh dear. This character. I was so annoyed with her for so much of the drama. I really disliked her for much of the drama. I only started to tolerate her after Shanhai died because then she had to live as a person responsible for her own actions.
Bicheng let heart guide her actions over her brain, and she constantly made trouble for others because of this. One of the earliest examples of this was when she was trying to save her classmate from being executed, and used Shanhai’s name to command Tao Dachun to carry out the operation. She had no business doing that, especially without consulting with Shanhai, and both Shanhai and Chen Shen had to help her fix it. Bicheng was also incredibly bullish when it came to Chen Shen. Of course, she was still in love with him and it would be great if they were on the same side. But she was not willing to understand why Shanhai would be skeptical of him. MISS XU!! YOU ARE A SPY!!!!!! Several characters said that Bicheng was not fit as a spy. She should not have been put on this mission, but I suppose she was assigned because she was the niece of Li Moqun and no one else can pretend to be that.
Bicheng in generally just wasn’t very good at masking, not good at being subtle, basically not a good spy. She was not good at being clever to get her own way and it made it really gruelling to watch. Even Xiaonan had her own way of getting things her own way and this scheming is what makes a good espionage show.
As mentioned, Bicheng remained true to Chen Shen throughout, though she later understood Shanhai’s devotion to her, and she was struck by his sacrifice for her. Afterward, she tried to exact revenge and she carried it out extremely clumsily, just straight up trying to bomb him. Very clumsy and again, guided by her heart and not her head.
As Chen Shen’s main love interest, I think the writers wanted to portray Bicheng as a very kind and elegant lady. There was a scene where Xiaonan was saying something in a bit of a poetic way and Chen Shen told her to stop trying to be like Bicheng. However, Bicheng came across as a person who had no sense of propriety which is very hard to watch in a show with scheming. She doesn’t acknowledge the rules that they are playing with, believing that her values should transcend all, and that’s just not fun to watch. The reason why scheming Cdramas are fun is because the characters have to go through all of the rules to trap one another. Bicheng meanwhile believes that the power of love should be enough for everyone, and she can’t understand or sympathize with why someone might not believe them. So Bicheng just came off as extremely immature.
Add to that the fact that I do think Zhou Dongyu was the weak link. She was very young-looking and I think she was in fact younger than most of the other cast members. I know Bicheng was Chen Shen’s student so there should be a bit of an age gap, but it was still hard to think of her as a couple with Chen Shen or Tang Shanhai. I also just didn’t think that Dongyu was very expressive. I was just overall very annoyed with her character all the time.
Weakest character of this show.
Su Sanxing
Su Sanxing was an officer of the Japanese puppet regime, and an ambitious man. He was cutthroat and ruthless, willing to use any means to uncover spies and to receive recognition. Su Sanxing had a sister, whose husband and child had been killed by the Japanese. So he kept his occupation a secret from his sister.
Su Sanxing’s only weak point was his love for Xiaonan. She had showed him a bit of tenderness and he fell head over heels for her. However, his downfall was that he couldn’t accept no for an answer. But while all the other rejected characters in this story were able to move on and love in their own way (Liu Meina, Tang Shanhai, Li Xiaonan), I think the difference was that they were still in some kind of relationship with the objects of their affection. Anyway, Su Sanxing continued to pursue Xiaonan even after she was engaged. His sister encouraged this, saying that he still had a shot as long as she wasn’t engaged. So he pursued her aggressively to the point that Xiaonan had to explicitly tell him that she would never like him.
That soon led to Xiaonan’s identity reveal. Xiaonan briefly tricked Sanxing into believing that she accepted his love, by getting him to access the safety deposit box. Xiaonan tried to frame Sanxing as being Maque but he was able to get out of the trap. And he came back with a vengeance.
Sanxing’s execution of Xiaonan was briefly interrupted by the arrival of his sister and her subsequent death, and he killed Xiaonan in a rage. Sanxing continued on a path of ruthlessness to uncover the true Maque, which he strongly believed to be Chen Shen. However, Bi Zhongliang did not believe him and had him killed. While Sanxing was technically right, he had also committed a good amount of crimes leading up to that.
Sanxing was consistently a villain in the drama. He was always looking for spies, so all of our main characters had reasons to be wary of him at all times. He was a little crafty too, which added to his danger. His only downfalls were his sister and Xiaonan, and both of them would be used to trick him.
I think Yin Zheng did a good job of acting Su Sanxing. When he was first introduced as a character, I realized that he was going to be someone to constantly worry about. I hated Su Sanxing, but I think that meant that Yin Zheng did a good job as a villain.
Li Xiaonan
HOMEGIRL CAME THROUGH!!!!! I was constantly cheering for Li Xiaonan during this entire show lol.
Li Xiaonan was an aspiring actress who was madly in love with Chen Shen despite his obvious disinterest in her. To her credit, she tried everything in her power to get him to marry her. She befriended all of the people close to Chen Shen. Chen Shen realized what she was doing, but he just wasn’t interested. He only officially rejected Li Xiaonan after Liu Lanzhi had them reside together. He told her that he only saw her as a friend, a xiongdi, but that on the outside, they could continue posing as a couple if that was what she wanted. And I think he did that because he needed to stay on Liu Lanzhi’s good side, so that he could stay on Bi Zhongliang’s good side.
Even though she was rejected, Xiaonan continued to show her love, willing to do anything for him. She was excited by the idea of fighting the Japanese with Chen Shen and she helped him in whatever way possible. Chen Shen came to rely on her a lot as a right hand, in a way that he even didn’t rely on Biantou.
Up until then, we had seen a few instances in which Xiaonan appeared to be smarter than she seemed. Near the beginning, when Chen Shen needed his briefcase to be hided, Xiaonan had peeked into the briefcase to see what was in it. When she was helping Chen Shen with his operation, we also saw her successfully fighting off some officers.
And then the reveal came. This was truly the only major reveal in the drama and it changed everything. It told us that she truly was the goddess of acting that she claimed to be. She had fooled literally everybody, in a way that Chen Shen had even failed to do. And she did that through sheer dedication. She really played into her role of being a woman who was so madly in love with Chen Shen, as a way to get an in to Bi Zhongliang’s department.
I talked about this above, but her dedication realized how much Chen Shen had taken her for granted. Even if her love, especially if her love was false, that just showed how much Li Xiaonan had put in to care for Chen Shen. She really wanted him to like her, she tried to take care of their house for him, she tried to knit a scarf for him, etc. And then she later helped him execute his missions, though she had her own motives for doing so.
Through all the time they spent together, I think Chen Shen realized that what he had said was true, that despite not loving Li Xiaonan, she had become the person who was closest to him, his 親人. She had been with him every step of the way. Because Chen Shen would let his guard down around her, she came to understand him fully well, and she shaped her entire personality to fit around him so that he never felt like he was out of control. And he couldn’t tell her this, but he realized that as a fellow comrade, she had given up so much, and he could respect that. I think he kind of felt sorry that he hadn’t treated her better. And that was why he was so nice to her as she was dying. He was the only person she had left that could see her, that could comfort her. He wanted to have a meal with her, helped her cut her hair. There was a comfort in being with her that I would argue he would never even feel with Bicheng.
And only after her death in the letter hidden in Pipi’s chest, did Xiaonan reveal to Chen Shen that Zaixiang was her sister, making them truly family. They had both lost much in the battle. Xiaonan had watched her sister being led away to die, and thus she threw herself into the cause. Just as Chen Shen did.
The reason why I liked Xiaonan from the start was that even though she was not a spy, she still showed that she was smart. And that’s what we like in spy dramas! We like smart characters! Like Bicheng, Xiaonan was also meant to be kind and sympathetic. That was why they made fast friends. However, Xiaonan was also a little more well-rounded as a character. Bicheng was black and white in her morality, whereas Xiaonan clearly had priorities and that made her interesting! Obviously she will love Chen Shen over everyone else, but she otherwise understands propriety. She understands why people are bound to do things by duty. And she exhibited all of these characteristics before her reveal as a spy. Even as a commoner, she was a very interesting character in a spy drama.
The reveal added a dimension to her personality. I was always holding out for her to have a bigger part in the espionage, and I was so pleasantly surprised that her role was not limited to being Chen Shen’s right-hand woman. She was a woman who had loved and lost, she was a woman who fought for her cause with her actions rather than clumsily making commands and having other people pick up after her. Li Xiaonan was my favourite character in this drama!
Biantou
Biantou was another character who really shone in this drama. He was Chen Shen’s main henchman at work. For the first part of the drama, he was kind of an information plot device. He relayed gossip to Chen Shen. He was also a social bridge between Chen Shen and other people including Li Xiaonan, whom Chen Shen was constantly trying to rebuff. Biantou would help Li Xiaonan when Chen Shen didn’t want to spend time with her lol.
Biantou started branching out a bit in the second half of the drama. He started to notice more important plot happenings on his own and he would relay that information back to Chen Shen. More importantly, Biantou had come to the realization that Chen Shen might have been a Communist Party member, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. He respected Chen Shen a lot as a person who had always been very kind to him. He went home to his fiancée who convinced him that it was noble to be a patriot, and so Biantou decided to help Chen Shen (who at the time needed him to pass a message to Bicheng to plant things at Su Sanxing’s house to make him look like Maque).
In the final episodes, Chen Shen was going to escape Shanghai, and Biantou had to part ways with him. Biantou was emotional about him. This was goodbye for them, and Biantou knew it. Chen Shen had given him money for his wedding, had bought a gift for his unborn child. But through their years of working together, Biantou knew that Chen Shen was kind despite acting cold sometimes. Biantou did all he could to help Chen Shen, and he bid farewell to him with a moving hug T_T BIANTOU!!!!
Liu Meina
Liu Meina was a secretary in the department. She was known as a someone who was able to come across news very easily, and she was also the only other person who had keys to the archive where the secret document was stored.
She had a crush on Tang Shanhai, and so he and Xu Bicheng concocted a plan for him to seduce her to get access to the archive. In collaboration with Chen Shen and Bicheng, Shanhai would spend time with Meina and try to get access to her purse in order to get a copy of the key. This failed a couple of times so Shanhai had to extend their courtship. Shanhai kept stringing her along, telling her that he wasn’t interested in Bicheng at all, and that they would run away together.
Honestly I felt really bad for Meina. She was a smart woman who was fooled by a man she was in love with. It became clear that she would throw everything away for Shanhai, but Shanhai was always a spy first. On their final night together, Shanhai had dinner with her and tried to get her key again, and Meina held a gun to him because she had heard inklings that she was being used. Even then, Shanhai lied to her, specifically about running away with her. So Meina stole the document for Shanhai and then they would run away together. Except they got caught, and Meina got shot. As she was dying, Meina said that she’d figured that Shanhai was tricking her, but she’d rather her life end in the arms of her loved one than by a random officer.
As I mentioned, I think it was through Meina that Shanhai learned that love can be selfless, that he can love Bicheng without having her. And despite being cold, I think Shanhai understood the gravity of what she had given to him. When she stole the document for him and then they went to meet Tao Dachun, Tao Dachun asked Shanhai why he hadn’t killed her yet. Shanhai asked him to take her away and just tell her that he’d dumped her, not willing to kill her. But in the end, things did not work out that way.
As a character, I thought Meina was interesting, but unfortunately she just became a plot device.
Liu Lanzhi
Lanzhi was Bi Zhongliang’s wife. She loved her husband and she also loved Chen Shen dearly and was trying to get him to marry. She was so pleased when she found out about his ‘girlfriend’ Li Xiaonan (she had proclaimed it herself). She had fully bought in to the Li Xiaonan propaganda which Chen Shen was a little exasperated about, but Chen Shen went along with it.
Lanzhi was probably the one truly ignorant character in the entire drama. As I mentioned, there were some conversations where she just exhibited no awareness of the world they lived in. She lived in a world where everybody had to be nice to each other. So that became a problem as Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang gained in on each other. Chen Shen had asked Lanzhi who she would defend if they got in a fight, and Lanzhi said that of course she would defend him. That turned out to be true, when Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang had a confrontation at the end of the drama. She tried to stop Bi Zhongliang from shooting Chen Shen dead.
Lanzhi was a kind person, she visited the orphanage often. She and Bi Zhongliang had had a daughter before, but she had died, so she was always kind of wistful about kids. Towards the end of the drama, Bi Zhongliang suggested that they adopt a kid from the orphanage and Lanzhi was so excited about that.
After Bi Zhongliang died, Lanzhi became a nun, looking after kids at the church. Chen Shen had visited once to give her medicine, but he left right away.
I think Lanzhi’s character served to round out Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang’s relationship as friends, to be that extra friction between them. While she was a little annoying at times, I think she mostly served that role well.
Liu Erbao
Erbao was Bi Zhongliang’s head henchman. He was always spying on Chen Shen on his behalf. He was also kind of a Su Sanxing-lite in the sense that most of our main cast were often wary of him because he was easy to snitch. He was actually helping Bi Zhongliang collect evidence about Su Sanxing, through one of Su Sanxing’s henchmen. It turned out in the end that Erbao was a man placed by Bi Zhongliang’s side by Li Moqun, as Li Moqun wanted to get rid of him.
Tao Dachun
Tao Dachun was a member of the Kuomintang and helped Tang Shanhai and Xu Bicheng through much of the drama, as a third man in the undercover operations. He basically did a lot of the work when Shanhai and Bicheng could not because they had to keep up their appearance.
Tao Dachun continued to help Bicheng after Shanhai’s death. But he also kind of started to branch out in terms of how he did things. He didn’t always agree with Bicheng’s ways, including letting Su Cuilan run to Su Sanxing during the execution of Xiaonan.
I think Tao Dachun was more like Shanhai in that he was actually a spy and that was why he didn’t agree with Bicheng’s ways of doing things sometimes. He survived to the end, continuing to work with Bicheng.
Li Moqun
Li Moqun was a higher up officer of the government. He was Bi Zhongliang’s superior, and he reported to a Japanese officer. His niece was Xu Bicheng, and that was how Bicheng and Shanhai got an in with the department. I think his role was mostly to put pressure on Bi Zhongliang though from the Chinese side and not the Japanese side.
In the end it was revealed that he had wanted to get rid of Bi Zhongliang. It was a storyline that was thrown in at the end and didn’t really affect anything. I guess it would have been more impactful if I felt he had a bigger part in Chen Shen’s operations, but he didn’t really in my opinion.
Su Cuilan
Su Cuilan was Su Sanxing’s sister. Her husband and child had been killed by the Japanese and Sanxing was her only family left. She was portrayed as a kind of…country gal you could say. She was not well-educated, wasn’t able to read, and she thought simply. I mentioned this before, but I thought that her overall styling was not appropriate for this kind of character. She was dressed in a very modern way, compared to the more practical clothing of a woman who spent her days with housework.
Su Cuilan really liked Li Xiaonan and she encouraged Su Sanxing to pursue her. Li Xiaonan protected Su Cuilan, took her around town, etc. Su Sanxing had once sullenly told Su Cuilan that Li Xiaonan was engaged, but Su Cuilan pushed him to pursue her, saying that he still had a chance if she wasn’t married, and that she was extremely sure that Li Xiaonan would definitely settle with him if he proved himself to be an upstanding man who could take care of her. I think Cuilan is definitely to blame for at least some of Sanxing’s aggressive behaviour.
Cuilan was very much against the Japanese as they killed her husband and child. When she heard from others that Sanxing was working for the Japanese, he lied to her and told her that he was actually an undercover agent.
The main cast tried to frame Sanxing as Maque at the end of the drama and part of the plan was for Bicheng to kidnap Cuilan to make it look like Sanxing was preparing to run away. Cuilan overheard Bicheng talking about Sanxing being an agent for the Japanese again. She ran to Sanxing, who was then about to execute Xiaonan. She got caught in the crossfire and was killed by Bi Zhongliang’s sniper.
Cuilan was a plot device character who was meant to give Sanxing a more personable side. That’s all.
Themes
As with every other Republican Era spy cdrama, patriotism was a big theme. Each of our Kuomintang and Communist Party characters were fighting back against the Japanese for the country.
As a result of their devotion to the cause, all of our spy characters had to give up their personal relationships. Chen Shen started with his sister-in-law martyring herself, leaving Pipi his only blood relative. Bicheng was working against her uncle and faked a relationship. Shanhai fake a marriage with Bicheng and also a relationship with Meina in different ways. Xiaonan like Chen Shen was also without a single relative. In war, no one has relations, they all only have their cause.
At the same time, people bond tremendously through their cause. Though Bicheng and Shanhai were never really in love with each other, Bicheng definitely appreciated what Shanhai did for her by the end. Not to mention Chen Shen and Li Xiaonan bonding after he realized what she’d given up, and wanting to be the person to do nice things for her. Even Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang had bonded through their war experiences together.
Overall
Decent show, not great. But good. Li Xiaonan was my favourite and I think I’ll be thinking about her for the next little while :3
However, there were some flaws in this show that might bother some people. The production value wasn't the best. It was fine, but there were some anachronisms that bothered me and this drama also had that typical cdrama lighting that didn't really immerse me in the setting (I was constantly reminded that the drama was taking place on a set and not in a more realistic location). The script was also not perfect. While I did like some of the character writing, there were some parts of the plot that weren't the tightest.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this drama to people due to the lower production value and overall execution. But I think this would be a good drama for those who don’t normally watch Republican Era cdramas because it had decent character writing to accompany the heavy political themes that are often up front and centre in Republican Era dramas.
This is going to a messy no-edit write up, apologies in advance. And there will be spoilers.
Story
The story was focused around three political alliances. One was the puppet government backed by the Japanese, one was the Kuomintang, and the last was the Communist Party. The Kuomintang and the Communist Party wanted to retrieve a secret Japanese document, and the entire story revolved around that. Through a series of losses, the plan was ultimately passed on to the Communist Party.
As I mentioned, however, there were strong character stories overlaid onto the political one. Our main character, Chen Shen, was an undercover member of the Communist Party. His brother and sister-in-law died while carrying out their duties and that propelled his sense of patriotism. He had saved the life of Bi Zhongliang in war, and became somewhat of a sworn brother. Bi Zhongliang was an officer in the Japanese puppet regime.
Chen Shen had previously had a romantic relationship with Xu Bicheng, who was his student at the military academy. She was an undercover Kuomintang officer, posing with Tang Shanhai as a couple. She was also the niece of Li Moqun, a higher ranking officer than Bi Zhongliang in the government. Tang Shanhai was in love with Xu Bicheng, but she still had feelings for Chen Shen and vice versa. However, for much of the show, Xu Bicheng had kept her false relationship with Tang Shanhai a secret for the sake of their operation.
Li Xiaonan was an aspiring actress who was madly in love with Chen Shen, going so far as to helping him set up ruses for his undercover operations. She was aware that Chen Shen was in love with Xu Bicheng, but she was still fully devoted to Chen Shen. It was revealed that Li Xiaonan was also an undercover Communist officer and the younger sister of Chen Shen’s sister-in-law, implying that she likely had wanted to become close to Chen Shen for political reasons. Nonetheless, it put their relationship in a totally different context. More on that later.
Su Sanxing was another officer of the government who was very politically ambitious. He was ruthless about moving up the ladder. His weak spots were his sister and his romantic love for Li Xiaonan, who constantly rebuffed him.
Tang Shanhai was found out as a Kuomintang officer, and by extension, Xu Bicheng was assumed to be one as well. After Tang Shanhai’s arrest, Bicheng went into hiding. Tang Shanhai was eventually executed. Li Xiaonan was also found out to be a Communist officer, and subsequently executed.
In the end, Chen Shen was able to get pictures of the Japanese plan, which had been hidden in Bi Zhongliang’s house. After a confrontation, Bi Zhongliang was killed while trying to protect his wife who had walked in. Chen Shen snuck the plan out to his allies. He continued his undercover work. I was a little puzzled about the ending but my guess is that Bicheng as a Kuomintang officer was not moving her target from the puppet regime to the Communist Party.
Like I said, my main praise of the story was its ability to make every character unique in their background and political values, so that each person had a unique person with everyone else in the main cast. And there is a big enough main cast with members from every political party to keep the suspense fun.
In terms of the espionage, it carried out in a number of operations, with each operation acting like a mini arc. They were more personal in nature at first, particularly since at the beginning, several of the operations encountered problems due to Bicheng’s hasty behaviour. But towards the end, the operations were more about retrieving the Japanese document, or about uncovering identities. The last 20 episodes or so of the drama were very fun as the operations became more suspenseful. I appreciated that these operations also had some variation. Some involved having to wait for the opponent to act first, some took advantage of other personal happenings. There was good variety.
The romance was also alright. It wasn’t the most well-executed, but I appreciated the direction. I’m sorry, but Zhou Dongyu is the major weak link here. I think she was too young-looking compared to the rest of the cast to seem a believable love interest, but I think the bigger problem here was likely that she just wasn’t as good of an actor as the rest of the case. Her script also affected that. I’ll talk about this below but I think her character was most poorly written out of the main characters. So her being the target of affection for two of the major characters was unbelievable and relied heavily on the partners.
Chen Shen and Xu Bicheng had a prior romantic relationship and that romantic relationship remained after everything. The only reason it didn’t amount to much in the first half of the drama was because Xu Bicheng was supposedly married to Tang Shanhai and off limits. Chen Shen was not a man to go after a married woman. Nonetheless, he was still very friendly with her and helped her out a lot.
Tang Shanhai at one point had to seduce Liu Meina to get the key to the archive room. It was a bit dragged out but he had to convince her that he was not in love with Bicheng and would run away with her. Meina did suspect his love, but Shanhai convinced her that he was true to her, and it was painful to watch, particularly because we knew that Shanhai loved Bicheng and was just using Meina, when Meina would throw her entire life away for Shanhai. But it was through his relationship with Meina that Shanhai understood what it meant to love and be loved by someone. Even if he didn’t necessarily return it, he understood the sincerity of Meina’s feelings and he appreciated all that she did for him in the end, teaching him to love.
Tang Shanhai’s romance towards Xu Bicheng was one-sided. He was cold and he didn’t agree with her hasty behaviour, particularly when she went out of her own way to act on her personal feelings and put operations in danger. He was also a little possessive, and very wary of Chen Shen. But his professionalism (i.e. his devotion to being a spy) backfired against him, because Bicheng would use that reasoning to put distance between her and Shanhai. She didn’t like that Shanhai was always suspicious of Chen Shen. She thought he was a trustworthy person but obviously to Tang Shanhai as a spy, he had to be suspicious of everyone. Bicheng really started to appreciated Shanhai towards the end, when he walked into a dangerous situation and got arrested. She realized that he really was devoted to both the cause and to her, and that he would give up his life for both.
It had become widespread knowledge that Chen Shen and Bicheng had had feelings for each other before. This did not deter Xiaonan as Chen Shen’s lack of affection for her did not negate her feelings for him. Chen Shen and Bicheng’s relationship grew warmer after Chen Shen found out that they weren’t a real couple. They even had some cute moments where they walked home together holding hands.
But I think things really took a turn when Li Xiaonan was revealed as a Communist officer. I think Chen Shen had previously taken Xiaonan’s affections for granted because she was so exaggeratedly infatuated with him. But I think he realized that she had sacrificed so much to get close to him. And I think through finding out about her identity, he realized how much effort it took to really love someone. Did Chen Shen really deserve Xiaonan’s love? You don’t know what you had until you’ve lost it. I think that’s what Chen Shen felt. After Xiaonan’s identity reveal, their relationship became so genuine and I loved it. I think to some degree, Xiaonan realized that Chen Shen was on her side and helping her. I think because she managed to truly trick Chen Shen, that she understood his person and understood that he really was helping her because he wanted to. But anyway, after this reveal, Chen Shen said that he’d understood that Xiaonan had truly become his closest person. Not only because she was related to him through family, but also because he’d expressed his innermost thoughts and intentions to her. Even if he obscured them, he was most natural with her because he never considered her a player in the political game. Even though Xiaonan deceived him, Chen Shen realized that all she had done had come from the same place as his intentions. They truly were the closest, even if he only realized it after her death (he only found out she was his sister-in-law’s sister after visiting Pipi at the orphanage).
Xiaonan and Sanxing’s relationship didn’t really get closure but that was the point. Xiaonan continuously rejected Sanxing, though not in the same way that Chen Shen technically rejected her. Chen Shen said he rejected her in private, but in public he did technically propose to her and they did technically live together. However, Su Sanxing continued to pursue Xiaonan after she had become engaged. Though I think Xiaonan understood where he came from, she didn’t accept his advances and that angered him. But he didn’t have a chance to act on that anger as Xiaonan was found out as a Communist spy. He had wanted to torture her a bit, as revenge for making him into a fool. But after her cover was blown, Xiaonan had no ounce of sympathy for Sanxing, just goading him into shooting her quick and fast.
The ultimate showdown was always going to be between Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang. Bi Zhongliang did suspect Chen Shen, though overtly he knew he couldn’t. Chen Shen had saved his life, and his wife was extremely fond of him. Chen Shen told Bi Zhongliang that he would always be a traitor working for the Japanese regime and those were his true thoughts. Bi Zhongliang died without much closure. Both Zaixiang (Chen Shen’s sister-in-law) and Xiaonan had told him that he would die by Maque’s hand, and he did. He was dying for being a traitor but we didn’t really get deep thoughts from him on patriotism which kind of made his death a little flat. He did however die as a man who loved his wife and that’s not the worst.
Ok but some of the writing in this show was sloppy. I think there was a lot of sloppy writing that was just unchecked towards the beginning. For example, there was confusion over whether Bicheng had been a good or bad student at the military academy. Chen Shen had implied that she was a bad student, and Bicheng had once said that the only thing she was good at at the military academy was communications. But there had also been a line of dialogue that had praised her as a good student. I think it was just a mistake, but it was sloppy.
The biggest thing that drove me up the wall were the characters who approached politics with the black and white morality of a child. This specifically is about Xu Bicheng and Liu Lanzhi. There were many times in which Bicheng didn’t want anybody to get hurt, and she would become very upset at the thought of any collateral damage. She was very open with her emotions and it made her a terrible spy. She also seemed unwilling to understand why Shanhai would ever be suspicious of Chen Shen and that’s just dumb. Liu Lanzhi did have her moments where she questioned Bi Zhongliang’s suspicions towards the people in his own department, including Chen Shen. I get that she loved Chen Shen a lot, but at her station, she should really understand that politics has no mercy. These characters had really annoying preachy monologues at times and I hated them.
Some of the coincidences in the espionage were a little too much. For example, there was a time when an officer had to spy on Chen Shen and Xiaonan when they were living together as an engaged pair. Chen Shen asked Xiaonan to act out a dialogue to trick the officer, so Xiaonan said something loudly so that the officer could hear from outside their two-story building. That seemed a bit too easy. There were instances of characters overhearing things at just the right moment. There were several instances of people’s faces being blocked by walking pedestrians or poles on the street or beams in a building that were also very coincidental. There was also one part when Su Cuilan was looking for Xiaonan at her place of work and a staff member randomly knew Xiaonan’s address off the top of her head. That was poorly written dialogue.
I also felt that the omniscient narration might have been too heavy-handed. The story could have done just as well without the narrator telling us how the characters were feeling, because that should already come across well enough if the actors are good.
So overall, sloppy writing but decent overall concepts.
Production
While watching this show, I realized my issue with Republican Era cdramas. Many of them feel very much like dramas that are filmed on sets. The buildings and roads are always too clean, the lighting always feels a bit claustrophobic. I never feel like I’m in the big city of Shanghai, but a small set. So that’s one reason why this production fell flat.
The poor prop quality was another reason that I didn’t like this production. Blood was extremely red, the lighting was always super bright and clean. And in poorer quality production Republican Era cdramas, the props always feel a bit anachronistic, a bit too modern. I see those green lamps in literally every single Republican Era cdrama. The chairs feel a bit like modern imitations of what grand furniture would feel like. And some of the clothes feel too modern as well. The guys in suits were definitely wearing suits that were too modern. And some of the women were wearing outfits that were too modern and impractical as well. Su Cuilan in particular was poorly outfitted. She was portrayed as somewhat of a modest and not well-educated woman who mostly just took care of the household, but she was dressed quite fashionably in a qipao with a very high slit and high heels. She would NOT be wearing that in real life.
The version I was watching had a lot of audio issues, the sound often cutting out for long periods of time and that was very annoying. However, I also didn’t think the audio was very good. The dubbing was fine, it’s average cdrama quality. I don’t know how many of the actors dubbed themselves if any. But the music choice was questionable. There was a scene where there was a party and of the musicians, I remember there being a trumpetist, a saxophonist, a pianist, and a singer? That implied that jazz music should have been playing at the party and it very much was not! It was something more pastoral to a ¾ beat and that bothered me so much. The audio department couldn’t even both to find music that suited the band.
Overall, production value was not good if they wanted me to take it seriously.
Characters
Chen Shen
Chen Shen presented himself to the world as a useless playboy, someone who was just here to have a good time, not someone to be trusted with responsibility. Deep down inside, he was a man who had lost nearly everything due to war. His sister-in-law had made him promise to continue carrying out that work, and he took on that responsibility solemnly. He of course was originally a Communist due to patriotism and love of the country, but his family connections made him even more devoted to the cause.
The only indulgence that Chen Shen allowed himself was perhaps his love for Xu Bicheng. She was his only love. He wouldn’t touch a married woman, but everyone could tell his affections for her. But it was only after he found out that she wasn’t married that he became the loving man he always wanted to be. He was protective of Bicheng. Chen Shen never really thought too much of Shanhai, for lack of a better way to say it. He never saw himself as a rival with Shanhai, though the same could not be said for the reverse. Chen Shen didn’t see himself as a player in the game when Bicheng was already married, but Bicheng revealed the truth behind the marriage to Chen Shen because she loved him so much, and that confession affirmed that Chen Shen had always been the only man in her heart, in which case Shanhai was not his competitor.
Chen Shen couldn’t really do much to push Xiaonan away. He didn’t love her, and I think he thought of her as an annoyance. There was a time when he wanted to send her away and Bicheng tried to convinced Xiaonan that it was because Chen Shen liked her too much. But I think at the time, it was just because Chen Shen needed her out of the way. I think he appreciated her more when she was able to help him evade suspicion and carry out operations. It was only when her identity was revealed that I think Chen Shen realized he hadn’t treated Xiaonan in a way a person should treat another person. Chen Shen should have done more to reject a woman he didn’t like, but he had still accepted her because he knew that Liu Lanzhi liked her and he needed to keep an in with Bi Zhongliang. He also took for granted all of Xiaonan’s help. When her identity was revealed, Chen Shen realized Xiaonan had shaped her entire life around him to get an in for her own operation. And I think he realized that she had given up more than he ever had. And at that point, he was the only person who could ever understand her because he was the closest with her. I liked their relationship a lot after the reveal because I think it was the first time Chen Shen had been fooled and the first time he had to do some self-reflection on how he treated the people around him.
Chen Shen’s relationship with Bicheng after Xiaonan’s death was still close but not so affectionate. I think Chen Shen realized that he had to prioritize the operation always to prevent more people dying. With the help of Bicheng, Biantou, and his crew, Chen Shen completed the mission and escaped with his life, while also saving his nephew Pipi. And he continued his duties as Maque, despite all that had happened. Because his duty was all he had left.
I think Chen Shen was a decent main character. He kept his values and goals buried but they were unmoving. Never once did he waver on his goals. He was very firm in his beliefs. He was kind to people that he felt had good hearts, and he was very sure about people who betrayed the country.
Bi Zhongliang
Bi Zhongliang was interesting in that he was not really a big bad villain in archetype, and yet he was always going to be the final boss. Bi Zhongliang owed his life to Chen Shen and as a result, his family accepted him. However, as an officer, he was suspicious of everyone. He was even suspicious of Chen Shen at the beginning when things were not heated yet, and that was just naturally because of his occupation.
As I mentioned above, it was a bit of a pity that we never got Bi Zhongliang’s feelings on patriotism. Chen Shen and his allies saw Bi Zhongliang as a traitor to the country. But what about himself? Why did he pursue this line of business? I didn’t feel that he was as career-driven as Su Sanxing. I didn’t feel that Zhongliang was constantly trying to climb up. I really felt that he was just trying to do his job properly. So what did he think of the Japanese? That was never addressed, and I think it was a pity, because it would make his flashbacks at death hit that much harder. Chen Shen accused him of being a traitor to the country and we didn’t know what his defense was. We didn’t know what his tragic flaw was. Was it truly just career ambition? Then why did his death hit so differently from Su Sanxing’s?
The one characteristic of Bi Zhongliang we can be sure of is his love for his wife. I mean, she was the only other thing in his life other than his job. But he tried all he could to keep her in the dark about what he did. That being said, I think at one point, she tried to convince him to leave for another job and stop working for the Japanese and it just wasn’t something he was interested in, but he didn’t elaborate. But it was true that he cared for her truly. When Zhongliang realized his wife might be in danger of being sniped, he rushed to protect her. So even as a traitor to the country, he was at least a man who loved.
Tang Shanhai
Tang Shanhai was a Kuomintang officer working undercover in Bi Zhongliang’s department. He was cold and professional, but he did have a weak spot for Xu Bicheng. Right when he met Chen Shen, he realized there was something between them, and that activated his jealousy and insecurity. His feelings for Bicheng were the only thing that could ever foil his dedication to his job.
I honestly felt kind of bad for Shanhai at the beginning because Bicheng made so many bad decisions due to her overly sympathetic behaviour. She made hasty decisions, taking advantage of her connections and using Shanhai’s name to make them sound official, and both Shanhai and Chen Shen had to pull overtime to fix all of her issues. But Shanhai was in love with Bicheng, so what could he do?
There was a major plot in which Shanhai was supposed to seduce Liu Meina. It was painful to watch because he was clearly not in love with her and she was so blinded by her love for him. She missed all of the red flags and let herself be led around by the nose by him. But it was through Meina that Shanhai felt what love was. I think he realized that Meina was throwing away everything for him, and at the very least, he appreciated what she did for him. As Meina lay dying, she revealed that she sort of knew that Shanhai was deceiving her, but she wanted to indulge in him and that was why she went along with it. She had been shot in the shootout and was bleeding out, and her request to Shanhai was that he kill her to put her out of her misery, which Shanhai did.
Shanhai was eventually caught and I think he realized he was willing to give his life, both for the cause, but also if it would keep Bicheng out of harm’s way. Just as Meina gave her life for him, this could be his way of showing his love, and he was more than happy to do it because all of this proved his values. He was devoted to his cause, and he was devoted to Bicheng, and he was more than happy to die for them.
Only at the end of their relationship did Bicheng really appreciate all that he’d done, in the same way that only after Xiaonan’s reveal did Chen Shen realize what he’d taken for granted. Bicheng realized that Shanhai had always done everything in his power to protect Bicheng and fix her mistakes and she had taken it all for granted.
Xu Bicheng
Oh dear. This character. I was so annoyed with her for so much of the drama. I really disliked her for much of the drama. I only started to tolerate her after Shanhai died because then she had to live as a person responsible for her own actions.
Bicheng let heart guide her actions over her brain, and she constantly made trouble for others because of this. One of the earliest examples of this was when she was trying to save her classmate from being executed, and used Shanhai’s name to command Tao Dachun to carry out the operation. She had no business doing that, especially without consulting with Shanhai, and both Shanhai and Chen Shen had to help her fix it. Bicheng was also incredibly bullish when it came to Chen Shen. Of course, she was still in love with him and it would be great if they were on the same side. But she was not willing to understand why Shanhai would be skeptical of him. MISS XU!! YOU ARE A SPY!!!!!! Several characters said that Bicheng was not fit as a spy. She should not have been put on this mission, but I suppose she was assigned because she was the niece of Li Moqun and no one else can pretend to be that.
Bicheng in generally just wasn’t very good at masking, not good at being subtle, basically not a good spy. She was not good at being clever to get her own way and it made it really gruelling to watch. Even Xiaonan had her own way of getting things her own way and this scheming is what makes a good espionage show.
As mentioned, Bicheng remained true to Chen Shen throughout, though she later understood Shanhai’s devotion to her, and she was struck by his sacrifice for her. Afterward, she tried to exact revenge and she carried it out extremely clumsily, just straight up trying to bomb him. Very clumsy and again, guided by her heart and not her head.
As Chen Shen’s main love interest, I think the writers wanted to portray Bicheng as a very kind and elegant lady. There was a scene where Xiaonan was saying something in a bit of a poetic way and Chen Shen told her to stop trying to be like Bicheng. However, Bicheng came across as a person who had no sense of propriety which is very hard to watch in a show with scheming. She doesn’t acknowledge the rules that they are playing with, believing that her values should transcend all, and that’s just not fun to watch. The reason why scheming Cdramas are fun is because the characters have to go through all of the rules to trap one another. Bicheng meanwhile believes that the power of love should be enough for everyone, and she can’t understand or sympathize with why someone might not believe them. So Bicheng just came off as extremely immature.
Add to that the fact that I do think Zhou Dongyu was the weak link. She was very young-looking and I think she was in fact younger than most of the other cast members. I know Bicheng was Chen Shen’s student so there should be a bit of an age gap, but it was still hard to think of her as a couple with Chen Shen or Tang Shanhai. I also just didn’t think that Dongyu was very expressive. I was just overall very annoyed with her character all the time.
Weakest character of this show.
Su Sanxing
Su Sanxing was an officer of the Japanese puppet regime, and an ambitious man. He was cutthroat and ruthless, willing to use any means to uncover spies and to receive recognition. Su Sanxing had a sister, whose husband and child had been killed by the Japanese. So he kept his occupation a secret from his sister.
Su Sanxing’s only weak point was his love for Xiaonan. She had showed him a bit of tenderness and he fell head over heels for her. However, his downfall was that he couldn’t accept no for an answer. But while all the other rejected characters in this story were able to move on and love in their own way (Liu Meina, Tang Shanhai, Li Xiaonan), I think the difference was that they were still in some kind of relationship with the objects of their affection. Anyway, Su Sanxing continued to pursue Xiaonan even after she was engaged. His sister encouraged this, saying that he still had a shot as long as she wasn’t engaged. So he pursued her aggressively to the point that Xiaonan had to explicitly tell him that she would never like him.
That soon led to Xiaonan’s identity reveal. Xiaonan briefly tricked Sanxing into believing that she accepted his love, by getting him to access the safety deposit box. Xiaonan tried to frame Sanxing as being Maque but he was able to get out of the trap. And he came back with a vengeance.
Sanxing’s execution of Xiaonan was briefly interrupted by the arrival of his sister and her subsequent death, and he killed Xiaonan in a rage. Sanxing continued on a path of ruthlessness to uncover the true Maque, which he strongly believed to be Chen Shen. However, Bi Zhongliang did not believe him and had him killed. While Sanxing was technically right, he had also committed a good amount of crimes leading up to that.
Sanxing was consistently a villain in the drama. He was always looking for spies, so all of our main characters had reasons to be wary of him at all times. He was a little crafty too, which added to his danger. His only downfalls were his sister and Xiaonan, and both of them would be used to trick him.
I think Yin Zheng did a good job of acting Su Sanxing. When he was first introduced as a character, I realized that he was going to be someone to constantly worry about. I hated Su Sanxing, but I think that meant that Yin Zheng did a good job as a villain.
Li Xiaonan
HOMEGIRL CAME THROUGH!!!!! I was constantly cheering for Li Xiaonan during this entire show lol.
Li Xiaonan was an aspiring actress who was madly in love with Chen Shen despite his obvious disinterest in her. To her credit, she tried everything in her power to get him to marry her. She befriended all of the people close to Chen Shen. Chen Shen realized what she was doing, but he just wasn’t interested. He only officially rejected Li Xiaonan after Liu Lanzhi had them reside together. He told her that he only saw her as a friend, a xiongdi, but that on the outside, they could continue posing as a couple if that was what she wanted. And I think he did that because he needed to stay on Liu Lanzhi’s good side, so that he could stay on Bi Zhongliang’s good side.
Even though she was rejected, Xiaonan continued to show her love, willing to do anything for him. She was excited by the idea of fighting the Japanese with Chen Shen and she helped him in whatever way possible. Chen Shen came to rely on her a lot as a right hand, in a way that he even didn’t rely on Biantou.
Up until then, we had seen a few instances in which Xiaonan appeared to be smarter than she seemed. Near the beginning, when Chen Shen needed his briefcase to be hided, Xiaonan had peeked into the briefcase to see what was in it. When she was helping Chen Shen with his operation, we also saw her successfully fighting off some officers.
And then the reveal came. This was truly the only major reveal in the drama and it changed everything. It told us that she truly was the goddess of acting that she claimed to be. She had fooled literally everybody, in a way that Chen Shen had even failed to do. And she did that through sheer dedication. She really played into her role of being a woman who was so madly in love with Chen Shen, as a way to get an in to Bi Zhongliang’s department.
I talked about this above, but her dedication realized how much Chen Shen had taken her for granted. Even if her love, especially if her love was false, that just showed how much Li Xiaonan had put in to care for Chen Shen. She really wanted him to like her, she tried to take care of their house for him, she tried to knit a scarf for him, etc. And then she later helped him execute his missions, though she had her own motives for doing so.
Through all the time they spent together, I think Chen Shen realized that what he had said was true, that despite not loving Li Xiaonan, she had become the person who was closest to him, his 親人. She had been with him every step of the way. Because Chen Shen would let his guard down around her, she came to understand him fully well, and she shaped her entire personality to fit around him so that he never felt like he was out of control. And he couldn’t tell her this, but he realized that as a fellow comrade, she had given up so much, and he could respect that. I think he kind of felt sorry that he hadn’t treated her better. And that was why he was so nice to her as she was dying. He was the only person she had left that could see her, that could comfort her. He wanted to have a meal with her, helped her cut her hair. There was a comfort in being with her that I would argue he would never even feel with Bicheng.
And only after her death in the letter hidden in Pipi’s chest, did Xiaonan reveal to Chen Shen that Zaixiang was her sister, making them truly family. They had both lost much in the battle. Xiaonan had watched her sister being led away to die, and thus she threw herself into the cause. Just as Chen Shen did.
The reason why I liked Xiaonan from the start was that even though she was not a spy, she still showed that she was smart. And that’s what we like in spy dramas! We like smart characters! Like Bicheng, Xiaonan was also meant to be kind and sympathetic. That was why they made fast friends. However, Xiaonan was also a little more well-rounded as a character. Bicheng was black and white in her morality, whereas Xiaonan clearly had priorities and that made her interesting! Obviously she will love Chen Shen over everyone else, but she otherwise understands propriety. She understands why people are bound to do things by duty. And she exhibited all of these characteristics before her reveal as a spy. Even as a commoner, she was a very interesting character in a spy drama.
The reveal added a dimension to her personality. I was always holding out for her to have a bigger part in the espionage, and I was so pleasantly surprised that her role was not limited to being Chen Shen’s right-hand woman. She was a woman who had loved and lost, she was a woman who fought for her cause with her actions rather than clumsily making commands and having other people pick up after her. Li Xiaonan was my favourite character in this drama!
Biantou
Biantou was another character who really shone in this drama. He was Chen Shen’s main henchman at work. For the first part of the drama, he was kind of an information plot device. He relayed gossip to Chen Shen. He was also a social bridge between Chen Shen and other people including Li Xiaonan, whom Chen Shen was constantly trying to rebuff. Biantou would help Li Xiaonan when Chen Shen didn’t want to spend time with her lol.
Biantou started branching out a bit in the second half of the drama. He started to notice more important plot happenings on his own and he would relay that information back to Chen Shen. More importantly, Biantou had come to the realization that Chen Shen might have been a Communist Party member, and he wasn’t sure how to deal with it. He respected Chen Shen a lot as a person who had always been very kind to him. He went home to his fiancée who convinced him that it was noble to be a patriot, and so Biantou decided to help Chen Shen (who at the time needed him to pass a message to Bicheng to plant things at Su Sanxing’s house to make him look like Maque).
In the final episodes, Chen Shen was going to escape Shanghai, and Biantou had to part ways with him. Biantou was emotional about him. This was goodbye for them, and Biantou knew it. Chen Shen had given him money for his wedding, had bought a gift for his unborn child. But through their years of working together, Biantou knew that Chen Shen was kind despite acting cold sometimes. Biantou did all he could to help Chen Shen, and he bid farewell to him with a moving hug T_T BIANTOU!!!!
Liu Meina
Liu Meina was a secretary in the department. She was known as a someone who was able to come across news very easily, and she was also the only other person who had keys to the archive where the secret document was stored.
She had a crush on Tang Shanhai, and so he and Xu Bicheng concocted a plan for him to seduce her to get access to the archive. In collaboration with Chen Shen and Bicheng, Shanhai would spend time with Meina and try to get access to her purse in order to get a copy of the key. This failed a couple of times so Shanhai had to extend their courtship. Shanhai kept stringing her along, telling her that he wasn’t interested in Bicheng at all, and that they would run away together.
Honestly I felt really bad for Meina. She was a smart woman who was fooled by a man she was in love with. It became clear that she would throw everything away for Shanhai, but Shanhai was always a spy first. On their final night together, Shanhai had dinner with her and tried to get her key again, and Meina held a gun to him because she had heard inklings that she was being used. Even then, Shanhai lied to her, specifically about running away with her. So Meina stole the document for Shanhai and then they would run away together. Except they got caught, and Meina got shot. As she was dying, Meina said that she’d figured that Shanhai was tricking her, but she’d rather her life end in the arms of her loved one than by a random officer.
As I mentioned, I think it was through Meina that Shanhai learned that love can be selfless, that he can love Bicheng without having her. And despite being cold, I think Shanhai understood the gravity of what she had given to him. When she stole the document for him and then they went to meet Tao Dachun, Tao Dachun asked Shanhai why he hadn’t killed her yet. Shanhai asked him to take her away and just tell her that he’d dumped her, not willing to kill her. But in the end, things did not work out that way.
As a character, I thought Meina was interesting, but unfortunately she just became a plot device.
Liu Lanzhi
Lanzhi was Bi Zhongliang’s wife. She loved her husband and she also loved Chen Shen dearly and was trying to get him to marry. She was so pleased when she found out about his ‘girlfriend’ Li Xiaonan (she had proclaimed it herself). She had fully bought in to the Li Xiaonan propaganda which Chen Shen was a little exasperated about, but Chen Shen went along with it.
Lanzhi was probably the one truly ignorant character in the entire drama. As I mentioned, there were some conversations where she just exhibited no awareness of the world they lived in. She lived in a world where everybody had to be nice to each other. So that became a problem as Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang gained in on each other. Chen Shen had asked Lanzhi who she would defend if they got in a fight, and Lanzhi said that of course she would defend him. That turned out to be true, when Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang had a confrontation at the end of the drama. She tried to stop Bi Zhongliang from shooting Chen Shen dead.
Lanzhi was a kind person, she visited the orphanage often. She and Bi Zhongliang had had a daughter before, but she had died, so she was always kind of wistful about kids. Towards the end of the drama, Bi Zhongliang suggested that they adopt a kid from the orphanage and Lanzhi was so excited about that.
After Bi Zhongliang died, Lanzhi became a nun, looking after kids at the church. Chen Shen had visited once to give her medicine, but he left right away.
I think Lanzhi’s character served to round out Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang’s relationship as friends, to be that extra friction between them. While she was a little annoying at times, I think she mostly served that role well.
Liu Erbao
Erbao was Bi Zhongliang’s head henchman. He was always spying on Chen Shen on his behalf. He was also kind of a Su Sanxing-lite in the sense that most of our main cast were often wary of him because he was easy to snitch. He was actually helping Bi Zhongliang collect evidence about Su Sanxing, through one of Su Sanxing’s henchmen. It turned out in the end that Erbao was a man placed by Bi Zhongliang’s side by Li Moqun, as Li Moqun wanted to get rid of him.
Tao Dachun
Tao Dachun was a member of the Kuomintang and helped Tang Shanhai and Xu Bicheng through much of the drama, as a third man in the undercover operations. He basically did a lot of the work when Shanhai and Bicheng could not because they had to keep up their appearance.
Tao Dachun continued to help Bicheng after Shanhai’s death. But he also kind of started to branch out in terms of how he did things. He didn’t always agree with Bicheng’s ways, including letting Su Cuilan run to Su Sanxing during the execution of Xiaonan.
I think Tao Dachun was more like Shanhai in that he was actually a spy and that was why he didn’t agree with Bicheng’s ways of doing things sometimes. He survived to the end, continuing to work with Bicheng.
Li Moqun
Li Moqun was a higher up officer of the government. He was Bi Zhongliang’s superior, and he reported to a Japanese officer. His niece was Xu Bicheng, and that was how Bicheng and Shanhai got an in with the department. I think his role was mostly to put pressure on Bi Zhongliang though from the Chinese side and not the Japanese side.
In the end it was revealed that he had wanted to get rid of Bi Zhongliang. It was a storyline that was thrown in at the end and didn’t really affect anything. I guess it would have been more impactful if I felt he had a bigger part in Chen Shen’s operations, but he didn’t really in my opinion.
Su Cuilan
Su Cuilan was Su Sanxing’s sister. Her husband and child had been killed by the Japanese and Sanxing was her only family left. She was portrayed as a kind of…country gal you could say. She was not well-educated, wasn’t able to read, and she thought simply. I mentioned this before, but I thought that her overall styling was not appropriate for this kind of character. She was dressed in a very modern way, compared to the more practical clothing of a woman who spent her days with housework.
Su Cuilan really liked Li Xiaonan and she encouraged Su Sanxing to pursue her. Li Xiaonan protected Su Cuilan, took her around town, etc. Su Sanxing had once sullenly told Su Cuilan that Li Xiaonan was engaged, but Su Cuilan pushed him to pursue her, saying that he still had a chance if she wasn’t married, and that she was extremely sure that Li Xiaonan would definitely settle with him if he proved himself to be an upstanding man who could take care of her. I think Cuilan is definitely to blame for at least some of Sanxing’s aggressive behaviour.
Cuilan was very much against the Japanese as they killed her husband and child. When she heard from others that Sanxing was working for the Japanese, he lied to her and told her that he was actually an undercover agent.
The main cast tried to frame Sanxing as Maque at the end of the drama and part of the plan was for Bicheng to kidnap Cuilan to make it look like Sanxing was preparing to run away. Cuilan overheard Bicheng talking about Sanxing being an agent for the Japanese again. She ran to Sanxing, who was then about to execute Xiaonan. She got caught in the crossfire and was killed by Bi Zhongliang’s sniper.
Cuilan was a plot device character who was meant to give Sanxing a more personable side. That’s all.
Themes
As with every other Republican Era spy cdrama, patriotism was a big theme. Each of our Kuomintang and Communist Party characters were fighting back against the Japanese for the country.
As a result of their devotion to the cause, all of our spy characters had to give up their personal relationships. Chen Shen started with his sister-in-law martyring herself, leaving Pipi his only blood relative. Bicheng was working against her uncle and faked a relationship. Shanhai fake a marriage with Bicheng and also a relationship with Meina in different ways. Xiaonan like Chen Shen was also without a single relative. In war, no one has relations, they all only have their cause.
At the same time, people bond tremendously through their cause. Though Bicheng and Shanhai were never really in love with each other, Bicheng definitely appreciated what Shanhai did for her by the end. Not to mention Chen Shen and Li Xiaonan bonding after he realized what she’d given up, and wanting to be the person to do nice things for her. Even Chen Shen and Bi Zhongliang had bonded through their war experiences together.
Overall
Decent show, not great. But good. Li Xiaonan was my favourite and I think I’ll be thinking about her for the next little while :3