Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Yingtai- Leading children astray since the Jin Dynasty
I am sure many have heard of the famous Chinese folklore 梁山伯与祝英台, or the Butterfly Lovers.
The Butterfly Lovers tells the story of a noble lady Zhu Ying Tai, who had aspirations to get an education. Despite the fact that women were forbidden to get an education in Imperial China, she went against all odds to ask her parents to send her to school disguised as a man so that she could graduate and contribute to society just as a man could.
In school, she met Liang Shan Bo, an impoverished but brilliant scholar. She fell in love with him but unfortunately, her school term was cut short because her father fell terminally ill. Before parting with Liang Shan Bo, she tried to subtly hint to him that she was a woman, and told him to look for her at the Zhu residence after he graduated to propose to her "ninth sister" who was really her. As fate would have it, upon returning home, she realised that her parents had bethrothed her to a wealthy merchant named Ma Wen Cai. Liang Shan Bo returned to the Zhu residence after his Imperial Examinations, realised the whole truth, and died of depression.
On Zhu Ying Tai's wedding night, she was caught in storm, and later realised her carriage was passing by Liang Shan Bo's grave. She stopped to mourn him, his grave opened, and she jumped in with him. Both turned into butterflies and lived happily ever after.
This was the version that I had the utmost misfortune of watching on Channel U when I was a kid. The storyline was drastically altered from its original. It is the hands down the worst show I have ever watched. Not even my childhood 女神 贾静雯 could save it.
(Watch it on the link above. It is in Hokkien, so the dialogue is 100 times funnier. Shan Bo is apparently "Sua Peh" in Hokkien LMFAO)
This Taiwanese station is known for its really long, family-feud style dramas, so I am not surprised they decided to take this turn with a popular legend to be able to make 33 episodes for TV.
The critical mistake that this drama made was that in doing so, it completely changed the DNA and main message of the original story.
Instead of Zhu Ying Tai and Liang Shan Bo meeting at the school, they meet before, when Zhu Ying Tai was trying to publicly embarass Ma Wen Cai and get him to stop pestering her. They fell in love before Liang Shan Bo was due to go to school, and Zhu Ying Tai begged her parents to let her go to school, for no reason other than to chase Liang Shan Bo down.
Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai spent most of their school days doing
nothing but causing drama and trouble, instead of bonding over their
shared interest in literature and the arts. Ma Wen Cai also become a fellow student and love rival and was the cause of a lot of drama in the school.
Finally, Zhu Ying Tai suffered multiple near death experiences at the hands of Liang Shan Bo, yet still ran back to him and decided to die for him.
So going back to the topic of the day, why do I say this drama leads children astray?
1. Zhu Ying Tai's motivations for going to school
Contrary to the original, Zhu Ying Tai was inspired to start going to school only because of Liang Shan Bo. This changes our female protagonist from someone who was willing to take risks for a shot at an education and equality, to an impulsive person who was willing to risk her safety and survival just to be in close proximity of a man she had just met a few days ago, whom she hadn't properly vetted yet.
Sounds familiar? Like the naive 18 year old girl who moves across states to be with a leather jacking, motorcycle riding guy she only met two weeks ago, or the guy who transfers $10,000 to his online lover from a far away land.
Throughout their school term, Zhu Ying Tai spent less time studying and more time running after Shan Bo, taking care of his problems and his tantrums, and abruptly dropped out after revealing to him that she was a woman. This completely goes against the main defining trait of Zhu Ying Tai, being that she was supposed to love learning and broadening her horizons, and instead turns her into a pickme.
2. Liang Shan Bo's communist parade of red flags
Janis Ian voice: "Don't be fooled, because he may look like your typical selfish, weaponising his incompetence, two-faced manchild but in reality, he is so much more evil than that."
Why did Zhu Ying Tai, a noble lady, fall in love with Liang Shan Bo?
Notwithstanding their common interests, it was because Liang Shan Bo was
a kind man who was dependable, humble and noble above all else.
My Chinese teacher in secondary school put on an animated version of The Butterfly Lovers for the class. Because it stayed true to the source material and was well-written, it really helped me see why Zhu Ying Tai loved him so much and wanted to spend her life with him.
This version of Liang Shan Bo, on the other hand, repulsed every fibre of my being. From start to end I didn't understand what Zhu Ying Tai saw in him at all. He was cartoonishly insane.
p.s. Who picked this actor to be Liang Shan Bo? The cringe-worthy acting made everything a thousand times worse. Taking so many screengrabs of him snivelling like this with snot running down his nose for this blog post was a traumatic experience.
a. Unable to deal with problems like an adult
Upon seeing Zhu Ying Tai for the first time Liang Shan Bo was besotted with her and drew a portrait of her from memory. Zhu Ying Tai went shopping dressed as a man one day and was shocked to the high heavens, understandably, to see that this strange man drew a picture of her. She got into a squabble with Liang Shan Bo and they accidentally tore the painting in half. Being the shrewd problem solver that Liang Shan Bo was, he...
He sat on the ground and cried. Literally just sat there wailing sobbing into his butler's arms over a torn painting, like someone just stole his arm, his leg and his first born! OMFG. Am I watching Liang Shan Bo or Liang Po Po?
He spent the entirety of this series like this, preferring to sulk, cry and get violent with Ying Tai on multiple occasions rather than face his problems like a grown adult.
The whole point of being partnered up is to have someone to go through thick and thin with, so you do not have to face life's trials and tribulations by yourself. A partner like Liang Shan Bo will not only not help solve problems for you, now you have a problem and an adult-sized baby to console.
b. Unwise about money
This did not explicitly come out in the show, but I noticed an interesting detail about Liang Shan Bo's family. In a fight with his mother, Liang Shan Bo explained that he did not want to go to school because school fees were expensive, and there would be no one left to take care of his mother when he was in school.
At first I boiled it down to being on survival mode; after all, you cannot blame someone who had grown up struggling to survive all his life if he could not appreciate this thing called Return on Investment on education.
But I rewatched and noticed the following details.
- He himself was dressed in colourful silks, while his own mother was dressed like a nightsoil collector and looked worse than his butler
I also have the same question as you auntie
- When his mother fell in the first episode, she decided to get a VET to treat her broken leg for free just so that she could save money for his studies. BUT he somehow had money to spend on all these inks to paint a beautiful picture of Zhu Ying Tai whom he only met once. Even his butler, in one scene, commented that the paper was expensive
-The excuse he used for not wanting to go to school and sit for the imperial examaniations, was that he believed studying should be "to enrich one's mind" and not for the sake of a government position
- He also said he was perfectly content farming and growing vegetables at home, selling his art for a living, yet in the next line, he said that their family did not have any farming land and that they did not even have a place to stay. In other words, he was never intending to "farm"
I don't know about you but the logical conclusion I gathered from all these details was that: Liang Shan Bo was spending the money that was meant for the family (whatever little of it) on himself, to pursue his own frivolous hobbies, while being more than happy to leave his mother homeless, limping and in rags, and had no sense of responsibility to earn a better life for his mother. The arguments about his mother having no one to take care of her were really just excuses since he already wasn't taking care of her anyway.
His mother eventually pooled together all her fortune to send him to school, only for him to spend HER money buying her a year's worth of necessities (instead of spending HIS OWN money or ensuring his mother was well provided for on a daily basis in the first place), then ended not having enough to pay for his school fees.
c. Even his own butler hated him
Liang Shan Bo had a butler uncreatively named 四九. (Chinese for Forty-Nine, so let's just call him 49)
At least his name is not 六九
In the olden days, servants were treated like the property of rich families, and the fact that even this did not stop 49 from coming close to whacking Liang Shan Bo up on many occasions just showed how incapable Liang Shan Bo was at earning anybody's respect at all.
I want to digress here and talk about 49. In a character establishing moment, 49 told his young master that he could very well have left the Liang family to work for a richer family for higher wages, yet he didn't out of gratitude because Liang's mother once saved his life. He thus felt he had the responsibility to ensure Liang Shan Bo made the right decisions and did not let his mother down.
49 might seem like a boorish, greedy, bad-tempered guy who loved easy money, but his outlook made sense for someone of his background and upbringing. He wasn't refined, and he wasn't taught to value higher pursuits over mere survival, but this was because he never had those opportunities. Deep down, he still had this old fashioned sense of righteousness in him and did everything out of loyalty to the Liang family. He even risked his own life barging into a Prince's residence to fight for Zhu Ying Tai's honour.
So how come he didn't have a good relationship with his young master? Because if you paid attention to their dynamic, Liang Shan Bo actually looked down on 49 and would throw 49 under the bus if he could.
During a heated fight, 49 told Liang Shan Bo to stop giving excuses and go to school so that he would not let his mother down. Liang Shan Bo told 49 that he would never understand studying for the joy of learning because 49 was bloody uneducated, and that the latter ought to shut up because he was the Young Master. WOW, this guy!
While Zhu Ying Tai and her helper Yinxin also bickered on many occasions, Zhu Ying Tai fundamentally respected Yinxin and took care of her. Yinxin sacrificed herself in return and stood by Zhu Ying Tai all the way because Zhu Ying Tai had earned that loyalty. Zhu Ying Tai treated Yinxin like a sister; Liang Shan Bo treated 49 like a slave (on top of being completely unreasonable and unlikeable). This was why 49 and Liang Shan Bo's relationship was like gunpowder and fire.
Halfway through the show 49 even completely gave up on Liang Shan Bo and switched loyalties to take care of Ying Tai because 49 was sick and tired of Liang Shan Bo's cowardice and irresponsbility. LMFAO.
Isn't that ironic? That a "spoiled" young mistress from the wealthy Zhu family, whom you'd think had every excuse to look down on the less privileged, was actually kinder and more respectful that the supposed scholarly “gentleman" from a humble background? The "Nice Guy" who thought himself superior to his long-suffering butler just because he could recite a few poems???
I like 49. He is amazing, the only sane man and the best written character in this dumpster fire of a show in my opinion.
d. Constantly needed everyone else to solve his problems for him
When he expended his mother's funds on necessities for her and ended up not having enough to pay for his school fees, he just gave up on the spot. He threw a tantrum, called the school admistrator elitist, and wanted to just walk away after all the sacrifices his mother just made.
49 even pleaded with the administrator on his behalf and knelt in from of the school gates to try and move the school with his sincerity. And what did this ingrate Liang Shan Bo say to thank 49?
"You were the one who wanted to kneel what, not me!" OMFG. WTF.
He let 49 almost go crippled from kneeling until Zhu Ying Tai sought help from the head-mistress, who decided to give him a chance by letting him pay for his school fees with labour instead.
In another instance, Ma Wen Cai colluded with the school administrator to frame Liang Shan Bo for theft out of jealousy. Similarly, all Liang Shan Bo did was sit in the jail cell and cry until Zhu Ying Tai pleaded with Ma Wen Cai to stop his nonsense.
When Ma Wen Cai finally allowed him to be released, Liang Shan Bo gave them a new problem: now he refused to come out.
His justification was that his mother had arrived to the school to visit him and he couldn't let his mother see him in such a state. So the solution he decided to give everyone who tried to help him (Ying Tai, Yinxin and 49), was to turn into an ungrateful sobbing mess and make them clean up after him, Round 2.
e. Put her in harm's way on many occasions
As mentioned above, Liang Shan Bo had directly used violence on Zhu Ying Tai on multiple occasions.
Trigger warning: Domestic violence
One time, he pushed her down the stairs for Ma Wen Cai (yes, I'm absolutely not joking).
Liang Shan Bo saw Ma Wen Cai as a brother and did not bother to see things from Zhu Ying Tai's point of view. He boiled her frustrations with Ma Wen Cai down to her being unreasonable and bratty, and picked Ma Wen Cai's side in a quarrel.
He also slapped her over another woman and made a death threat:
Even as a bystander Ma Wen Cai couldn't take it and told Liang Shan Bo he shouldn't have placed his hands on Ying Tai!
You may argue that Zhu Ying Tai was dressed as a man then, so he didn't know she was the woman he loved, but firstly, you aren't supposed to be hitting a man or pushing him down stairs, either.
Secondly, Ma Wen Cai sabotaged Liang Shan Bo and put him down so many times while Zhu Ying Tai was the one who stuck by him. Yet, he was happy to throw a valuable friend away just because he couldn't bear to taint the "brotherhood" (on paper) he had with Ma Wen Cai. After slapping Ying Tai, Shan Bo apologised to Ma Wen Cai for making him angry, instead of apologising to Ying Tai herself!
Liang Shan Bo even admitted that if forced to choose between the actual Zhu Ying Tai (the lady version) and Ma Wen Cai, he would pick Ma Wen Cai.
Even if Liang Shan Bo would not have hit Zhu Ying Tai if he knew she was a woman, there was a plot point that showed you Liang Shan Bo would absolutely humiliate and throw a woman to the wolves over trivial matters like school rules.
There was a point in the show when rumour got out that there was a woman who snuck into the school dressed as a male student. Ma Wen Cai, surprisingly, was the one who went all out to try and protect Ying Tai's identity. However, Liang Shan Bo very righteously suggested that everyone stripped down so as to reveal who the woman was, because it was an afront to the school's rules.
Throughout history, there were records of women dressing up as men to go into combat to fight for their country because women were not allowed to join the military. In doing so, they were putting themselves at huge risks of being left behind for dead because of physical differences, or found out, sexually assaulted and killed, yet they made that noble decision to do so because of loyalty to country. A woman doing the same to get an education was no different.
His justification for subjecting a woman to public body checks was because having a woman in the school would spoil the school's reputation and distract the male students from studying. It was so shocking that even the head mistress who was originally on his side expressed disbelief at his abject cruelty.
A student in school, no matter how brilliant, would sully the reputation of a school simply because she was a woman. But Liang Shan Bo, who marched up to the school demanding a place despite having insufficient funds for school, who got into fights and hit his friends, was a model student in comparison? Precisely. LMFAO I'd STFU about tarnishing the school's reputation if I were Liang Shan No.
Next, what's the matter with people like Liang Shan Bo? Always blaming women and our existence, our dressing, our behaviour, our breathing, for your distractions, your failures, your VIOLENCE. WE NEVER "CAUSE" ANY OF YOU TO DO ANYTHING. You want to blame, you blame yourself! What's next with Liang Shan Bo? "I SA-ed that woman because her ankles were showing and it was distracting me."????
If Liang Shan Bo could not understand why a woman would want to sneak into a school in such a manner, it would be because he had zero empathy, which was bad enough.
Why, WHYYY did he also feel strongly enough against this matter to want to expose this woman in front of hundreds of men? He would be putting her at risk of sexually harrassment and assault. If she was there to hide from an abusive spouse or family, where on earth would she go after that?
At best, Liang Shan Bo was too dense to consider the survival of someone else other than himself and his twisted ideals about following the rules.
At worst, he was a raging misogynist who was jumping at this opportunity to punish a woman for daring to deviate from his book of rules.
Either way, this is not a person you should want to have anything to do with.
In the end, when Zhu Ying Tai revealed to him that she was a woman, the only thing he cared about was that she lied to him. (And started crying again) No appreciation for everything she did, sacrificed, and the risks she took for him.
f. (Not Liang Shan Bo's fault, but) Had a horribly toxic mother
Liang Shan Bo's mother lost her husband when he was just a baby. In the scenes we see in the show, she was emotionally abusive, blamed Shan Bo for many things he didn't do, and even threatened to multilate and kill herself to manipulate her son in many instances.
(Even then, I want to contest this point because despite her abuse, Liang Shan Bo was infantalised and self-centred, basking in luxuries like art and poetry, and was never seen lifting a finger to do anything, ever. Behind the scenes, she had clearly spoiled him to some extent)
While none of this was Liang Shan Bo's fault, children who grow up with abusive parents need a lot of support to grow into normal adulthood. Till that happens, they should be allowed to heal from their trauma instead of being in a relationship.
Fortunately, the mother eventually healed later in the show, came to her senses and treated Liang Shan Bo way better than before, after meeting Zhu Ying Tai and being touched by her sincerity. However, this often does not happen in real life. What more often happens is that this toxic dynamic bleeds into your marriage and ends up hurting any children you have.
Interestingly, this Liang Shan Bo is being portrayed as the superior option to the 40-year-old looking Ma Wen Cai, who was a wife beater, womaniser, also obsessive and willing to destroy to force Zhu Ying Tai to marry him.
40 year old high-schooler Ma Wen Cai. This is called lifelong learning
Is it because the producers know this Liang Shan Bo was hypocritical and far more insidious than your average in-your-face villain, so they wrote a horribly demented version of Ma Wen Cai to act like an absolute psycho in contrast?
Ma Wen Cai wasn't even evil in the original literature. He was just another teenager who was a victim of his parents' wishes and bethrothed to Zhu Ying Tai in an arranged marriage. In fact, in some media adaptations Ma Wen Cai did not even appear. He didn't have to, because he wasn't the problem, the problem was what he represented- the rich and powerful in that society could do whatever they pleased at the expense of the oppressed.
The conflict that Zhu Ying Tai and Liang Shan Bo had with Ma Wen Cai in the original literature was one of differing viewpoints, freedom to love versus adherence to tradition. Whereas in here, the conflict became good vs evil.
The problem with that is that this presents the audience with a false dilemma. Ma Wen Cai was nuts, Liang Shan Bo was....not as nuts (I beg to differ, to be honest), hence Liang Shan Bo must be an objectively good option, when the reality is both are not good partners to have. Both are the same species of villian just different breeds.
I actually found Ma Wen Cai less unlikeable than Liang Shan Bo because the Ma Wen Cai actor had good acting chops. Towards the end Ma Wen Cai showed that even evil had its limits and decided to stop his nonsense when he saw much Zhu Ying Tai was suffering. Liang Shan Bo had no backbone or character at all and was purely driven by rules or ideals. He will not do the right thing just because it is against the rules, but more importantly, he will do all the wrong things only because it is according to principles that are written on paper.
Zhu Ying Tai found his immaturity and ineptitude "cute", so she ended up paying for it for the rest of her life.
3. Zhu Ying Tai painted herself into a corner
Zhu Ying Tai fell pregnant shortly after Liang Shan Bo graduated and left for the capital for the imperial examinations. Liang Shan Bo fell off a cliff and was presumed dead by everyone but was actually rescued by a Princess. More on this later.
Yes, this Zhu Ying Tai got pregnant out of a wedlock.
Because Ma Wen Cai was born crazy and jealous, he used his father's name to confiscate the Zhu family's assets and the Zhu family fell into poverty. Zhu Ying Tai ran away from home to look for Liang Shan Bo's mother, since she already "took the vows of marriage" in a broken temple with Liang Shan Bo. She begged the mother to let her stay and waited on her hand and foot so that she would be touched by her sincerity and accept her as a daughter in law.
I know that by modern standards, we would all be scolding Zhu Ying Tai in the comments, calling her a pickme, stupid, etc, but she had little choice left in this situation.
Why do kids go astray and get into trouble out there? Because their parents failed to provide them with a safe space at home, to the point the kids feel emotionally neglected, and try to find connection elsewhere. Even the most successful kids who seem to do everything right can have bad relationships with their parents for no reason other than differing values. Some kids thrive and live a happy life despite their parents' negative influence, but many also don't. It is a very very sad situation that should not be painted as touching devotion to the man she loved!
Ying Tai's original family had made the stupid decision of bethrothing her to Ma Wen Cai, which kickstarted this whole series of bad events in the first place. I know Ma Wen Cai was rich, but his family assets would eventually be diluted by all his illegitimate mistresses and children due to his womanising ways. Money that he could have used to provide for Ying Tai, their children and his in-laws, would be squandered on prostitutes and frivolous pursuits! He was also a mentally unstable person who would torpedo his in-laws' family over the smallest offence. It was a bad business decision on every count.
Plus, in that day and age, how could she continue to stay in the Zhu family while heavily pregnant without people talking? The only way for her to maintain her dignity would be to pretend to be Liang Shan Bo's widowed wife staying with her mother in law.
Like many modern day women who were left pregnant, poor and destitute, Zhu Ying Tai's predicament was the end result of a toxic family which led to her making a string of extremely poor decisions. What she, and women like her need, is serious help. There is nothing touching or virtuous about any of this.
4. Their love ultimately caused each other more destruction than if they had never met.
There was one major plot point in this series that was not in the original- the Liangs and Zhus had a major family feud. Basically, Zhu's father murdered Liang's father many years ago, hence both sets of parents did not want them to be together.
(This plot point was not in the original literature, but it wouldn't have mattered. Even without this family feud, their relationship was doomed to fail because of Liang Shan Bo's character deficiencies and Zhu Ying Tai's lack of self-respect and poor decision making.)
Liang Shan Bo, not knowing what to do after learning of the family feud, just ghosted the pregnant Zhu Ying Tai and preferred to sit around and cry in the Prince's residence (with free food and lodging provided, obviously!) instead of facing up to his problems like a grownup.
Poor Zhu Ying Tai waited aimlessly for him for seven days, sacrificing her health, wasting her soul away...while her family got sabotaged by Ma Wen Cai's father, she got framed for murder and thrown into prison, tortured by beatings and clampings, and had a miscarriage there, ALL ALONE.
Imagine being pregnant and being subjected to corporal punishment in this manner while your supposed "husband" abandoned you! By the way, she had a miscarriage because Shan Bo was yelling at her from outside the prison cell provoking her.
Even Ma Wen Cai couldn't take it and thought that was too much!
During this whole time, Liang Shan Bo was bethrothed by the Emperor to a Princess, and he agreed to the marriage to avoid having to deal with the whole Zhu Ying Tai fiasco. It was a good thing that Princess was smart. She knew he loved another woman and was not about to let him destroy both their lives, so she went to see Zhu Ying Tai by herself to explain that Liang Shan Bo was avoiding her because of that feud. Liang Shan Bo was such a baby princess, he needed an actual princess to resolve his conflicts for him.
Sice episode 1, Liang Shan Bo had given Zhu Ying Tai nothing but problems, many of them life-threatening, while doing nothing for her as her partner and father of her child. The fact that he mistreated her so badly when she was dressed as a man was proof that Liang Shan Bo never liked Zhu Ying Tai for her personality and intellect, only her beauty. After putting her through it all, all Liang Shan Bo did was use words to beg for her forgiveness, and even then not missing the opportunity to guilt trip her: "You are really that heartless to give up our love?"
She rightfully rejected him and decided to call it quits, but he wouldn't leave her alone, even tried to guilt her with his illness, until she finally caved when he proposed to her DURING YINXIN and 49'S WEDDING.
This guy really cannot stop making everything about himself for just one second.
When he proposed, Ying Tai asked him if he would ever leave her behind (i.e. for dead) or break her heart (and maybe limbs) again if he married her. You know, it's not a good sign if you are still asking your significant other this when you are at the altar. However, I am not surprised she agreed to marry him. What other choice did she have at this point, as a woman in Ancient China? Her family was gone, she had sunk too much of her life into this man, and she was broke.
Liang Shan Bo died after this, which was probably the best ending Zhu Ying Tai could have gotten.
Think about it. What would their marriage look like? How would Liang Shan Bo take care of his wife and their children? Zhu Ying Tai would only end up doing everything- the chores, the housekeeping, taking care of his mum etc. For the smallest issues he'd just sit there and sulk while she solved everything. He would sit there and cry days after she gave birth to complain that she no longer cooked for him. He would cry that Ying Tai was paying more attention to his child than him. Can you imagine how much the innocent civillians would have to suffer with someone like Liang Shan Bo as their magistrate?
And after sacrificing everything for him, Shan Bo would resent her for not being that beautiful interesting girl he used to love, and turn his affections towards princesses, noble ladies, women from far more powerful families than Zhu Ying Tai now that he was a scholar. All of this, assuming she was lucky enough Shan Bo never hit her again.
I can get being young and stupid in love. But there's got to be a limit to everything. Past some point it is far better to just cut your losses and pack up and go. Don't torment yourself in this manner and pretend like this will make your love deeper.
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The original Butterfly Lovers was set in the Eastern Jin Dynasty (approx 300 AD),
during a period when women had little freedoms and people from lower
castes had little power against aristocrats. In this context, Zhu Ying
Tai's decision to risk her safety and survival to attend an all boys'
school, and subsequently pursue a relationship with Liang Shan Bo, was a
noble act of rebellion against the unfair expectations imposed upon
women. She was drawn to Liang Shan Bo because he was, similarly to her,
born into circumstances he had little control over, and, like her, was
doing whatever was in his power to improve his lot in life by going to
school.
I didn't know Nicky Wu also played Liang Shan Bo before, but his version had a dialogue with Zhu Ying Tai's mother, which I felt summarised the tragedy of this story.
Zhu's mother: "You think your indignance can change your and Ying Tai's destinies? If you want to resent, resent the fact that you were born in the wrong place and time. Our dynasty has fallen, everyone is greedy and selfish as we need to survive. Resent your own idealism, because you think just because you do not accept the way things are the entire society has to change for you."
Liang and Zhu were fighting for their freedom to love outside the confines of their society. The suicide was a last stretch, a final act of rebellion against their oppression. This context is important.
When you take a classic Chinese legend, rewrite its characters, and add all kinds of nonsensical subplots the way this rendition did, it dilutes the context and this is when the whole story stops making sense. Now, you stop feeling empathy for the characters and instead realise they got their tragic ending because of their own stupid actions and failure to think about the consequences of their actions.
You could set this story in 2024 and the take away messages would have been exactly the same.
Liang Shan Bo is a "self-employed" 25 year old man who lives with his mother, who makes Youtube videos and hosts a podcast to argue with women about why women should not be allowed to get an education. He refuses to go to college because it costs money. He refuses to work because "living should be for enrichment and not for money". His mother is on food stamps and couch surfs in the basement of neighbours on a rotational basis.
One day, he meets a beautiful girl called Zhu Ying Tai, his Margot Robbie look-alike dream girl.... and he is hooked ever since. He obsessively tries every night to break into her house and after a while, Zhu Ying Tai is touched. After his mother threatens self-harm and he finally agrees to go to college, Zhu Ying Tai is determined to follow him there.
In college, Liang Shan Bo joins a gang headed by Ma Wen Cai, who also likes Zhu Ying Tai. Liang Shan Bo constantly takes Ma Wen Cai's side, because "bros before h**s". They burn the school down, and Ying Tai has to drop out because she is pregnant with Liang Shan Bo's child. Liang Shan Bo goes missing, and is presumed dead when in fact he has transferred schools.
Ying Tai joins Liang Shan Bo's mother in couch surfing, slogging, barely having enough to eat because she could no longer go home. Ma Wen Cai thrashes the Zhu family and hangs a pig's head on their home door everyday until Zhu Ying Tai was willing to marry her. Liang Shan Bo realises that years ago, Zhu Ying Tai's father caused his father's death, and fakes his disappearance because he cannot take it. He meets a tech CEO's daughter, decided to string her along to avoid his problems back home. One day the CEO's daughter finally had enough and reveals the truth to Zhu Ying Tai, begs Liang Shan Bo to leave her alone, and blocks and deletes him.
After Ying Tai gets framed for murder and has a miscarriage, she decides to break up with Shan Bo. Shan Bo becomes the crazy ex who pesters, harrasses and stalks her, to give him a second chance after it all. After she agrees, he abruptly dies of an unknown disease, and Zhu Ying Tai follows him to his grave.
Since the producers have so thoroughly destroyed this Chinese classic beyond recognition, is there still anything for children to learn from this? Yes, there are plenty of lessons applicable to modern society.
1. Focus on your education and career. Relationships should value-add to your life, not be the end all be all to life.
2. Don't make the mistake of believing that if you don't settle for "good enough", then your only option left is "terrible". There are genuinely amazing people out there who will be right for you, and will love and care for you for who you are, flaws and all. Failing which, being single is a perfectly valid choice to make.
3. You canot love someone out of their own dysfunction. Wish them all the best in their healing journey, leave them and look for someone else who is ready.
4. You can be the most good-looking, rich, intelligent and selfless person and the wrong person will still find a reason to mistreat you because of their psychosis. Don't internalise it.
5. Relationships are work, in the same way that everything worth having is not effortless (a good career, healthy finances, a fit body, your mental well-being etc). However, relationships ought to elevate your overall quality of life, not diminish it. Don't let a relationship ruin your physical, mental and financial health, thinking that you will one day get a reward for all that sacrifice.
6. (If you are a woman) Do NOT get pregnant by a man until he has proven consistently that he will be a good husband and father to your children.
7. There are things more important than love for a relationship to work, such as dependability, trustworthiness and responsibility.
If this is love, I'd rather die alone with 5 cats.
No need to turn me into a butterfly after I die, just let me cease to exist. Thanks for reading.
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