I have finally finished Blossom Through the Cloud, and I find myself sitting with a rather unexpected feeling. I enjoyed the drama, certainly, but “enjoyed” doesn’t quite describe what happened this time. I think this may be the first Chinese drama I have watched that I can honestly say I truly loved. Not because it was perfect. It wasn’t. Not because every scene worked for me. It didn’t. Perhaps it is because, for once, I found myself believing the people inside the story.
There is something interesting about the way I watch Chinese dramas. Most of the dramas I have watched are adaptations of novels, but I don’t have access to the original Chinese novels, even in translation. So I enter these stories without an already established picture of the characters. I don’t know what the heroine is supposed to look like in my imagination, how the hero is supposed to speak, or how a particular scene should feel. I simply enter the world that the drama gives me and allow it to introduce itself.
That is very different from watching a film or drama based on a book I have already read. When I have read the book, the characters already exist somewhere in my head. They have faces, voices, personalities and rhythms that I have created as a reader. The director is no longer introducing me to the story. The director is introducing me to their interpretation of a story I already know. That can be a very different experience.
Perhaps that is one reason I could enter Blossom Through the Cloud so freely. I had no previous Ruan Sixian or Fu Mingyu competing with the people on the screen. I could simply watch them.
And what first drew me into the story was Ruan Sixian’s ambition.
I was genuinely satisfied to see a story that did not ask the woman to put her career ambition second. We see successful women all the time in stories, but I sometimes wonder whether we really see what lies behind that success. We see the finished woman—the competent woman, the ambitious woman, the woman who has made it—but we don’t always see the compromises and negotiations that may have been necessary to get there.
A man who wants to succeed is often allowed to be simply ambitious. His determination is expected. A woman may be ambitious and still be expected to be an all-rounder: successful, capable, emotionally available, considerate, pleasant, supportive and somehow never allowed to let her ambition inconvenience anyone else.
That is why Ruan Sixian’s journey mattered to me. Her ambition was not merely a character trait to be overcome when romance arrived. She did not have to become smaller in order to become someone’s partner. Her professional identity remained part of who she was, and the relationship had to make room for that person.
What I particularly appreciated was that the drama did not achieve this by turning every other woman into an obstacle.
There is remarkably little of the familiar “women must fight women” construction. The first team leader Ruan Sixian worked with could easily have become the jealous senior woman who feels threatened by the younger woman’s ability. Instead, their relationship gradually drifts towards friendship. There is no constant one-upmanship, no need for one woman to defeat another so that the heroine can shine.
The women have friendships. They look out for each other. They have their own insecurities and ambitions. Their lives do not revolve entirely around competing for the same man.
And then there is Zheng You’an, the stepsister, whose story I found unexpectedly moving.
She could so easily have been written as the jealous stepsister. Instead, the drama gives her something much more human: the fear of losing her mother again, along with a woman who has her own ambitions and insecurities. Her insecurity doesn’t automatically make her a bad person. She is frightened that a change in the family will mean losing something precious to her. I found myself glued to the screen whenever she appeared because I wanted to understand what was happening inside her.
The explanation surrounding Ruan Sixian’s biological mother and her relationship with Ruan’s late biological father felt rather lukewarm to me. But You’an’s insecurities felt beautifully true. They had an emotional logic that I could understand, even when I did not necessarily agree with everything the plot indicated.
Some of the characters, I felt, remained more like props within the story than fully developed people. They were there to support the main plot, move a particular relationship forward or provide the necessary information, and the drama did not always give them enough space to become much more than that. I can live with that, though, because at least the plot itself was not the run-of-the-mill kind where every woman has to become a rival, every misunderstanding has to become a catastrophe, and every relationship exists only to lead us towards the central romance.
That, to me, was one of the quiet strengths of the drama. It did not always turn emotional conflict into villainy. Even when some characters remained lightly sketched, the central relationships were given enough emotional space to feel human.
And I have to mention Yan An, played by Fei Qiming, Zheng You’an’s childhood friend. He is one of those secondary characters whose presence makes the world feel lived in. He is quietly supportive, often provides the comic relief when the story becomes too serious, and somehow manages to be useful without constantly demanding that the story make him the centre of attention. I liked that.
Perhaps that is part of why the drama felt like a world rather than simply a romance. People existed around the central couple. They had histories with one another. They supported each other, irritated each other, worried about each other and sometimes simply made a scene lighter.
And then, of course, there is Fu Mingyu.
My history with Wei Zheming goes back several dramas. I first encountered him in Perfect and Casual, when I watched him with what I now think of as my innocent, uncritical eyes. The two leads were cute, the professor helped her finish her course, and the romance was sweet. I enjoyed him as the rather severe professor and thought he did that sort of role very well.
Now, watching him again in Blossom Through the Cloud, I found myself paying attention to something quite different.
There is a collected quality in his screen presence that I find very attractive in an actor. I have an instinctive feeling that he studies the characters he portrays and does some degree of self-reflection before bringing them into the scene. I cannot claim to know his actual acting process, of course, but that is what I perceive as a viewer.
For me, there is a difference between an actor who follows a director’s instructions perfectly and an actor who has internally constructed the person who is receiving those instructions.
A director provides the structure of the scene: where the actor stands, where the camera is, when the character looks, when the dialogue lands, how the scene moves. But the actor can either remain inside those instructions or bring a fully considered character into them. When the latter happens, even a pause or a small change in expression can have a history behind it.
That is what I find interesting about Wei Zheming. His stillness does not always feel empty. It can feel as though there is someone thinking behind it.
And perhaps that is why Fu Mingyu worked for me.
The relationship between Fu Mingyu and Ruan Sixian was not simply a romance in which the successful man rescues or completes the ambitious woman. Their relationship had room for two people who were already becoming themselves.
That is important to me.
I don’t need a drama to tell me that a relationship is equal. I would rather see two people behave as though they understand that the other person has a life of their own.
There was, however, one point where I felt the drama became a little too mushy for my taste: the College–Industry Expert Symposium.
By then, I felt the drama was explaining something it had already shown me quite successfully through the characters. I didn’t need quite so much verbal confirmation. I had already seen Ruan Sixian’s ambition. I had already seen the friendships between women. I had already seen Zheng You’an’s vulnerability. I had already watched the central relationship develop.
Sometimes I think a story becomes stronger when it trusts its viewer a little more.
But that small reservation didn’t change my overall feeling.
What stayed with me was the sense of plausibility.
I don’t mean realistic in the literal sense. This is still a drama, and it has all the heightened circumstances and romantic storytelling that come with the genre. What I mean is emotionally plausible.
People have ambitions. People make mistakes. People become insecure. Women can disagree without becoming enemies. A stepsister can feel threatened without becoming wicked. A childhood friend can quietly support someone without needing to become another hero. A former colleague can become a friend instead of a rival. A man can fall in love without requiring the woman to abandon the person she is.
That may be why Blossom Through the Cloud stayed with me more than many other dramas I have watched.
It didn’t ask me to admire its characters from a distance. It allowed me to understand them.
And perhaps that is what I have discovered about myself as a viewer. I can forgive a drama many things when I can enter its world. I can forgive melodrama. I can forgive a little too much romance. I can even forgive the occasional symposium that pours sugar over everything.
What I find much harder to forgive is when I cannot believe the people.
Blossom Through the Cloud gave me people I could believe.
And for this particular viewer, that was enough to make the clouds part.
Credit: Convo with Goosey
