Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Love til the End of Summer/Rush to the Dead Summer
(夏至未至 / Xia Zhi Wei Zhi)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

This drama had been on my list for quite some time. I think I saw a trailer of it once and decided to give it a go. Although I don’t usually watch a lot of Chinese/Taiwanese dramas, this one looked like a good watch because it depicted both romance and emotional depth (concluded from reading the summary). And I also read that this drama would be special because it is one of the few Chinese dramas which aren’t dubbed, and only use the actors’ real voices. Since the dubbing is one of the reasons I don’t like most C-Dramas, this came as a big plus.

I knew the main actress from the Chinese version of Hana Yori Dango, which was apparently 10 years before this drama. She still looks exactly the same, super petite, skinny and doll-faced.
I’m not familiar with many Chinese actors so the rest I didn’t know. When I finally was about to watch it, I saw that it had 46 episodes -whoops- so I watched another drama simultaneously to ease the emotional tension. Even though it was 46 episodes, it still didn’t take me that long to finish because even though a lot emotional stuff happens, the story isn’t complicated so it’s very accessible to watch.

One of the things that immediately stood out to me was the cinematography. The shots are beautiful, expanded, almost panorama-like. They seem to have a knack for cinematic shots in Chinese dramas, to make scenery look almost idyllic. I guess dorms in Chinese schools must look like this, I think the rooms look very cozy and cute. Style-wise it was the closest to Korean drama that I’ve ever seen in a Chinese dramas, also in ways of more realistic acting and camera positioning. There were some true pearls in there, I was very impressed with the cinematography.

I will try and give a summary of the story before going into comments.
The story spans a 10-year period of time of a group of friends who meet each other in high school and after graduation still manage to stay together, even though everything changes.
Two best friends since childhood, Fu Xiao Si (played by Chen Xue Dong) and Lu Zhi Ang (Bai Jing Ting) are the two main heartthrobs at school, they always place 1 and 2 respectively at exams and they are the most popular guys in school. Xiao Si is the typical handsome genius who doesn’t show a lot of emotion. Zhi Ang is the only person he can truly be himself around. Zhi Ang is the complete opposite of Xiao Si. He is always energetic, cheerful and funny.
The two meet Li Xia (played by Zheng Shuang) when she is seated in front of them in class. In the beginning, Xiao Si and Li Xia can’t really see eye to eye, but some things happen and the romantic tension between them grows. Zhi Ang initially also likes Li Xia, but seeing the bond between her and his best friend grow, he decides to not be an obstacle to them. He always chooses his friendship with Xiao Si above anything.
Furthermore, there’s Cheng Qi Qi (played by Chai Bi Yun), Li Xia’s best friend. Qi Qi is a very social person, she’s from a rich but strict family and sees her time at school as true freedom away from her demanding parents. She has a talent for getting people to like her very quickly, a talent that the mild-natured Li Xia envies about her. However, Qi Qi is placed in a different class from the main trio and soon starts to feel left out, because she wants to be a part of their group as well but isn’t as much included in their activities together (both in and out of school) as she’d like. Contrarily, she starts feeling neglected and lonely. Especially because she falls in love with Xiao Si and starts getting hurt again and again when she is confronted with the fact that he only has eyes for Li Xia.
The last friend appears in the second semester, her name is Yu Jian (played by Xia Zi Tong). Due to her punk-ish way of dressing, everyone initially thinks she is bad news, a delinquent maybe, but Li Xia doesn’t buy it and starts standing up for her, gaining Yu Jian’s friendship. Yu Jian’s dream is to be a famous singer and have her own album produced.
The high school days are probably the most peaceful part of the series. Everyone is still very young and learning about everything, friendship, trust, love. And everyone still has big dreams and ambitions. They can’t even imagine what life will be like in 10 years.

In the summary of the series, it only tells about the high school phase and then how everything is suddenly different 10 years later. But that’s not how it goes in the series. It doesn’t suddenly jump to 10 years later, the thing mentioned in the summary actually only happen in the last 5 episodes or so, when everything is seriously messed up for a while. Up until then, we see everything that happens after they graduate, how they all move to Shanghai to fulfill their dreams and how some of them learn the hard way how naive they were in dreaming so big.
Yu Jian is the first one to move to Shanghai, having already made a deal with a media company there that promised her she would be able to sing. She even breaks up with her boyfriend to follow that dream. However, when she gets there, she immediately finds that they’re not just going to let her sing: she first has to ‘please’ some board members in order to get contracted. Refusing this, she ends up working in a convenience store and has to lie to her friends back home about how well her music career is going.
On the other hand, calculating Qi Qi isn’t as stubborn and won’t stop at anything to acquire fame, even if that means betraying her friends – which she does, multiple times. Her greed to receive Xiao Si’s affection only grows, and driven by that and her manipulative manager, she does some really nasty things.
Fu Xiao Si and Li Xia stay together. Xiao Si becomes a famous artist – he was always great at painting and won prizes at school as well- and Li Xia, who also likes painting, becomes his assistent.
Zhi Ang travels to Japan to study abroad there and meets Yan Mo (Zheng He Hui Zi), an immature but affectionate girl who becomes infatuated with him. After graduation in Japan, he comes back to China and for a while, all the friends are reunited at the same media company Li Tong. It seems ideal, who would have thought they would all be working together at the same company? Xiao Si and Qi Qi are artists labeled under the company, Zhi Ang and Yan Mo both become managers (Yan Mo’s father is the company’s owner). Yu Jian meets Duan Qiao (Pang Han Chen), a young man striving to become an architect who supports her to continue her singing career, and eventually also catches the attention of Li Tong. However, Qi Qi feels threatened by this new interest in Yu Jian and makes sure she can’t sign a contract with the company.
From this point on, everything slowly but surely goes downhill. As Qi Qi becomes more greedy, she creates more tension and instances where her friends are hurt. She even concurs a lie to Li Xia that she’s pregnant with Xiao Si’s child after a drunk night together and makes Li Xia leave Xiao Si. Zhi Ang accidentally stabs a hostile artist trying to physically harm Xiao Si and is forced to go on the run. Xiao Si is left without his two best friends and his eyesight declining and is completely distraught.

The last five or six episodes of the series were seriously almost unbearable. So much was already going on with Xiao Si and his reputation in jeopardy and Li Xia leaving, and then they also felt the need to let Duan Qiao die (which was really unnecessary in my opinion). He and Yu Jian were on their way to get married (of course) and (of course) he crossed the street without paying attention and (of course) there was a car that appeared out of nowhere. I really didn’t see the meaning in his death, it felt more like they were determined to make everything go worse and worse and hurt Yu Jian even more – she was just starting to open up again.

In the end, the company issues are solved by Yan Mo’s father (thank god) and the evil manager and director were chased away. Even though Qi Qi got away without punishment, she stopped being a backstabbing bitch and reflected (somewhat). She didn’t set right her mistakes and lies about being pregnant, which annoyed me. Because now Xiao Si and Li Xia’s breakup was based on a lie and they still could’ve been together. On the other side it made me doubt their relationship because it was so obviously a lie, but still Li Xia chose to believe it and leave Xiao Si in a time where he needed her most of all. Xiao Si was never good at expressing his emotions, but his love for Li Xia was so apparent – I was kind of disappointed in Li Xia that she believed her treacherous fake friend (and she knew Qi Qi was treacherous because she just heard everything she’d done in the past) so quickly over her ‘great love’.
They do meet again at the very end, when Zhi Ang and Yan Mo get married, but the series ends with them standing opposite each other. They couldn’t get back together like that, because we saw before that Li Xia already moved on, and was discussing marriage with her new boyfriend, so I didn’t really get why she came back and what her intentions were at the end.

So, that’s it for the story. I would now like to discuss the characters and the actors more.
First of all, I was impressed by the complexity of the characters. In the beginning everyone seemed to be pretty easy characters to grasp, the cold genius school prince, the cheerful best friend, the shy sweet girl who is ‘chosen’ by the popular guy… But especially through the long after-graduation part, the character development for each character is explored and we see many different sides of everyone.
Fu Xiao Si isn’t just the cold genius, yes he has an emotionless face, but he’s simply very bad at expressing his feelings and this leads him to many awkward confrontations and situations. I think he was very well cast, because he did have an emotionless face but he also exuded this kind of melancholy, which fitted his role as a misunderstood genius.
Li Xia – I actually have to say something about this. Maybe it was the actress, but I actually found Li Xia one of the most difficult characters to read in the whole series. She was described as ‘the sweetest, most charming girl you can imagine’, but I actually didn’t find her that ‘sweet’ all the time. She wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself and plain tell someone she didn’t like in their face that she wasn’t interested in listening to them. Other than that, she had a lot of ambiguous facial expressions that I couldn’t really put my finger on. She would look worried most of the time, and then suddenly show a little pout or smile. I also thought she was too lenient – whenever someone would say ‘I’m fine’ (even though they were clearly not), she would just be like ‘Okay then, then it’s good’ and not go into it any deeper. It definitely puzzled me in the case of Qi Qi, because they were supposedly best friends but clearly were not on the same wavelength at all. Of course, some things needed to be spoken, but when Qi Qi was feeling down it was so obvious something was bothering her, Li Xia should’ve pushed further more as in ‘What do you mean ‘You’re fine’? You’r clearly not.’ But she didn’t, so a lot of times it seemed like she just didn’t really wanted to get too close to people emotionally, making her seem more distant. Whenever the girls in her dorm would girl-talk or gossip, she also made clear she didn’t want to get involved. In that sense, I didn’t find her that typical ‘sweet’ girl.
When it comes to the relationship between Xiao Si and Li Xia, even though it was clear that there was romantic tension between them, there were a lot of times I found things a bit forced. For instance, Xiao Si seemed to dominate their whole relationship, making Li Xia seem like a will-less puppet at many occasions. He would just say things like ‘You will be by my side forever’ or ‘Be my girlfriend, I want to take care of you’, ‘Let’s get married’. Like, he wouldn’t ask her, he would just state it. And she always just went along with it with an awkward smile. Another thing I noticed was that they barely looked each other in the eye when they were talking about emotional things. When Li Xia asks him why he chose her over all the other girls since she’s so plain, she is constantly casting her eyes down. Xiao Si, on the other hand, is always looking her in the eye. His love for her -although not well expressed in words- becomes more than clear in the way he looks at her. But apart from the many mutual stare-moments, when they are actually talking to each other, in a lot of cases they weren’t looking at each other. Even when Xiao Si asks her to be his girlfriend – EVEN when he proposes her. In the case of the proposal it was even worse because he hugged her from behind and did all the talking from there, so they didn’t even have the chance to look each other in the eye while he was actually PROPOSING. I don’t know, that’s why it still felt very awkward between them, even when they were already together for such a long time.
Lu Zhi Ang is literally the most precious puppy I’ve seen in a drama. It’s been a long time since I would actually go ‘ohmygosh don’t cry puppy’ and ‘oh my precious baby’ on a drama character. What I loved about his character was that they gave him very good character development. He used to be this carefree, energetic, lovable, always smiling boy who would always sleep in class – and then before he even graduates his mother passes away and before anyone notices he’s grown up. I found that a very good piece, where Xiao Si tried to comfort him and he said something like ‘I’ve never seen anyone grow up within a matter of minutes like this’. This happening of course grieves Zhi Ang to the bone, and he does fall into a phase of rebellion because of it, but luckily not for long because he still realizes how much his friends worry and care for him. After that, he suddenly becomes a lot more mature, although his mischievous strike still remains.
I personally loved the relationship between Xiao Si and Zhi Ang. Their bromance was unequalled to any other one I’ve seen in a drama up until now. Even to the point of flirting with each other and rolling on the floor frolicking with each other like a bunch of kid dorks. It was really nice to see how many expressions Xiao Si was able to produce when being around Zhi Ang.
To be very honest, I didn’t really warm up to his relationship with Yan Mo. On the contrary, I found Yan Mo very childish and annoying. She initially forced a relationship on Zhi Ang, clinging to him while he was clearly showing dismay, and she would constantly jump to conclusions and pull stupid pranks on him. I didn’t think they were compatible at all. In the end, there were a few cases where I did like her, because she seemed to be the only one who actually saw what was going on in the company and that Qi Qi and her evil manager were the evildoers. And there were maybe one or two instances were she actually acted mature. But apart from that, she was so weirdly obsessed with Zhi Ang that it seemed to be all about him and her. Even when she turned out to be the director’s daughter and Zhi Ang was working under her, she used meetings and her position to tease him (which I thought was very immature).
Even when Zhi Ang was on the run, she asked Xiao Si ‘Do you think I will ever see him again?’ Not even thinking about how this must be for Xiao Si, to have lost his best friend of more than 10 years, she asks I instead of we. Those were the little things that annoyed me about her.
The only moment I kind of approved was when Zhi Ang finally decided to turn himself in, and the sad smiles they gave each other before he was taken in were very effective. And the hug they shared when he came out three years later was very sweet. So in the end I kind of came to terms with their relationship, lol.
Qi Qi is probably one of the most complex characters to play in this series, so kudos to the actress. Her personality had many layers, and even though looking at it from one point of view it is very easy to say ‘that bitch!’ I have to say that there was some foundation to her actions. Especially the moments in high school when she felt left out. I could really understand how she felt, because I’ve felt it myself. On the other side I also know that it’s usually not done on purpose. The three didn’t mean to leave her out, they were usually just in a situation where Qi Qi wasn’t present, or made spontaneous last minute plans after Qi Qi had already left. Nonetheless, as I said, I could relate with Qi Qi whenever she heard afterwards that they had been hanging out again together and she was like ‘why didn’t you call me too?’, because her family situation was so upsetting.
Growing up like that, yearning for true attention and freedom she never received at home, it all went to her head when she got a whiff of the fame she had longed for for so long. I still think that it was wrong of her to let greed get the best of her and let her jealousy escalate to the point of hurting her only friends. There was one scene where she was alone in her dressing room and she was fighting these contradicting feelings, going a little crazy, and then in the end she put on new lipstick, saying to herself something like (I don’t remember the exact words, so maybe I’m wrong) ‘You can’t let people see you be ugly from the outside as well’. In the end, even though I was one of those people yelling ‘you bitch!’ in the back of my head as well, I think she was actually a really complex and interesting character and the actress portrayed her very well.
Yu Jian; I liked her from the get-go, the girl who looked like she came right out of a rock band but who to everyone’s surprise to be just a normal sweet girl! And she had a supercute boyfriend, his name was Qing Tian (Juck Zhang – I have to mention him because he was so cute). But when she stated her ambitions to him and asked him to go to Shanghai with her, he refused. At that moment I could already guess that Yu Jian was the one being naive, because her head was still in the clouds, and Qing Tian was the adult: ‘And what if we go there, where are we going to live? How are we going to earn money? Are we going to play music under a bridge? Been there, don’t wanna do it again. And I don’t want that for you, either.’ He was actually being sensible and she couldn’t stand him not ‘fully supporting’ her. So she left – he wanted to see her off at the bus terminal but was too late.
After being in Shanghai for a while, she eventually misses him so much she goes back – only to find him with a new girlfriend. Duan Qiao, already interested in her at that point, subsequently provides her with all the support she could ever want. She never shows the same affection to Duan Qiao she showed Qing Tian, but maybe this also has to do with her maturing. She is probably one of the more mature characters from the series. Even when Duan Qiao dies, we don’t get to see a full memorial service where everyone is gathered around grieving. We don’t see the others’ reaction to it at all. All that’s shown is Yu Jian’s response. The way she deals with it all on her own. In the end she returns home and reconciles with Qing Tian, although they don’t become lovers again. But it was nice to see them together again in a friendly way. Apart from that, Yu Jian seemed very stoic in the second half of the series. She would have a blank/neutral look on her face, the glimmer in her eye and the mischievous smile she showed during the high school period don’t come back except for a few small moments with Duan Qiao. And then there was the hair. I don’t know what this was supposed to be: in the beginning I really liked her hairstyle, her own color with some highlights. She was seen wearing a wig once, for a gig or something. But then, after she came to Shanghai, she was suddenly wearing this super obvious fake pink wig that didn’t suit her at all in my opinion. The fact that it was so obviously a wig really bothered me. And then afterwards she went for granny-grey, which made her look like a boy even more, but was still better than the wig. In-between there was one time when she had to pretend she was Li Xia and she suddenly had brown hair again -maybe that was supposed to be a wig? But it was clearly her real hair?- anyways, in the end she got her own real brown hair back which suited her the best.
This may sound unimportant, but details like this always make a big impression on me and also play in part in how much I take things seriously.

There was one character that only really appeared during the high school phase. The girl Li Yan Ran (Wang Yu Wen), who was Xiao Si’s childhood friend and she was so in love with him that before Qi Qi became obsessed, she was the ‘bitch’ that kept sabotaging Xiao Si and Li Xia’s relationship. After an ‘accident’ (later also explained to be Qi Qi’s doing – even though it was obvious from the beginning for me because Qi Qi was already starting to get a bit twisted then) a staging consisting of a huge pile of boxes for some sort of party event at school collapses on Yan Ran as she’s fighting over Xiao Si with Li Xia. Xiao Si jumps in and saves Li Xia, but Yan Ran’s leg gets caught in the rubble and she even breaks her leg, causing her desired dancing career to become uncertain.
Now even though Yan Ran was just a little jealous girl who couldn’t get the boy she was in love with to love her back, we meet her again in the future, where’s she shopping for a wedding ring with her fiance. Zhi Ang bumps into her and we see how mature Yan Ran has gotten, talking about her crush on Xiao Si as a silly infatuation, and that she really wishes Xiao Si and Li Xia to be happy together. It is also thanks to her that the truth about Qi Qi comes to the surface, as she reacts rationally that she’s not surprised that ‘that calculating girl’ made it that far in the entertainment business and she also reveals that it was Qi Qi who was responsible for the accident that time. It was really nice to see at least someone mature enough to acknowledge their youth naivety and has now gotten over it and went on with her life.

I need to make two more compliments to minor characters: the homeroom teacher Miss. Wen Ren (Ni Jing Yian) and Li Xia’s high school roommate Song Ying Ying (Zhao Yami).
I really liked the homeroom teacher, she was perfectly casted. She was the so-called ‘Ice Queen’, the unyieldingly strict teacher that everyone was afraid of, but secretly she really cared about her students and stood up for her class to the director every time. The series actually starts with graduation day, when all the students are emotional because they don’t want to part from their teacher. Seeing that, I thought ‘wow, I’ve never seen such a sentimental class’. Then it started all from the beginning, where they were still very intimidated by their teacher and it was nice to see how this relationship between teacher and students also developed. The woman playing the teacher portrayed the character very well, I think, because she had this hard poker face but when she smiled, she looked really kind.
Ying Ying instantly jumped out to me from her first appearance. At first I was just laughing about this one girl who was acting so intensely, but instead of getting annoyed about her exaggerating, I actually found it really refreshing. You don’t see a lot of this over-the-top acting in Asian dramas. And it wasn’t over-the-top as in ‘too much’ or ‘fake’, but it remained credible because the actress was acting with full commitment. They say that when you have to act really over-the-top, people will find it fake if they see you yourself don’t take it seriously. As long as you take it seriously, no matter how weird it feels, the public will believe you. And this girl really succeeded in that. She used all the muscles in her face without a glimpse of hesitation or shame, she wasn’t scared to show weird hilarious expressions and positions – even at the end, during the wedding, she took the spotlight by actively screaming for the bride’s bouquet – and I always admire that kind of commitment, certainly in Asian dramas where the focus still mainly seems to be on looking pretty/handsome.

Another thing that couldn’t NOT be noticed: the freaking sponsors. At first I just thought ‘wow, they drink a lot of Coca Cola in this series’. But then it became more obvious with the episode. Not just the Cola. Coca Cola, KFC, Lux, Unif Instant Noodles, Three Squirrels peanuts.
Everything had to be pronounced by its name, as if it was some sort of commercial:
‘Here, I bought you your favorite Lux shampoo.’ ‘Let’s eat some Unif instant noodles.’ ‘Give me some of the Three Squirrels nuts. Which ones are there? Peanuts, walnuts, pecans *insert several more kinds of nuts*’. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many sponsors so obviously promoted in a drama series. Also, did they really repeatedly drink and eat all this? Because every single person in this drama was hella skinny. Even the food-obsessed roommate who was supposed to be ‘chubby’ wasn’t really chubby. There was one scene when all the roommates had to help her get into a dress and it ripped because she wasn’t skinny enough… I don’t believe she wasn’t actually able to get into that dress. That was the only thing, if you want to make a stereotype, make it a good one.

As for the continuity of the series’ timeline: I liked that they used the development of mobile phones as a way to show the changing of times and the growing accessibility to keep contact. In the first break from high school, no-one had mobile phones yet so they couldn’t contact each other at all while everyone went home.
At a certain point I think the fast forward shots (I don’t know what they are called in cinematography terms, the shots where you have an overview of a city and it’s played in fast forward that it becomes night and day again) were meant to indicate the passing of several years. Because from one episode onto the other they would suddenly say about something that happened 10 minutes earlier in the episode that it was something that had happened a year ago.

Overall, it was a very eventful series and not one episode was boring. There was a very natural build-up in the story and the characters’ development and relationships. I think it gives a very good image of the innocence of youth and how ‘life’ can suddenly be more painful and harsh than you’d imagine. The most important thing is to search for the warmth of the people you know care about you. As long as you are surrounded by that warmth and support, there will be a way out of the dark.
None of the characters ends up living the future that they’d dreamed of in school. They all get shit thrown their way, they all get to face difficult choices and especially in the entertainment industry, the dog-eat-dog business mustn’t be underestimated. I think it’s a very good coming-of-age story, depicting different kinds of people who chose to go different kinds of ways. Some are blinded by success -or the illusion of success- that they are prepared to give up everything for it. One of Qi Qi’s best quotes at the end of the series was ‘I’ve gained the world. But still I feel like I’ve gained nothing.’
The importance of friends, especially in dire straits, the importance of trust and support. It may have started out as a simple romantic high school drama story, the way it turned out after depicting ‘what happens after school’, is what made it a real story about real life and real people and how they deal with all kinds of miserable and difficult situations, but still have each other to come back to.
One of the better Chinese dramas I’ve seen so far.