SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

A Love So Beautiful
(致我们单纯的小美好 / Zhi Wo Men Dan Chun De Xiao Mei Hao)
MyDramaList rating: 6.5/10

Yes, I’m still alive! First of all, I’d like to say that I’ve noticed how my reviews seem to get shorter each time. It’s not that I’m not motivated to review anymore, I still forward to it. I will try to keep my reviews as full as possible, not only describing the contents of the story, but also properly including my own opinions. Of course it depends on the mood I’m in while writing, but I don’t want some reviews to be more elaborate than others because I really want to leave a clear memory of all series I’ve watched.

It took me a long time to finish this drama, both because of personal circumstances (quitting my job, busy with rehearsals etc.) and because this drama was pretty slow-paced and I wasn’t always in the mood and sometimes really had to get into it again. So, my apologies for taking so long! Anyways, here we go.

I think I initially put this drama on my list because I probably saw a trailer of it in which it looked a cute love story and, you know, a typical high school romance drama.
In the end, I have to say it reminded me a lot of Love Til the End of Summer which I watched before (see link to my review here: https://meicchi.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/love-til-the-end-of-summer/). Not in terms of plot and development, but because of the story and what it depicts.
The story of A Love So Beautiful follows a group of high school friends as they go through their lives, first in school and then after graduation until they enter society.
The main character of the series is Chen Xiao Xi (played by Shen Yue). Xiaoxi is a very smol and childly energetic girl, the typical klutz and bad at studying type, who is hopelessly in love with her neighbor since childhood, the cold but handsome Jiang Chen (played by Hu Yi Tian), who is the most popular guy in school because of his looks and high grades. Xiaoxi keeps chasing him and is very open about her affection towards him, but he keeps brushing her off, although it’s clear that he doesn’t completely dislike her. The love story between these two is the main storyline.
Apart from that, there’s Xiaoxi’s good friend Lin Jing Xiao – nicknamed Jingjing- (played by Wang Xin Wei) and nerdy Lu Yang (played by Sun Ning). Jingjing, a pretty but tough athletic girl, only has to save Lu Yang from bullies once to make him fall head over heels with her.
Later on a transfer student named Wu Bo Song (played by Gao Zhi Ting) enters their circle of friends and he falls in love with Xiaoxi, making him and Jiang Chen rivals. Wu Bo Song is a talented swimmer, his father coaches him in national competitions, but his growing feelings for Xiaoxi start effecting his performance in the water.
(When he was first introduced I thought Wu Bo Song was a Korean name, but he is definitely Chinese, my bad)

Apart from exploring Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen’s romantic development, there doesn’t seem to be a real plot to the story. A lot of things happen at school that brings the group closer together as friends, there are happy moments, embarrassing moments, sad moments, love rivals appear, friendships deepen, stress about grades, classmates in trouble etcetera. The parts in high school where they get in trouble together and bond as friends really reminded me of Love til the End of Summer. Also, when their homeroom teacher gives a speech at the end when they all graduate, it had a similar feeling to it. There wasn’t as much rivalry and sabotaging between people as in LttEoS, but the pace and other scenes depicting the lightness and carefreeness of youth was really similar.
It not having a core storyline or plot was however one of the reasons that it didn’t hold my constant attention. There wasn’t any real drama in it, the events happening in school weren’t as defining as in LttEoS (sorry for already comparing the two so much).
While watching this drama I realized that maybe I really do prefer dramas with a clear plot and direction that work towards a certain goal rather than slice of life series that just depict the ‘daily lives of…’. I’m not saying that it completely killed the drama for me, but it did play a part in how long it took me to finish it.

As I mentioned, the love story between Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen is the main storyline in the series. If I had to identify a plot then that would probably be Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen eventually ending up together.
I think their relationship was very similar to Itazura na Kiss. Xiaoxi is the happy-go-lucky klutzy girl yearning for the genius but icy aloof guy who initially treats her coldly. But there is a distinct difference in their initial relationship. They’ve been neighbors since childhood, always lived next to each other, so they’ve visited each other’s houses a lot in the past as kids. Jiang Chen lost his father when he was young and his mother took his younger brother with her when she moved to work in the city, leaving Jiang Chen mostly alone. In the final episode he reveals that Xiaoxi started to mean a lot to him in this period because she was the only one who kept him company and kept chasing after him so that he wouldn’t be alone. She would always wait for him to go to school together and even bring him breakfast in the morning. Xiaoxi’s parents were always very kind and welcoming to him as well. Jiang Chen’s abandonment issues caused by his father’s death and his mother’s neglection have resulted in him holding back his feelings for a very long time.
So his attitude in being cold and distant come from a completely different place than e.g. ItaKiss. Also, when it becomes apparent that Wu Bo Song likes Xiaoxi and starts making a move, Jiang Chen decides that it’s time to step in and sweep Xiaoxi away before it’s too late and he immediately starts acting differently.

I would like to write a little about all the individual characters now.
First of all, Xiaoxi. Of course, I know Shen Yue from Meteor Garden 2018 where she portrayed the main character Shancai. I remember that in the first episode of Meteor Garden 2018 they made a reference to A Love So Beautiful which I didn’t understand then because I hadn’t watched it yet. Anyways, I now got it.
I have to say that despite the writers’ attempts to portray Xiaoxi as cute and innocent as possible, at a certain point her childishness really started to get on my nerves. I get that it’s part of her character to be a klutz and a crybaby, but I still felt that she acted too much like a baby, even when she got older. At a certain point I really wanted her to grow up, as mean as that sounds, and to be more mature.
Maybe it’s because I really like to see independent female characters in Asian dramas these days (they’re going places in Korean dramas for sure) and I become more and more sceptical when the girl is portrayed as the spineless damsel who has to be protected by strong men fighting over her. In the case of A Love So Beautiful, this definitely bothered me a little.
I’ve gotten used to the fact that in Asian dramas the girls need to be protected by the guys, and girls who act cutesy and girly are more popular than women who can take care of themselves. Sometimes, it even goes as far as the guys wanting to ‘take care’ of their girlfriends almost as if they are their ‘pets’. They need to be spoiled and taken care of and patted and kept content. In a lot of cases, female characters in dramas are treated/referred to as objects that belong to them. This was something that bothered me particularly in Korean drama ‘The Heirs’ as well, because the girl was so apathic and the guys were just grabbing her by the arm and dragging her everywhere as if she was their possession. I really dislike that kind of behavior. (Another unrelated example: I was watching the Arrowverse and the phrase ‘You love her? Then put a ring on her.’, came by and it genuinely pissed me off.)
ANYWAYS (sorry I get carried away), Xiaoxi was one of these typical girls who relied completely on a guy to to make her happy. It seemed to me that she had a really idealistic image of her romance with Jiang Chen. When they graduated and eventually started dating and Jiang Chen got busy with becoming a doctor and couldn’t always make time for her because of assisting at surgeries, it didn’t go as she’d expected. I really got the feeling she wanted her relationship with Jiang Chen to be lovey-dovey forever, that he’d put her first in everything as she did with him. But the reason I felt she was so immature was that real life, real adult life, doesn’t work that way. She felt like he didn’t make enough time for her and then almost immediately got angry with him. He couldn’t come to her because he was in a surgery, and she immediately accuses him of not liking her enough. I also thought that, in their temporal breakup, her immaturity was one of the major things to blame.

About Jiang Chen, I didn’t know the actor (nor any of the other actors for that matter), but I think he acted well, especially when he started showing affection for Xiaoxi. It’s like in ItaKiss, when Irie starts opening up more and gradually shows more expression on his face, that’s what he did too and he did it very well I think.
I only have some critism regarding his character when it comes to the breakup thing. Which was completely based on misunderstandings from both sides.
The whole thing starts when one of his doctor superiors offers him an exclusive traineeship or education at a famous hospital in Beijing. He initially refuses right off the bat – for Xiaoxi. But she finds out about the rumors of him going before he can tell her and immediately starts blaming him for not telling her and without even giving him a chance to explain she’s like ‘Let’s break up’. (I really disliked Xiaoxi here because she was just throwing a childish tantrum and wasn’t even willing to listen to his side of the story.) He didn’t even get the chance to tell her that he already gave up this amazing opportunity for her. And like, the same day, his first surgical patient dies on the table and he is super upset and he comes to her for comfort and she’s just pissed at him and sends him away without even asking what’s wrong. I mean. It was so obvious from his face that he felt really crappy about something, but she didn’t even look at him and only went on about her own reason to be mad at him (which was the childish reason).
I don’t want to dwell on frustrating things too much, so let me get to my point about Jiang Chen. When he eventually starts winning her back, he starts acting a little cocky, saying things like ‘she always belonged to me’ and ‘we’ll get back together anyway’ and just grabbing her hand and kissing her without her permission.
There is one scene where he follows her with his car and pretty much commands her to apologize to him. I mean, I was on his side, but it’s not like he didn’t have anything to apologize for. In that scene he treats her like a little kid who did something bad and needs to apologize and after apologizes she gets another chance and a reward kiss.
It just felt wrong to me, also that Xiaoxi so meekly apologizes while up to that point she’s the one refusing to get back together.
He suddenly starts showing a really persistent side that doesn’t have any respect for Xiaoxi’s privacy or boundaries. He just kisses her when she lets her guard down for a moment, and he won’t respect that she needs time to decide for herself if she wants to get back with him. He even semi-forces a proposal onto her, for god’s sake.
Honestly, the development in the last part of the series was really fast and kind of unnatural to me.

Let me talk a little more about this sudden change of pace in the latter part of the series.
As soon as they graduate high school, the pace of the series suddenly changes and from one moment to the next, there’s time jump after time jump in which they *boom* are suddenly dating and *boom* are suddenly adults and *boom* are suddenly working. I honestly felt like I missed a lot in-between, when the next moment Jiang Chen out of the blue started calling Xiaoxi his girlfriend (to be clear, ALSO without properly talking to her/confessing how he feels about her first). And then they have this breakup and the next episode it is suddenly 3 years later and they meet again and the way they reconcile in the end… it all felt rushed to me.
It felt like they had only four more episodes left to the finale and they had to quickly think of a way to have them make up or something.
As mentioned before, LttEoS -in my opinion- made very good use of technological development (cellphones) to illustrate the times changing, but in the case of ALSB the time jumps were a bit too spontaneous and unannounced for me. It all just felt like it was going too fast at the end.
One moment Xiaoxi would still be mad at Jiang Chen, and the next moment she’d be smiling giddily again because he grabbed her hand. And then they were suddenly all kissy and lovey-dovey and she even went back to her childish self a bit. I don’t know, I had the same feeling with Love til the End of Summer when I didn’t really understand where they wanted to go with the ending. It was clear that they were going to end up together from the start, so why put in the whole ‘on a break’ and even give Wu Bo Song hope again of winning Xiaoxi’s heart after all — but then, not. Again. Sorry Wu Bo Song.

Wu Bo Song was the typical second male lead character. The awesome friend who always supported Xiaoxi and was always there for her when Jiang Chen wasn’t. The guy who was the nicest and whose acts never got noticed. And he keeps trying to the very end. When Jiang Chen goes to Beijing after all, he meets Xiaoxi at the airport where she’s crying and then *time jump to 3 years later* they’re suddenly “dating”. My first thought was, really? Jiang Chen is out of town, Bo Song is here to comfort you so then you just run off with Bo Song, taking advantage of his feelings while you know you don’t really love him? I just feel bad that Bo Song thought he finally got his chance and then Jiang Chen re-appears and Xiaoxi is like ‘okay yeah no this isn’t going to work after all’.
But in the end he keeps being the awesome supporting friend, relaying Jiang Chen’s true feelings through to Xiaoxi and giving up.
On a side note, I think the actor had a really friendly face (lol, I can’t explain why but he just looked really nice xD).

I’m going to write about Jingjing and Lu Yang now because they were my favorite characters and couple in the series and I’m super happy they got their happy ending.
First of all I was glad that the whole thing wasn’t just about Xiaoxi and Jiang Chen. Jingjing and Lu Yang played an important part, not only as supporting side characters, but they were people that were really needed in the story for balance.
Lu Yang is my favorite character by far because he is such a bean. At first glance he seems to be the typical nerdy friend who just wants to be popular with the girls, but when he falls for Jingjing he also goes through a rough patch (because Jingjing initally has the hots for the school doctor) and we see him genuinely get hurt. He also gets hurt physically because it turns out that he has a heart disease and at a certain point this almost gets the better of him and he has to be hospitalized. It is in this period that Jingjing starts to realize her own feelings for him.
I found it so heart-wrenching when she confronted him for suddenly acting distant and all he could say was that she deserved someone healthy and not someone with such a weak heart as his. His confession to her was the most badass one ever, because he came out of the hospital with his hair dyed in seven different colors and he got on stage for the end-of-year speech and announced how much he loved her in front of the entire school.
The little moments between these two were just generally heartwarming and cute and the actors portrayed really well how fond they were of each other. In the end, they even get married and that’s the moment in this drama where my heart was glowing the most. The way he looks at her when he first sees her in that wedding dress and mumbles that he must have saved the Milky Way in his past life – MY HEART.
All in all, I just really liked Lu Yang’s actor because he was genuinely funny (I usually have trouble with forced funniness in Chinese dramas) and showed so many expressions and sides to the character. I don’t like one-dimensional characters, characters that are just written as ‘the funny sidekick’ etcetera, so I’m really happy they didn’t just make him ‘the nerdy friend’.

I think the casting for this drama was good. I’m not entirely sure, but I even got the feeling that it wasn’t dubbed. Maybe it was, but it didn’t bother me as much as in Meteor Garden. It was weird to hear Shen Yue talk with a different voice all of a sudden, though, but this voice sounded much more natural, so I thought that this might be her own voice. (How weird is it that you don’t even know the actors’ real voices because of the damn dubbing system?)
The acting was good as well, in the same way as in Love til the End of Summer (again), it didn’t feel exaggerated or forced but well done. I also liked Xiaoxi’s parents, in how human they were portrayed.
There was one guy, a teacher I think, in their school who was yelling ALL THE TIME and this kind of annoyed me, but other than that I had no criticism about the cast. I think this was just how his character was written, the teacher who would yell at students about every stupid little rule.
I would’ve liked to see a little more depth in the homeroom teacher as well. I was reminded of Love til the End of Summer, where they showed really clearly that the homeroom teacher’s strict exterior was mostly a wall she put up while she actually really cared about her students. The homeroom teacher in A Love So Beautiful was just really strict all the time and then she suddenly would get emotional about her students while she never really showed any compassion to them in class, so that felt a little weird. But those are just details.

Overall, if you like slow-paced slife-of-life dramas that just depict the daily high school lives (like the Korean School 2013/2015/2017 series for example), you might like this. For me, one typical love story as plot didn’t do me much in this case (although I do like ItaKiss, I don’t know what it is). I really liked LttEoS because of the complexity and depth it added to the story and all the characters and the use of stunning cinematography, but unfortunately this series fell a little short for me in comparison.
The love triangle Xiaoxi-Jiang Chen-Wu Bo Song was just a bit too typical and one-dimensional for me.

There’s a couple more Chinese dramas further away on my list, and I will keep an eye out for more interesting ones. It was a nice breather in-between, and now I would like to return to dramas with a more determined plot. Keep an eye out for my next review! Thanks for reading ^^