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.
Soft Memory
(別碰我心底的小柔軟 / Bie Peng Wo Xin Di De Xiao Rou Ruan / Don’t Touch The Soft Spot of My Heart)
MyDramaList rating: 5.5/10
I guess my Spin-the-Wheel app has developed a ‘soft spot’ for Chinese romcoms, all of a sudden. Again, I don’t remember precisely when or why I put this show on my list, but I must’ve seen a snippet somewhere and thought it looked interesting. I usually like Chinese dramas that follow a group of friends throughout high school, college and adult life (like Love til the End of Summer, A Love So Beautiful, With You and A Little Thing Called First Love), so I thought this would be something similar, especially since the summary on MDL described the characters ‘navigating the ups and downs of youth and discovering what really matters in love and life’. However, as much as I’d hoped for another wholesome coming-of-age Chinese drama, I have to say from the start that this show didn’t grab me whatsoever. I’m still going to write a proper review about it, since every drama is an exhaustive investment of time and money, but just be warned that this will be a relatively negative review.
Soft Memory is a Hunan TV/Tencent Video/Youku C-Drama that consists of 20 episodes of about 35 minutes each (including the, again very lengthy and full of spoilers, opening and ending credits). I started watching it on KissKH, but then the episodes suddenly stopped loading and I switched to the full playlist on the Tencent Video YouTube channel.
The story basically focusses on three friends that get involved in an unusual love triangle. The first character we’re introduced to is Sun Xiao Rou (played by Xin Rui Qi), a very typical high school girl with her head in the clouds. One of my favorite songs by the Dutch duo ‘Yentl en de Boer’ has a line that goes (translated): “A girl is born to give love, to drift through clouds in pink, with a prince” and I thought that described Xiao Rou to a T. She literally says in her introduction: “I believe that every girl in puberty should be full of yearning for the love in fairytales, and I am no exception”. She was depicted as an ultimate girly girl that only loved cute and romantic things, and got completely immersed in crushes and daydreams.
At the start of the story, the target of her infatuation is a tall, handsome boy she calls ‘Pleasant Goat’ (which has something to do with the name of the bus stop she always spots him at). One day, Pleasant Goat suddenly transfers to Xiao Rou’s class, which makes her indulge in her destiny-filled daydream of him even more, as much as her two best friends Zhao Bin (Liu Luo Xi) and Xu Jing Wan (Jin Yo Mi) tease her for it. Pleasant Goat’s real name turns out to be Ou Yang Yu Sheng (played by Yi Heng). Although he initially seems very cool and indifferent, this image crumbles abruptly once it’s revealed that he has an unrequited crush on an older woman. Seeing him cry over being rejected immediately breaks the spell for Xiao Rou, and the two start getting along as normal friends. Luckily for Xiao Rou, she doesn’t have to be crush-less for very long, as (seemingly the next day) yet another transfer student appears. This mysterious new student is Chu Lu (played by Ni Yan). Assumed to be a guy, Chu Lu soon becomes the school’s new heart throb with their androgynous looks, mesmerizing singing voice, beaming smile and tendency to be kind to everyone. Even Yu Sheng finds himself strangely attracted to Chu Lu, and this causes him and Xiao Rou to suddenly become something resembling love rivals. As it happens, Chu Lu is actually a girl, who for some reason pretends to be a boy as she searches for her mother Zhong Li Fang (played by Zheng Shuang) and hides from her ex-boyfriend Gao Yuan (played by Cai Yi Da).
As the teenage drama reaches its climax and Chu Lu intends to reveal her true identity to Xiao Rou to get rid of her crush on her once and for all, a terrible earthquake causes the friends to get divided, both emotionally and physically. Chu Lu disappears to Beijing with Gao Yuan and is only reunited with Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng a year later, after reassuming her female identity. As both couples come to terms with what happened and how they feel about life and love, their shared experiences ultimately make them realize the true value of life, including their true feelings and dreams.
I just want to say from the get-go that I was very thrown off by the implementation of the earthquake. What started off as a light and silly story about a love triangle based on a mistaken identity suddenly turned unexpectedly dramatic and serious, and I personally don’t know how to feel about it. What’s more, according to a comment I read on MDL, the earthquake depicted in this show was actually based on the real Beichuan Earthquake that hit the Sichuan Province in 2008, which killed almost 100.000 people and destroyed 80% of the buildings in the area, including schools and hospitals (credit: mengosteen). The fact that this was used as a plot tool in a low-budget romcom feels a bit awkward to me.
Honestly, without the knowledge that it was based on a real event, it felt just like the plane crash in Grey’s Anatomy to me: mostly meant for shock value and to support some drastic decision of a main character that they apparently wouldn’t have realized without losing one of their closest friends. While it’s not a bad thing to include real-life events in dramas – sometimes it can really contribute to the time- and world-building of a story, like the financial crisis in Twenty-Five Twenty-One – in this particular story, the addition of such a dramatic event felt really out of place. I mean, they didn’t even establish what year this story took place in, so it could’ve easily been passed off as a fictional earthquake. Maybe it was meant to signify the mercilessness of real life in contrast to the romantic fairytale these teenagers were living, but it just felt like such a sudden and unnecessary twist, especially with killing off an important side character. I honestly don’t know how I feel about this as a plot tool, all the more now that I know it was meant to represent an actual earthquake that killed hundreds and thousands of people.
In terms of story and build-up, this series leaves a lot to be desired, as well. I saw a lot of comments on MDL and YouTube that expressed confusion as to who the main character was supposed to be. Going off the first introductions, you’d say that Xiao Rou would be the undeniable protagonist, also because Yu Sheng and Chu Lu are initially brought in as her crushes, aka side characters in her story. However, after the earthquake, the narrative suddenly shifts to Chu Lu, and Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng become more like supporting characters in her story. Maybe the writers had the intention to make Xiao Rou the main character in the first half, and Chu Lu the main character in the second half? Generally speaking, I would say that Xiao Rou, Yu Sheng and Chu Lu are all main characters, but I agree that the way the focus kept shifting between them was pretty confusing.
As if this continuous shift in focus wasn’t confusing enough, the ever-changing feelings between these three also caused a lot of bewilderment on my part. Maybe it’s because they were all eighteen and their youthful hormones were all over the place, but I’ve honestly never seen a show where the main characters’ feelings for each other changed so often and so quickly. In hindsight, it’s actually funny to see that everyone ended up with their initial crush, even though there didn’t seem to be any kind of build-up to that throughout the series.
Besides these elements, I also felt like there wasn’t a lot of depth to the story itself, apart from Chu Lu’s storyline. The rest of the story and the characters are only formed through present events, and don’t really build on the characters’ pasts and backstories. While this is fine in itself – not everything has to be destined or predetermined – I can’t deny that this made it hard for me to really relate to anything or anyone. It felt like I was already made to sympathize with the characters before I fully grasped them, and I kept struggling to get invested in what was going on. As a matter of fact, I spent the entire series not really caring about what was happening, simply because I couldn’t get into it. Even the more dramatic events felt exaggerated and typical to me, which is really bad considering the fact that the earthquake was based on a real catastrophe.
I guess my main issue with this show is that it tried to focus on too many things at once before even establishing one clear main storyline, and this caused the whole thing to become kind of messy and all over the place. I don’t want to dismiss the underlying and relevant themes of dealing with loss, the importance of friendship and achieving one’s goals without having to hide, but I feel like the way this show dealt with these themes was quite shallow. It even became a bit boring to watch people have the same conversation about joining or not joining a band over and over again. I actually started putting this series on in the background at some point – despite the fact that I don’t understand Chinese – and picked up my phone while watching it. As someone who likes to give my undivided attention to what I’m watching, this was definitely a bad sign.
Before I start on my character analysis, I just want to mention that I wasn’t able to find a single source website that credited the entire cast of this show. I always want to give credit where due, especially when it comes to the actors, but none of the sources I found even listed important side characters like Mi Na. Being my persistent self, I resorted to deciphering the actors’ names from the credits myself, using this website. Through this method, I’ll do my best to credit as many of the actors as possible.
I will start with Xiao Rou, since she’s the first character we meet. As I mentioned, she’s initially depicted as a very stereotypical, hopelessly romantic female protagonist who loves to giggle and daydream. I’m not even gonna lie when I say that she annoyed the heck out of me during the first half of the series, when they’re still in high school. Not just because she was such an airhead, but because it seemed like she only cared about herself. As well as she got along with her friends, it never seemed like she got genuinely concerned about them, whereas as soon as something happened to her or her crush, the whole world turned upside down. She was really living her life as if she was the protagonist and everything revolved around her. There were times when I found her behavior a bit unsettling, too, for example when she kept following Yu Sheng through the school to snap pictures of him. There was something about her appearance that just put me off, for some reason; it seemed like they gave the actress lenses to make her eyes look bigger and I kept getting freaked out by how large her irises were. The look she’d get in her eyes in combination with her wide, goofy smile lowkey made me shudder at times.
The way she kept pursuing Chu Lu even after the latter kept trying to convince her not to, also got a bit awkward at some point. While I’m also blaming Chu Lu for beating around the bush, Xiao Rou was definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed, and she needed things spelled out to her. Honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if seeing Chu Lu in a dress on stage would’ve just made her go: “Oh, so he likes cross-dressing? That’s fine!” instead of finally realizing that Chu Lu was a girl.
On a side note, I found it very typical how unequivocal this show was with regards to same-sex relationships. It was never expressed in direct, literal words, but it was very clear that romantic feelings between two men or women were treated as something unthinkable and out of the question. Not very progressive for a show from 2019, but I guess the story took place in 2008 and it was still more of a taboo back then? In hindsight, I’m actually starting to think that the premise of the unusual love triangle might have been the reason I put this show on my list, positively anticipating the idea of a more progressive Chinese drama – I guess that was wishful thinking, after all.
Moving on, as much as we followed Xiao Rou’s thoughts and feelings throughout the first half, I couldn’t really gauge what went through her mind once she found about Chu Lu’s true identity. I mean, her face definitely fell when she saw Chu Lu in a dress on stage, but it wasn’t clear if she understood what was going on, and then the earthquake also disrupted her processing of what she’d just seen. Fact remains that she immediately cried for Chu Lu and set out to find her, but she never voiced whether her feelings had changed or not. I was lowkey hoping/expecting her to just stick to her romantic feelings for Chu Lu even after finding out she was a girl, that would’ve been a cool twist. But I guess she just switched to a “okay well then I guess I was just attracted to her as a friend” mindset, seemingly in a hearbeat.
As much as she aggravated me in the first half, I was positively surprised by her character development in the second half. She clearly matured a lot and responded much more rationally to certain situations than before. Although I initially didn’t understand why she didn’t go inside the café after seeing Yu Sheng and Chu Lu there, it made sense when she explained that she suddenly felt like a third wheel, and this was validated even more by the fact that Yu Sheng built up a personal connection with Chu Lu while keeping Xiao Rou in the dark the entire time. I also appreciated how genuinely mad and disappointed she got at Yu Sheng for lying to her about Chu Lu’s disappearance – honestly, this was a big turn-off for me, as well. On the other hand, she forgave Chu Lu really quickly and then just went back to treating her like before, only as a best friend instead of a crush. The friendship between Xiao Rou and Chu Lu became really wholesome in the second act, which I liked. Even when they both realized their feelings for Yu Sheng, they never became prickly with each other; I think Chu Lu always knew the two of them would end up together, and Xiao Rou was actually willing to bottle up her own disappointment in order to support her two best friends’ relationship. Even though I got annoyed at her a lot in the beginning, I actually ended up feeling for Xiao Rou in certain moments, because it was unfair that she was kept out of the loop when she was the only person that never once wavered in her love and care for Chu Lu, be it as a crush or a friend.
By the way, I really liked Xiao Rou’s parents (played by Kong Lin and Zhao Liang). They made a really fun and interesting pair, and I’m sad they just disappeared in the second half. I believe Xiao Rou has one phone call with her mom at some point, but that’s it. Come to think of it, they weren’t even featured at the wedding in the final episode, which was curious since there was a full audience of random people present. I really wondered where Xiao Rou got her personality from, because her parents seemed to be wired very differently, lol. I loved how they kept bickering and how her dad kept trying to come up with ways to appease Xiao Rou. I thought they seemed like really cool parents.
As much as Xiao Rou initially annoyed me, I can’t deny that nothing beat Yu Sheng. This guy consistently made me go 🤨🤨🤨 as he went back and forth between his feelings for Xiao Rou and Chu Lu. It’s actually funny to realize how much the way he was initially introduced differed from how he turned out. The only background information we get about him is that his mom (Chen Jin) was very strict and only wanted him to focus on his studies, which initially made him hesitant about joining the school band and play the guitar. In the end, he was able to keep the guitar as a hobby and focus on his medical studies, so I guess that was fine.
Anyways, I simply could not with the way this guy ‘navigated’ his feelings. He was absolutely clueless, but instead of taking the time for himself to figure stuff out before rushing into things, he just went along with something before realizing it wasn’t actually what he wanted, often unnecessarily hurting people’s feelings in the process. My biggest issue with him was the way he seemed to ‘gatekeep’ Chu Lu from Xiao Rou. Ever since he found out that Chu Lu was a girl, it honestly felt like he was enjoying the fact that he had a way of getting closer with her that Xiao Rou didn’t have. Instead of sharing the information so they could all be on the same page, he just kept it all to himself. I just didn’t understand why he would lie to Xiao Rou about Chu Lu’s disappearance, like why couldn’t he have at least told her that Chu Lu was alive and safe, but moved away or something? What’s worse, he even used it as an opportunity to build a personal relationship with Chu Lu himself, and this really ruined whatever was going on between him and Xiao Rou for me. It literally felt like he wanted to keep Chu Lu to himself, and he didn’t have any qualms about keeping it a secret from Xiao Rou, even though he knew how hard it was for her to not know what happened to Chu Lu.
After meeting Chu Lu again in Beijing, he just started amiably meeting up with her to catch up behind Xiao Rou’s back. That moment when Xiao Rou found out through Gao Yuan that Yu Sheng had known about Chu Lu’s whereabouts all along and it switched to Yu Sheng and Chu Lu just cracking jokes about how Xiao Rou would react when she saw Chu Lu again was absolutely tasteless. It made me feel like Yu Sheng really had no qualms whatsoever about lying to Xiao Rou, and he didn’t even realize how much he’d hurt her feelings in doing so. That’s not how you treat a friend, much less someone you’re (apparently) harboring hidden feelings for.
Another thing that bothered me about Yu Sheng was how he dealt with his romantic feelings in general. He initially got attracted to Chu Lu when he still thought she was a boy, and then got really relieved when he found out she was a girl. But after reconnecting with her as a girl in Beijing, he suddenly felt his romantic feelings for her fade away, just like how he suddenly didn’t feel anything for Xiao Rou anymore in the beginning. He even tells Xiao Rou that he doesn’t feel romantically attracted to Chu Lu anymore. Meanwhile, he and Chu Lu have the greatest moments together: he joins her while busking, they run while holding hands, they make each other laugh and take care of each other. Honestly, from the way he treated her, it seemed like he was completely into Chu Lu. He even came running to her house to take care of her when she was sick. What’s more, when Chu Lu confesses her love to him, they’re suddenly ‘dating’ the next day, and that actually got me wondering if I’d misheard him telling Xiao Rou he didn’t have feelings for Chu Lu anymore. He certainly didn’t act like it. And then, he suddenly realizes his affectionate feelings for Xiao Rou again while he’s ‘dating’ Chu Lu and the two even end up standing in the first row of Chu Lu’s stage performance while HOLDING HANDS, like nothing is weird about that. At least he had the decency to tell people that Chu Lu had dumped him in the end instead of the other way around. I have no idea what he thought he was doing.
In terms of the ‘romantic’ development between Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng, I think we can all agree that it was one of the most confusing and ultimately disappointing aspects of the story. They were basically introduced as the main couple – and then they weren’t – and then they were again. I’m not even going to lie when I say that this was probably one of the worst romantic build-ups in the history of C-Dramas I have ever seen. Not even in terms of toxicity or anything, but in the actual lack of its existence. I didn’t sense ANY kind of romantic tension between them after Xiao Rou stopped crushing on him, which was halfway through THE FIRST EPISODE. She never gave him any kind of attention after that and seemed fine just being friends. Even when Yu Sheng suggested he had feelings for her at first, she actively rejected the option. I didn’t even sense anything when she suddenly tried to make her feelings to him clear by doing ‘I love you’ poses while he was taking pictures of her, because it completely lost its meaning when he didn’t get it and she just ended up pouting “You silly boy” 👉🏻👈🏻.
Because of this, it just felt really weird when they suddenly started pushing the two together again towards the end, and by that I mean in the very last episode. Yu Sheng receives an orientation about medical assistance in the military and suddenly thinks of Xiao Rou when he has to write the name of the person he’d want to claim his remains (very romantic, indeed). They topped this realization up with a whole flashback of moments they shared, which weren’t even romantic moments in the first place – one of them was literally the scene of him dragging Xiao Rou along on a walk at night to rant about his conflicting feelings for Chu Lu.
His final love confession was also the driest and least romantic one I’ve ever seen or heard. If it wasn’t bad enough to suddenly, out of the blue be like: “I just realized I want you to be the one to claim my remains if I should die during medical military service”, this guy literally flew from Beijing to Chengdu to drag Xiao Rou to their old school’s rooftop and then read his confession OFF HIS PHONE, without even facing her directly. Also, while I get that the choice of using only anatomical metaphors was meant as a joke, it just took away even more from the intended romance. Seriously, if you’re gonna say stuff like: “you’re the cure to my stomach ulcers” and “if you’re the small intestine, I’m the large one”, at least put some passion into it. Don’t go all: “You’re the blood that flows through my veins” and “My heart can’t beat without you” when you literally haven’t shared a single romantic moment in the entire series. He literally read it to her like he was sharing a freaking weather report – there was no feeling in that confession whatsoever.
I honestly have no idea what the writers were thinking while establishing this couple. I’ve never seen a drama before where the main leads literally only got together after realizing their feelings in the FINAL episode, without ANY kind of build-up or slowburn. They may have tried to make up for the absence of romantic scenes by suggesting some tension between them in the dialogue, for example by making Yu Sheng say that Xiao Rou would always text him every single thing she did, but we never actually see her keep in touch with him like that, so those kind of lines remained completely empty and unsupported. Also, why did they make a whole point of Xiao Rou throwing away that framed picture of her and Yu Sheng after accepting that he and Chu Lu became a couple, when they later showed that she had a whole freaking collage of pictures of them as her PC desktop? There was literally nothing that suggested that they were thinking about each other that much, and then suddenly they did and they got married. So yeah, that was very weird. Needless to say, I didn’t feel anything for this couple, or any couple in the series for that matter.
Moving on to Chu Lu, even though she was introduced as a side character or potential love interest for either Xiao Rou or Yu Sheng, she ended up getting the most backstory and development out of everyone.
Chu Lu was abandoned by her mother Zhong Li Fang (played by Zheng Shuang) when she was still very young. I believe she’d been looking for her for eight years (?) so that would mean she’d been ten years old when her mom left. In any case, once she came of age she left her father’s place to officially track her mother down and see if she could live with her. From what I gathered, Li Fang was kicked out by her in-laws for giving birth to a girl, or because they thought her work as a bar singer wasn’t respectable enough. Chu Lu’s father definitely didn’t stand up for her, because she left with the intention to never get involved with the Chu family again, which sadly included her little Lu Lu, who was given her father’s surname.
Apparently, Chu Lu only decided to dress up as a boy before transferring to Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng’s school, because there’s a whole flashback of her meeting Gao Yuan and joining his band before that, when she still has long hair.
Chu Lu met Gao Yuan after spotting him busking on the street one night and he piqued her interest (and vice versa). Acknowledging their respective love for music, they started busking together and Gao Yuan was taken with Chu Lu’s special voice. The two even started dating for a while, but things soured between them after they were given the option to sign the band to a label and Gao Yuan was willing to give up Chu Lu to continue his own music dream (they could only assign one vocalist, so it was either him or her). Feeling betrayed, Chu Lu left and I believe her disguise as a boy was partially to hide from Gao Yuan. It could also be that she felt some guilt about being born as a girl, since that got her mom kicked out, and the fact that Gao Yuan once told her that her singing voice would’ve been more special if she’d been a boy (what a compliment). I guess it was a mix of different reasons, although it’s never explained exactly as far as I remember. In any case, Chu Lu went undercover and joined a new school. The reason why she’s able to transfer to a new school so easily is that her aunt from her mother’s side, Zhong Zhuan Yuan (played by Liu Lin), is a teacher there. Mrs. Zhong just happens to be Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng’s homeroom teacher, and as such manages to get Chu Lu into her own class.
From this point on, Chu Lu just wants to be away from her past, make new friends and enjoy an uncomplicated school life. As she’s not used to being surrounded by close friends, the fact that Xiao Rou immediately reaches out to her initially overwhelms her a little bit, but it doesn’t take long for her to start seeing Xiao Rou as a very dear and important friend. Once she realizes that Xiao Rou harbors more than just friendly feelings for her, Chu Lu starts to get conflicted about how to tell her the truth, as she really doesn’t want to destroy their friendship.
If I may believe the comments I read on MDL and YouTube, besides the question of why Chu Lu was pretending to be a boy – which was eventually explained (sort of) – a lot of people, including me, were really confused as to why Chu Lu didn’t just tell her friends at school that she was a girl. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure she was pretending to be a boy at first, I just thought she was an androgynous-looking girl who didn’t entertain people’s assumptions about her. But then there started to be more instances where people addressed her as a boy and she didn’t correct them, and that’s when I went: ‘Huh, but why?’ Like, I get that she wanted to start anew in some way, but why would she openly lie to her new friends about it? It’s not as if they had anything to do with her family or Gao Yuan. Especially when things got awkward and she realized some girls started to crush on her, I think it would’ve been more respectful of Chu Lu to just break it to them before she involuntarily started breaking hearts. Although, as I said, Xiao Rou was definitely very dense and didn’t pick up on anything unless it was spelled out to her, I also thought Chu Lu’s ways of telling her were very roundabout and indirect. I mean, why would you say: “we can only ever be friends in a girl to girl way” when you could just say: “we can’t date because i’m a girl”.
Another thing I didn’t really like about Chu Lu was that she could never think of ways to solve her own problems. After failing at persuading Xiao Rou to give up on her crush on her, Chu Lu even asked Yu Sheng – who already found out at that point – to do it for her. Later on, something similar happens when she doesn’t know how to face Xiao Rou after the earthquake. As much as I understood Chu Lu’s awkwardness in maintaining close friendships due to her past, I couldn’t help but think that she should at least take the responsibility of finding the right words to explain things and apologize by herself. As cool and chill as she’d seemed in the beginning upon transferring, she became more and more indecisive throughout the series and that was a bit frustrating sometimes. Again, I don’t want to dismiss the fact that she was trying to figure out life and really needed the advice and help of others, but I felt like it took her a VERY long time to figure out what she wanted, and it took a LOT of nudges in the right direction for her to finally come to terms with the life she wanted to live.
If the relationship between Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng wasn’t already confusing enough, I honestly still have no idea what was going on between Chu Lu and Gao Yuan. It seemed like Chu Lu was completely done with him, but then she still ran to the hospital as soon as she heard he got hurt, telling Xiao Rou that ‘she still cared about him’. When she started ‘dating’ Yu Sheng, I actually got the feeling that she was trying to suppress her feelings for Gao Yuan by doing so, but then when she realized Yu Sheng liked someone else she couldn’t keep pretending, either. I never truly understood Chu Lu’s real feelings, or if she actually liked Yu Sheng romantically. I can only guess that she ended up going to Japan after hearing something happened to Gao Yuan during his surgery because she realized she still loved him, but we never find out what happened to him – Chu Lu just turns up at Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng’s wedding in the last episode with that same old mysterious smile on her face, and that’s it.
I’m not even gonna lie when I say that I paid very little attention to what happened between Chu Lu and Gao Yuan after they came to Beijing together. From what I gathered, after the earthquake Chu Lu suddenly decided to join Gao Yuan’s band after all, but then switched companies because she didn’t just want to sing his songs. Then the company she joined went bankrupt and Gao Yuan tried to get her to come back to his band and company, which she kept refusing. I think that’s what was going on, but it was honestly the least interesting part of the story for me. It actually brought me back to the repetitive office scenes from Road to Rebirth, which I know a lot of people started skipping altogether. In the end, Chu Lu manages to achieve her goal of becoming a solo artist, partially because Gao Yuan falls away due to the after effects of the injury he sustained during the earthquake – he becomes deaf. Then it turns out he knew this injury was gonna bite him in the ass one day and he actively started writing all his songs for Chu Lu because he wanted her to succeed more than he cared about what would happen to him (d’aww).
I honestly never really knew how to feel about Gao Yuan. He seemed like a decent enough guy, also from his interactions with Xiao Rou when they met without knowing their respective connections to Chu Lu. It always seemed like he meant to make up with Chu Lu, and that he cared about her and her music dreams as much as she did, but somehow it kept coming across the wrong way or something. I guess it could be seen as a noble move that he knew the severity of his injury and convinced Chu Lu to come to Beijing with him because he wanted to make more music with her before it was too late and his injury would catch up with him. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that he acted incredibly rashly during the earthquake. This man actively ignored the emergency workers and drove his car right into an area that was literally dropping rocks. Even in a desperate attempt to get to his loved one, this was just reckless and stupid. Also, the fact that he kept screaming for Chu Lu to be rescued without even checking first who the other trapped person was and then getting all shocked after finding out it was Mi Na was very typical. Honestly, I don’t think it would’ve mattered to him whether it had been Mi Na or someone he didn’t know, he would’ve still chosen to rescue Chu Lu. I also hated that he literally lamented Mi Na by saying: “she was the best bassist I knew” as if that was the only noteworthy thing about her, especially after we just learned that Mi Na had had a secret crush on him all along. It was as if the majority of the characters in this show only cared about themselves and one other person they were in love with, and the rest didn’t really matter that much, despite being able to at least shed a couple of tears about losing a friend.
In the second act, I actually got really annoyed by him because he kept asking Xiao Rou to drink with him and listen to him rant about Chu Lu. I didn’t really get the weird friendship that started between them, in the first place. The drinking also seemingly came out of nowhere, and he was extremely neglectful about his dizzy spells and headaches for someone who knew he had an injury, so that didn’t really make sense to me. All in all, I didn’t really care about his character, and I don’t really know how to feel about him, also because we don’t find out if he survived the surgery in the end.
Also, as Chu Lu’s ex who seemingly loved her so much that he was willing to give up his own music career so she could go solo, there wasn’t a single shred of romantic tension between them in their scenes. We never actually got to see them be close or intimate as a couple. Just like with Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng, their history together was just summarized in words. The lack of visual proof that these two used to be in love only made it harder for me to truly believe they were ever together.
I’d like to move on to the characters that left a more favorable impression on me. I’ve already mentioned her name a couple of times, but now I’ll actually say something about Mi Na. Mi Na (played by Tong Hua – as I said before, I deciphered the actress’ name from the credits because she’s not credited on any website: SHAME!) used to be in the same band as Chu Lu and Gao Yuan, as a bassist. After Chu Lu joins the band at her new school, she suddenly turns up as the new bassist player there, initially causing Chu Lu to run away from her because Mi Na knows who she really is. Now that I think about it, I don’t actually know how Mi Na ended up at this school, because she definitely wasn’t a student. Maybe she just tracked Chu Lu down there? Anyways, after Mi Na joins the band she actually becomes like an older sister figure to Chu Lu. In the earthquake, the two become trapped together and it’s a typical Descendants of the Sun situation where they can only save one person because the whole structure they’re lying under is connected.
I absolutely hated that they killed Mi Na off like that. At that point, she was honestly the coolest character out of everyone. I loved how chipper and confident she was, and how she teased Chu Lu about pretending to be a boy. Of course, her loss fuelled Chu Lu’s determination in continuing to make music, as it’s also what Mi Na would’ve wanted, but I still really hate that this needed to happen for her to come to that decision. Mi Na was the best of them. I can’t believe they actually killed off the one character I would call ‘my favorite’ after just letting her exist for a handful of episodes. SHAME.
Next up are Xiao Rou’s two best friends Zhao Bin and Xu Jing Wan, who ironically also disappear in the second arc, only to make one final comeback in the very last episode. I liked these two and I would’ve liked to see a bit more of them.
Zhao Bin, or Bin Bin, was a typical tomboy girl with short hair that got her automatically categorized as ‘one of the guys’ and ‘not attractive as a girl’ (these freaking beauty standard stereotypes, bro). Anyways, she was also Xiao Rou’s deskmate and got the most banter with her. She was the typical funny friend, whereas Jing Wan was much calmer. I actually would’ve liked to see more of Jing Wan, because she seemed really cool in her own way.
Looking at their friendship with Xiao Rou, I can’t deny that it felt as if these two were just assigned the roles of ‘token best friend characters’, but I never actually felt that much closeness between them. Maybe that’s because Xiao Rou seemed so occupied with herself, as I mentioned before. It would’ve been cool to see how they met and became friends, at the very least. While it was nice that they made a final reappearance. I remember wondering where they went at some point, but they just ended up as another item on the list of things that suddenly made a comeback in the very last episode, along with the main characters’ feelings for each other, lol.
In any case, I liked these two and they deserved more screentime. I actually found it weird that they just completely disappeared after the earthquake and it wasn’t even mentioned how they separated. If it weren’t for the opening credits scene of the three of them walking together in their ‘adult’ clothes, I might not have even have expected them to come back at all.
When the storyline about Chu Lu’s mother was introduced, I was actually quite intrigued because it was the first time we saw Chu Lu as herself, not pretending to be a boy, and it was interesting to get some substantial information about her past. I thought the scenes where Chu Lu followed and watched her mom and secretly left her gifts were kind of sweet, it showed how much she wanted to close the gap between them. It was also nice to see her mom as a singer, as this would be the first indicator of where Chu Lu’s natural love and talent for singing came from. Despite the life that her mother was living, Chu Lu still preferred staying with her and I think that also said a lot about her dad – he was only willing to take Li Fang back if she’d return with Chu Lu, and when that didn’t work out she was left to her own devices all over again.
The only time I didn’t like Li Fang was when she took Chu Lu in after the earthquake and started getting involved in her life and music career to the point that even Chu Lu got tired of it. For the rest, I actually sympathized with her situation. It’s crazy that women can be just outed like this in some societies, I really felt bad for her. I’m glad that she and Chu Lu at least mended their bond.
The last character I want to mention is Zhong Zhuang Yuan, Chu Lu’s aunt and the friends’ homeroom teacher. I actually really liked this woman. I loved how she seemed to be a very typical Spartan teacher, but then turned out to be so loved by her students. That one time when she came into the classroom wearing a nice dress and everyone was like “woohoo Teach!” was really nice. I also loved the part at the end when she joined Xiao Rou, Zhao Bin and Jing Wan in the old classroom and reenacted her iconic chalk-throwing, lol. It was really nice of her to take care of Chu Lu, even if it was just by allowing her in her class to keep an eye on her. I liked that they created an extra link between her and Chu Lu and Li Fang, it gave her character a bit more depth. I think that she might have actually been my favorite character after Mi Na, if I can really talk about favorites in a series I didn’t feel any kind of connection to.
I think that’ll have to do for my character analysis, so now I’d like to go over some specific scenes and things that stuck out to me for being either weird and sloppy or nice and wholesome.
To start with the more negative elements – I always dislike saying this because again, every drama takes a significant amount of time and money to create and produce – it was clear that this was quite the low-budget drama. I’m not just talking about the quality of the filming, acting and dubbing, but there were a lot of sloppy details in the continuancy and general execution of the story as well.
First of all, and this is very typical for low-budget series that feature a singer or any other kind of music element in it: there was a very limited number of songs they used for Chu Lu to sing. To be fair, I quite liked the songs and her singing voice was nice to listen to. But she only ever sang that one same song, which was also part of the soundtrack, and you could actually hear the autotune seeping through at some points. At least they managed to edit it over Chu Lu’s mouth movements so it actually seemed like she was singing it for once; I’ve seen too many sloppy edits where a person starts singing and the soundtrack overlapping it is an entirely different song that doesn’t fit the character’s lipsynching at all. But yeah, I definitely cringed at the obvious autotune and the fact that they gave Chu Lu so little to choose from. They’d always play something else at band practice, but when she was by herself it was always the same song.
Secondly, and this also contributes to my later and more extensive criticism regarding the acting in this show: every person cried in the exact same way. Whenever someone got emotional, they always got the same shot showing one tear calmly making its way down their cheek. I never saw a single emotional scene where the actor produced tears as they were acting, which contributed all the more to the shallow feel of the whole thing. Even in the scenes where people where sobbing I just remember distressed faces and exaggerated wailing by the voice actors to distract from the absence of actual tears.
Something that also jumped out to me was that, in several occasions, people were able to overhear conversations that took place on the other side of the street, or somewhere else that would realistically be too far away to catch. I believe this went mostly for Yu Sheng, by the way. At some point he is waiting in traffic and sees Chu Lu having a conversation with her father in the distance, but they kept switching between their discussion and Yu Sheng’s reacting face as if he could literally follow what they were talking about. The same went for when he found out that Chu Lu was a girl – Chu Lu and Mi Na were having dinner outside and he was standing a couple of meters away but still apparently heard every single thing. I don’t know, it was kind of unrealistic.
Another general thing that confused me was the overall timeline of the story. There’s only two time jumps in the series, one after the earthquake (one year) and one in the final episode (three months). Which means that it ends roughly two years after we first meet the characters in high school. After the first earthquake, Xiao Rou starts working/interning and Yu Sheng is in medical school, so that adds up, as either working or going to college are both logical steps to take after graduating high school. However, after the final time jump of three months, when Xiao Rou is reunited with Zhao Bin and Jing Wan, they visit their old school and talk about how the halls used to look much bigger and stuff, and that just made me go: ‘You literally went here until two years ago, tho?’ Like, those comments would’ve made more sense if they’d revisited the school after more than five years, at least. It sometimes felt like much more time had passed since the earthquake, also because Chu Lu’s hair had significantly grown (this was obviously a wig, by the way).
Speaking of Chu Lu’s hair, what the heck was up with her switching hairstyles for her solo debut? We literally see her right before she goes on stage, and someone is brushing her hair in her dressing room – the same hair/wig she’s had for the entire second half. But then she appears on stage with a completely different coupe, shorter, dyed and with all sorts of highlights and extensions in it. And then afterwards it’s back to normal again. That’s not how hair works! What the heck was that inconsistency?
One other scene that I found weird was when Xiao Rou brought a present to her reunion with Chu Lu but then couldn’t bring herself to enter the café and instead left the present outside the window Chu Lu was sitting at with Yu Sheng. First of all, very brave to just leave that box outside where literally anyone can grab it. Second, seeing its position, Xiao Rou must’ve walked up very close to the window to put it there, presumably right within Chu Lu and Yu Sheng’s peripheral. But no, they didn’t notice a thing. After that, there was the whole weird episode with Chu Lu and Gao Yuan sharing their stories of what happened after the earthquake with Yu Sheng and Xiao Rou, respectively. While Gao Yuan and Xiao Rou were sitting on some terrace roof, having a beer, Chu Lu and Yu Sheng seemed to still be sitting in that same café, even though it had already gone dark and there was no one else there, and the present was STILL sitting outside the window. It took them their entire conversation before one of them suddenly noticed it, like seriously? That was so weird.
Something else that made no sense at all was the news coverage of the earthquake and, more specifically, Chu Lu and Mi Na’s dire situation. They literally used the double shot of them lying underneath the rubble and the close-ups shots used in their dialogues as the actual news footage. You’re telling me that there was a cameraman on top of them or something? The whole point was that they were underneath a structure that couldn’t be moved, and somehow they featured their entire intimate final conversation on the news, so that Chu Lu’s mother could literally see her daughter lying there from up close on TV. Honestly, make it make sense.
And then I haven’t even started on the scenes where extras were seemingly too aware of themselves, didn’t know where to look or just kept standing somewhere randomly even though their part was already done. I distinctly remember this one woman at a studio that Gao Yuan’s band performed at who gave them directions while she was walking by. After that little interaction, the band members continued their own dialogue, but this woman just kept standing there in the background. Like, at least walk off screen, ma’am, that was your only line, you can go now!
Overall, I was less than impressed with the acting in this series. Admittedly, the dubbing occasionally made it worse than it was, but it was never great to begin with. Especially Yu Sheng’s actor really bothered me. He literally delivered all of his lines in the exact same way, without any deep feeling behind it. The only scene where he went the extra mile was when he was searching for his friends in the direct aftermath of the earthquake, which asked for some dramatic acting. Other than that, even the way he would look up to see if someone was there seemed like the actor just remembered that he had to look up. The love confession to Xiao Rou was the absolute cherry on top, I cannot believe how little emotion went into that.
I also felt like Xiao Rou’s actress just got the instruction to pull as many girly and childish pouty faces as possible. There was one scene in particular that really threw me off, the one where she read an emotional letter from Gao Yuan from his tablet, since he couldn’t talk anymore because of his deafness. She just stared at that tablet, not even moving her eyes to suggest she was reading it line by line, and occasionally either looked up to stare wistfully into the distance or pitifully at Gao Yuan while the narration just kept going. I was like, seriously, this is simply not how you read a letter. Of course you can stop halfway and look at the other person to express your shock at what you’re reading, but it seemed like she wasn’t even reacting to or looking at anything specific. Details like this, that were just added for dramatic value, made everything seem even more shallow and ungenuine.
To end on a positive note, there were also a couple of moments that I found touching, like Chu Lu’s reaction to Xiao Rou’s ‘Welcome Home’ balloon sign when she officially moved in with her. Ever since the beginning of the story, Chu Lu had always lived by herself and she kept changing places to stay, so the final decision to move in with Xiao Rou, her best and most loyal friend through it all, was really meaningful. Chu Lu was someone who always expressed her emotions through her expressions more than her words, and I think that came out really clearly in this scene – I was surprised she didn’t actually choke up. I thought that was a really nice and meaningful moment.
The moment that got me personally choked up is when Chu Lu pictured Mi Na standing next to her during her first solo performance in the final episode. That transition was actually really good, and it just made go 😭😭😭 seeing Mi Na standing there, bass in hand, nodding and smiling at Chu Lu as if to say: “Don’t worry about me, you did it and you deserve all of it, girl.” That actually wrapped up Chu Lu’s whole “I kept going for Mi Na” argument really nicely, I loved that.
Lastly, and I already briefly mentioned it, but I really liked the part in the final episode where Xiao Rou, Zhao Bin and Jing Wan went back to their old classroom and had a rendezvous with their homeroom teacher, Mrs. Zhong. It was really funny how Zhao Bin imitated Mrs. Zhong before she came in herself and they had that little reenactment. There hadn’t been any kind of closure of their school time because the story time-jumped immediately after the earthquake, so this at least felt like a final farewell to those innocent and worryfree days.
I have some final practical comments before concluding this review, starting with the poster. I believe there are several different posters, I’ve seen one on DramaWiki that features just Xiao Rou and Yu Sheng in their school uniforms, but this one I used is actually kind of peculiar. It shows Sky Band, the band that Chu Lu and Yu Sheng join in high school, together with Mi Na on bass and Liu Ge (Shi Zi Xun) on drums. Xiao Rou isn’t a part of this band, so it’s kind of weird to see this particular group of people together. Also, it shows Chu Lu with long hair, which technically doesn’t make sense because she only has this hairstyle in the flashback of when she first met Gao Yuan. The entire purpose of her character is that she starts out looking androgynous enough to be mistaken for a boy, and that’s also the look she has when she joins Sky Band. So why depict her with this specific look, when she only looks like this in one flashback? I also feel weird about Mi Na and Liu Ge being depicted instead of Gao Yuan, for example. Mi Na was only there for half of the show (RIP) and Liu Ge also disappeared after the earthquake and only came back for Chu Lu’s debut stage in the final episode. As much as I liked them, Gao Yuan was a much bigger character and I would think it more logical to put him on the poster. Anyways, the awkward photoshop and posing is enough to make me dislike this picture, lol. They could’ve done so much better. It’s honestly kind of weird that they made such a happy-looking poster that even features the one character that dies in such a carefree way.
As I usually do with Chinese dramas, I want to take a closer look at the original title versus the English one. What I like about the Chinese title is that it contains a wordpun on Xiao Rou’s name, 小柔, which in this sentence translates to ‘soft spot’. Despite this, I don’t really know what this refers to or whose soft spot it talks about. Going along with the final sentiments of the story, I guess this could count for Yu Sheng, realizing that Xiao Rou was always the ‘soft spot’ in his heart? As for the English title, I think ‘Soft Memory’ is as vague and generic a title you could think of. It would be appropriate if it was actually a typical coming-of-age drama that described the precious memories of youth, but I don’t actually remember a single ‘soft memory’ at all, thanks to that freaking earthquake. In my opinion, they could’ve definitely come up with a better title that at least reflected the overall tone of the entire story, including the serious parts, instead of trying to be a wholesome depiction of a special friendship. I guess the friendship between Xiao Rou, Yu Sheng and Chu Lu ended up being special for them, but I was too concerned with all the problematic aspects that I couldn’t even fully embrace what they had as a viewer. It’s kind of a pity. In hindsight, I would’ve even expected something referring to Chu Lu more than Xiao Rou, since her story was depicted in the most detail.
I’ve been writing this review while I was sick and already took longer than planned to finish this, so I’m going to skip on a cast comment section for this one. I didn’t know any of the actors and I generally didn’t really like the acting, so there’s not much for me to say. The only people whose acting I liked were Tong Hua (Mi Na), Liu Luo Xi (Zhao Bin), Liu Lin (Mrs. Zhong) and occasionally Zheng Shuang (Zhong Li Fang), so I hope I get to see more of them in the near future.
To sum up my final thoughts, although this series definitely didn’t offer much in terms of story and romantic development, it was bearable enough as a quaint little romcom. I wouldn’t say it frustrated me as much as it confused me, and that does make a difference. It was a pity that they abandoned that interesting premise of an unusual love triangle so quickly and suddenly threw in that earthquake to turn everything upside down. I think it could’ve been much better if there had been a clear storyline and main protagonist to follow instead of continuously going back and forth on both accounts. Apart from Chu Lu achieving her dream of becoming her own musician, I’m really not sure what other kind of message the writers meant to convey with this. I did see that this was the first project of the director in charge of this show, so I can only hope he’s improved his skills since then. As much as I want to support low-budget dramas, sometimes I just can’t believe that certain details passed through editing unnoticed. It just gives the impression that they’re not even striving for the bare minimum of quality to at least make things make sense on screen, and that’s a pity, because I’m one of those viewers that tends to pick up on stuff like that. In any case, they definitely tried to make something of this and it had some nice themes like friendship and pursuing your dreams against all odds, so I can appreciate that. The idea had potential, but the execution just didn’t cut it for me. I’ll leave it at that.
As compensation for the lack of romantic build-up in this series, I’ve decided to break my streak and pick out my next drama by myself. I’ve been eyeing a new one on Netflix that promises a great dose of enjoyable romance, so I’m definitely sinking my teeth into that for December, as soon as I feel better.
Until then, bye-bee! x