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.
Shards of Her
(她和她的她 / Ta He Ta De Ta)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10
I didn’t actually expect I’d be able to finish my next show one week after the last one, but here we are. I made the submission deadline for my translation and won’t get my final feedback until two weeks later, so I found some more time to watch shows in the meantime. I’m not gonna lie, I yelped in excitement when my Wheel of Fortune app revealed my next watch because I’d been really looking forward to this one. I also liked that I got to watch another Taiwanese drama before the year was done, and that I could watch it in good quality with decent subtitles on Netflix. I’d seen either a trailer or read a summary (I don’t remember) but I was positive that this show was going to be something else. Having said that, I should put a major trigger warning here because this show (and consequently this review) deals with depictions/mentions of rape, sexual assault and harassment, victim-blaming and mental illness.
One more disclaimer: I’ve written all the names in this review according to the standard Mandarin pinyin romanization, although the subtitles that I watched and most of the credit sources I could find used the Wade-Giles writing system (eg. “Hsi“ instead of “Xi“ / “Hsieh“ instead of “Xie“). I just hope I’m not offending the correct spelling of the names, it’s just that I’m personally more familiar with the pinyin writing of Chinese names. I also credited all the actors with their Chinese names rather than their international names in my review since that’s how they are credited in the show.
Shards of Her is a Taiwanese Netflix drama series with nine episodes of about fifty minutes each. It’s about Lin Chen Xi (played by Xu Wei Ning), a top employee at a headhunting company who also goes by her international name “Seher” (which is Turkish for “dawn”). Chen Xi is an einselganger, she prefers to work alone and steer clear of parties and engagements that force her to socialize with other people. She has a very loving boyfriend of three years, Li Hao Ming (played by Li Cheng Bin), but she’s been quite distant with him for a while and contemplates breaking up with him. It’s hinted from the start that Chen Xi is dealing with the repercussions of a youth trauma, and we see that she’s isolating herself from the people around her, even from her mother, whom she hasn’t contacted in years even after both her father and her brother passed away. Chen Xi’s unstable state is tested even more when her company is reinforced with a new guy who just came back from the US and who immediately starts behaving inappropriately familiar with her. This guy, Tu Chun Ju or “Danny” (played by Wu Kang Ren) even starts openly harrassing her on the workfloor, but always makes it seem like she came onto him when others pass by. When Chen Xi starts ignoring him, he gets mad and takes revenge: he lures her to the company at night, knocks her out, ties her up and attempts to violate her while filming it. Chen Xi manages to escape, but as she’s trying to get away in her car in the pouring rain, desperately trying to reach Hao Ming, she gets hit by a truck. When she wakes up, she suddenly finds herself back in her family home in her hometown. Her whole family is still alive, she’s still in touch with her best friends from high school, and Hao Ming doesn’t exist – that is, he’s now a shabby-looking police officer by the name of Liu Chang Yu (nicknamed Xiao Liu) and they’ve never met before. She’s told that she’s been in a car accident and that she has amnesia, and that Hao Ming and her headhunting company are just hallucinations caused by the accident. While navigating through this familiar yet strange environment, Chen Xi slowly recovers her memories and is forced to come face to face with the excruciating trauma of being raped by her maths teacher back in high school.
The link to Chen Xi’s previous encounter with sexual assault is already suggested from the first episode onwards. The way she flinches when a man (even Hao Ming) even so much as touches her on the back or shoulder, and the vague memory fragments that shoot by during Danny’s attack speak volumes. However, it’s not until she goes into that alternate reality (if that’s what it was) that she’s able to slowly recall what exactly went down in her youth. The alternate reality seems like a pleasant solution at first, since Chen Xi still has her family and friends and she has a nice job at a study center for children. However, the more she remembers and tries to uncover, the more she realizes that everyone around her is actually grateful for the fact that she doesn’t remember anything and tries to hide the truth from her. It’s mostly meant to protect her because she’s been miserable ever since it happened and forgetting about it might actually bring some lightness back into her life. But of course it won’t do to just bury an event like that and pretend like it didn’t happen just to keep the peace in the community.
I honestly think this show did an amazing job at portraying the rawness of dealing with trauma, and how one appalling deed can damage a person for life. As if the rape itself wasn’t enough, it got even worse when, after Chen Xi finally managed to speak up about it, the adults around her did NOTHING. On the contrary, they actually turned on her and blamed her for being the seducer. Even her own father didn’t believe her at first, and even after considering that she told the truth he just yelled at her for not resisting. In the direct aftermath of the rape, Chen Xi wasn’t able to find anyone who could or even wanted to help her. Most people didn’t believe her and when she finally mustered up the courage to report it to the police, they just covered it up and relocated the one officer who actually tried to help her. Nothing was done about it, no justice was served. As a result, Chen Xi has been walking around with PTSD for twenty years, tricking herself into believing that she isn’t meant to be happy. She keeps a distance from Hao Ming because she doesn’t want him to go through the same thing as her ex-boyfriend Chiang Yuan (played by Hu Yu Wai), who, despite being extremely supportive at first, left her because her trauma became too much for him to handle and she just wouldn’t “get better”. In the end, going through that alternate reality and reliving the vivid memories, Chen Xi is able to return to her own reality, in which she’s apparently been dissociating all this time: she comes to in the middle of a police interrogation and doesn’t even remember how she got there. Later it’s revealed that she’s been writing a private blog in which she records her dissociations, so she has actually been aware of them for a while but just never managed to seek help because of her self-isolation.
As someone who’s been lucky enough to never go through something like this, the depiction of Chen Xi’s deteriorating mental health caused by this horrendous event in her youth struck me very hard and repeatedly brought me to tears. I’ve mentioned it several times before in other reviews, but I always appreciate it so much when drama writers use their platform to convey a serious message and spread awareness. I deeply respect this show for painting such a raw and realistic image of the severity of sexual assault. It means all the more to see an Asian show like this because I believe that this kind of topic is an even bigger taboo in Asian countries and cultures. I recently came across a documentary called Black Box Diaries about a Japanese journalist who set out to investigate her own sexual assault by an influential superior, so my awareness regarding this topic happened to be already heightened when I started watching this series. All in all, I thought this drama was both heartwrenching and, with regards to the ending, extremely empowering at the same time.
Within the alternate reality, Chen Xi finds her real life colliding with one where things took a slightly different turn, and these two lives start blending together to the point where it becomes hard to distinguish what’s real and what isn’t. In this regard, I was lowkey reminded of The Light in Your Eyes, where we see the events unfold through the lens of a woman with dementia and it’s revealed in the final episode that almost the entirety of the show was one big Alzheimer’s episode. I’ve seen several source sites explaining it as an alternate reality, but in fact it’s actually one big dissociation that Chen Xi has.
It’s not even that she got into a coma after the accident, because it’s revealed after she returns that she’s been walking around, albeit in a mindless state, and she even went to a police station. The pieces fall together when she realizes that the people she encountered in the alternate reality weren’t just people from her past but also neighbors from her apartment complex in the real world. One neighbor became the apothecary guy that caused her car accident in the alternate reality, and one man and his daughter became a hardware store clerk and a girl from the study center she worked at. It doesn’t seem like she actively created this alternate reality as a way of coping with her past, but more like her mind walked away with her and unconsciously put in familiar faces from her neighborhood. It’s more like a dream in that sense, where your consciousness picks up details and impressions from things you’ve seen and puts them in a random setting in your mind. In any case, the main recurring “characters” in her dissociation/alternate reality are the people that she was closest to at the time of the rape.
Chen Xi (as a teen played by Lin Yi Lan) grew up in a family of four: her mother Chiu Wan Fen (Li Pei Ling), her father Lin Yu Sheng (Wang Yi Cheng) and her twin brother Lin Chen Ye (as a teen played by Chang Kai Zhe, as an adult by Xu Jun Hao). We don’t get to see too many flashbacks of how she was as a teen, but she generally seemed to be a sociable and bright girl with many hopes for the future. She cared a lot about her grades, and was very popular in high school for both her looks and her academic results. Her two best friends in high school were Cen Chi Ling (as a teen played by Lin Si Ting, as an adult by Li Pei Yu) and Yang Jia Ying (as a teen played by Xu Zhu Ting, as an adult by Wen Zhen Ling). In reality, Chen Xi broke things off with them after they betrayed her trust and caused her secret to be leaked through school, but in her alternate reality they somehow kept in touch.
Lastly, there’s Yen Sheng Hua (as a teen played by Hu Miu Miu, as an adult by Jia Jing Wen), another girl from Chen Xi’s class who went through the same ordeal with that teacher, but who was never brave enough to speak up about it and in that sense also left Chen Xi on her own. Before her car accident in the real world, Chen Xi just happened to meet Sheng Hua again through a work party she attended… as Danny’s wife.
I’d like to go over Chen Xi’s family members and friends one by one.
Starting with her family, as mentioned above Chen Xi grew up in a family of four, with both her parents and her twin brother Chen Ye. In the first episode, it’s established that in the real world, both her father and her brother passed away several years earlier, but the cause of their deaths is only explained in the final episode. In the real world, Chen Xi left her hometown after graduating high school and asked her family not to come looking for her. While building her career she told people (including Hao Ming) that both her parents had passed away – she really wanted a clean slate. This went so far that she didn’t even come back home after hearing that her father and brother had died. Her mother was left alone after losing all her family members, and has been trying to reach Chen Xi time and time again, to no avail.
In the alternate reality, after Chen Xi finally musters up the courage to tell her mother what’s happened, Wan Fen immediately believes her – her face when she comes out of her daughter’s room after hearing what happened is heartbreaking in itself. In the two-on-two conversation with the teacher and his wife, Chen Xi’s mother is the only one defending her daughter, and she’s always blamed her husband for settling the case rather than persecuting the teacher.
I thought that the character of Chen Xi’s mother was depicted very realistically. While she initially comes across as a slightly tough-love kind of mom, and you’d wonder how she would react, especially since she’d been classmates with that teacher herself, the way she crumbled after hearing the news and didn’t reprimand Chen Xi whatsoever was very reassuring. Admittedly, she also tried to hide the truth from her after she lost her memory, but in hindsight I really believe there was no ill intention in that. She just felt so sorry for what her daughter had to go through that she saw the amnesia as a kind of blessing in disguise that could help her daughter regain her joy in life. I think this came across really well in how heartbroken she seemed when watching how Chen Xi couldn’t even help her out in the kitchen anymore, and how she expressed her agony over why her daughter had to keep suffering like this.
I’m really glad that Chen Xi ended up visiting her back in the real world and that they made up. Although her mother also didn’t have the power to do anything about the situation back in the day, she was still the only adult in Chen Xi’s life who wanted justice for her, and actively spoke up against her husband and the teacher’s wife for not taking proper responsibility.
Although I really blamed Lin Yu Sheng for not believing in or standing up for his daughter, it did sting to see how much that ended up damaging him in the end. I was really mad at him for having the nerve to yell at his daughter why she would make up such stories about her teacher. He even suggested she did it out of spite for her failing grades – because sure, it was just a wave of rebellious adolescence that caused her to suddenly lose all motivation in school when she’d been such a hardworking student all this time. 🙄
In the alternate reality, the other student who went through the same thing as Chen Xi, Sheng Hua, is in hiding because she’s suspected for strangling their teacher in his bed in the caring home where she happened to work. It seems that Chen Xi’s father has been helping Sheng Hua out financially, making sure she got a good job, and he’s been hiding her in his orchard cabin in the mountains.
This was something that wasn’t really clear to me, to be honest. I guess there is some sense in the theory that Yu Sheng was dealing with some lingering regret of failing to stand up for his own daughter, and that he tried to compensate for that by helping out Sheng Hua. But it was never really explained through the narrative how they were related exactly and why Yu Sheng suddenly decided to back Sheng Hua. He even made it look like he was having an affair with her or something, so I couldn’t blame Wan Fen’s suspicion either. In any case, it’s safe to say that Yu Sheng ended up with a crippling sense of guilt towards his daughter. He kept blaming himself for not supporting her from the start by openly suing Teacher Guy. He ultimately died of an illness, and when Chen Xi goes back to her family home in the final episode she has a final short “encounter” with him in which she tells him she’s not mad at him anymore. I thought that was a really tender moment, and the way they hugged each other, both bawling their eyes out, was so touching. The way her father thanked her for forgiving him in the end really made me feel like it was his spirit telling her that he could finally move on now.
Being the same age as Chen Xi, of course there wasn’t much that her twin brother Chen Ye could do about the situation either. Although he’s alive in the alternate reality, he seems to have a very dark mindset and we also see a whole bunch of newspaper scrappings regarding various unfairly processed sexual assault cases on his bedroom wall. As a matter of fact, he’s the one who strangled Teacher Guy in Chen Xi’s alternate reality. Sheng Hua might have drugged him, but Chen Ye wore the gloves that left no fingerprints.
Although there aren’t too many scenes that show the relationship between Chen Xi and Chen Ye, we can see from the way she hugs him after first waking up in the alternate reality that he means a lot to her. When Chen Xi reconnects with her mother in the final episode, Wan Fen reveals that Chen Ye died when he got into an accident on his bike on the way back from visiting Teacher Guy himself. She never knew why he went to see him or what they talked about, and now there’s no one left to tell the tale – although Teacher Guy is still alive in the real world, he’s had a stroke and is unable to speak anymore.
After seeing her father (or his spirit) off for the last time, Chen Xi also has one final encounter with her brother, and I had to fight back tears when Chen Ye told her that maybe he would’ve been able to protect her better if he’d been born as her older brother, one minute earlier.
It was just so heartbreaking to discover with Chen Xi that all these people cared so much about what had happened and all felt so bad about not standing up for justice and the truth when it mattered. It really proves that such events affect more than just the direct victims; Chen Xi’s entire family fell apart after what happened, and it was really touching to see her finally come to terms with that after so many years.
Moving on to Chen Xi’s two best friends, Cen Chi Ling and Yang Jia Ying.
Starting with Chi Ling, she’s the tomboy of the group. As an adult she prefers to wear suits and sneakers rather than skirts and heels, she’s not interested in meeting guys and the way she presents herself can be described as more “masculine”, especially in contrast to Jia Ying. Despite her chill demeanor, Chi Ling has always genuinely cared for her friends, and after Chen Xi opened up to her in private about what happened to her, Chi Ling even admitted that she couldn’t stop crying whenever she thought about it. It’s a shame that Jia Ying ended up revealing the secret to the school, because this caused a vital friction in Chen Xi’s trust towards Chi Ling as she promised not to tell anyone, not even Jia Ying. Still, I did appreciate that she chose to support Jia Ying throughout the shit she went through out of a lingering sense of guilt for not being able to help Chen Xi at the time and not wanting to make the same mistake again.
Throughout the alternate reality, Chi Ling gets her own short storyline in which she starts working at the company that offered Chen Xi a new job in the real world, Daton. However, it doesn’t take Chi Ling long to realize that the company is very shady – not only does her female manager favoritize young male employees while terrorizing the young female ones, the Sales department actually utilizes low-paygrade employees to dine with and entertain their clients outside of office hours. Chi Ling eventually quits her job after discovering that her own colleagues were in on this as well and let themselves be used like that, even after hearing their stories of how desperate they are to work their way up and contribute to their families.
Jia Ying is the opposite of Chi Ling, both in terms of appearance and personality. As a teen, she was already teasingly called a “nympomaniac” by her friends because she was always fantasizing about boys. As an adult, she’s a very confident and wealthy young woman who’s not afraid to put her charms to use. However, the fact that she throws around her bubbliness like that gets her into a couple of nasty situations herself. In the alternate reality, she lives in Chen Xi’s apartment from the real world, and is secretly being stalked by the reception clerk who planted a hidden camera in her bedroom and even sneaks into her room at night to watch her sleep. If that isn’t bad enough, she eventually sleeps with a guy who films her while they’re having sex and he “happens” to leak it to his friends’ group chat, after which the video goes viral, causing Jia Ying to fall from grace in the most disrespectful way.
For some reason she gets mad at Chen Xi when her friends come to see how she’s doing, and tells her something strange: that she finally feels like she “won” over her. It’s ultimately revealed that Jia Ying has been jealous of Chen Xi ever since they were teens, because she always used to be the most admired girl in school and she kept wanting to one-up Chen Xi. Still, after learning what happened to her, it wasn’t actually her intention to blab her secret like that – she was actually trying to stand up for Chen Xi to some girls talking smack about her, and she told the school counsellor in the hopes of helping Chen Xi. Because Chen Xi turned her back on her and Chi Ling after that, they never got to talk it out.
While I liked the storylines from Chi Ling and Jia Ying because it really helped me get a better understanding of their characters, I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure how their storylines played into Chen Xi’s dissociation. After all, Chen Xi wasn’t present during these events at Chi Ling’s company or in Jia Ying’s private life, so how did these storylines come to be? Was it a way to redeem the two of them in her mind, that she imagined them in stressful and damaging situations of their own? I’m also not sure if these things actually happened or that they just played out in the alternate reality.
What I can imagine is that her mind purposely put Jia Ying in a similar position as her, as it played on the knowledge of Jia Ying’s jealousy of her. In the alternate reality, Jia Ying lives in Chen Xi’s apartment and has a social/career status similar to Chen Xi’s as a top headhunter. Even though Danny doesn’t appear in the alternate reality, the element of him filming her as he assaulted her could’ve also been reflected in how that guy filmed Jia Ying during sex and ended up harming her reputation with that.
The element of young people being forced into uncomfortable situations in order to keep contributing to society and their families also kept coming back. The young employees at Chi Ling’s company and the reception clerk at Jia Ying’s apartment were all revealed to be in a desperate situation, beit regarding money or taking care of an elderly relative. Chen Xi even found herself feeling bad for the reception clerk when it was revealed that arresting him would leave his grandma, his only remaining relative, by herself. It also made me think of how Sheng Hua told Chen Xi that she didn’t want to speak up about what happened because she couldn’t bear to face her grandma if she would find out about it.
These situations involve so much shame and guilt that, even when they know they’re being mistreated, people just can’t seem to speak up or report it because they know it’s going to harm the people around them as well.
There could be multiple explanations for how her friends’ storylines fit into Chen Xi’s dissociation episode. On the one hand I liked that I got to think about that by myself, but on the other hand I also would’ve liked if that could’ve been explained a bit more clearly through the narrative, because I still don’t really understand it.
The relationship between Chen Xi and Sheng Hua is even more complex since they both went through the same thing. As I mentioned, the two briefly meet again in the real world, where Sheng Hua is Danny’s wife. I feel like it is quite common for people that went through a traumatic (abusive or sexual) trauma earlier on in life to somehow end up in an equally abusive relationship or even marriage. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how Sheng Hua and Danny got together, but it was very typical that Sheng Hua got stuck in that same cycle of trauma. Because yeah, Danny didn’t just harrass Chen Xi at work, he was actually an abusive husband at home, as well. Sheng Hua kind of redeems him at some point by talking about how he himself also grew up in a toxic environment with an abusive mother, and that that’s what warped him like that. Still, it was really empowering to see how Sheng Hua ultimately snapped out of her self-punishment and decided to help Chen Xi get the video evidence of how Danny assaulted her.
There were two scenes in the final episode that I found really powerful: the one where she went in the bath and it suddenly hit her that she deserved better, and the one where she recalled her younger self saying, “Maybe things will become better when we grow up” (or something along those lines) in the car. You could just see the realization of “what the hell am I putting myself through” on her face.
In the alternate reality, Sheng Hua stayed in the hometown and she even started caring for Teacher Guy at the caring home she worked at. While she did drug him, Sheng Hua wasn’t actively involved in the murder as she happened to walk in on Chen Ye as he was strangling the guy. Still, it was really heartwrenching to see how she was prepared to take the responsibility for the crime in order not to harm Chen Xi and her family even more. She actually hoped for a better outcome for Chen Xi after she was able to forget about it, and was prepared to doom her own future in order to let at least Chen Xi have a happy ending. It was nice to see the two of them come together in the end. The hugs they shared, both as teens when they realized they went through the same thing, and as adults when they dealed with the Danny situation together brought genuine tears to my eyes.
In hindsight I really felt for Sheng Hua and the position she was in. I’ve learned from other stories of domestic and/or sexual abuse that there are so many people who don’t speak up out of fear or shame or guilt. In this show, it happens in a small town where nothing bad ever happens, and it was very understandable how big of an impact such an event would have on a tight community like that. I thought the most empowering thing at the end of the show, besides Chen Xi deciding to go after Danny, was that Sheng Hua finally cut herself free from the shackles of her low self-esteem. The fact that, even after being tied down by that event for such a long time, both Chen Xi and Sheng Hua were able to find the strength to not let it happen again was incredible.
I know I’ve been referring to him as Teacher Guy, but he does have a name and I do have to discuss him and his wife. Xie Chi Chung (played by Chen Yi Wen) was the math teacher at Chen Xi and her friends’ school and he was a very popular teacher. He and his wife Xie Hui Chen (played by Yu Zi Yu) would even invite groups of students to their house for private tutoring lessons, and Chen Xi was one of those students. Xie Chi Chung always attributed his affection towards the girls to the fact that he never got to have children of his own, and therefore his students were like daughters to him – I vomited a little when he used this as an excuse the first time he intimately hugged Chen Xi in his school office. He pretended to genuinely care about his female students’ futures and offered to support them in any way possible, posing as the best and nicest teacher ever, but in the meantime he kept eyeing their necklines and youthful faces when they weren’t paying attention. What’s worse is that, in Chen Xi’s case, he never even took responsibility for his deed and he actually poisoned her against her parents, saying that he may have given off mixed signals or something. I can never understand the audacity of a middle-aged man who just assumes that everyone should agree that a teenage girl would be willingly attracted to him. There are actual child(!!) rape cases where a grownass man has claimed that he was seduced and/or given consent by his victim, it’s unbelievable. Being a respectable and loved teacher shouldn’t mean anything if this is how you treat your students, especially after they’ve warmed up to you as a supportive and dependable adult or even a father figure. It’s disgusting.
What I did find curious was that Sheng Hua told Chen Xi that, each time it happened to her (which means he did it to her multiple times?!) he would apologize afterwards (this also turned out to be the reason she stuck by Danny), but for some reason with Chen Xi he couldn’t even bring himself to admit he did it. The way he just casually touched her shoulder again the next day at school and told her he was worried about her was insane. I just can’t understand how people can be like that, not even taking responsibility for what they’ve done to another person, especially such a young girl.
One of the most realistic parts of the series for me was how Chen Xi started behaving afterwards. How she went home and just started throwing buckets of water over herself in an attempt to “cleanse” it off her. This habit later went on as we see adult Chen Xi taking fully-clothed showers, just letting the water pour – no amount of cleaning was ever going to be enough to wash everything off. That makes me think of a line from a play I once did, “A Kind of Hades” by Lars Norén, in which a girl claiming to have been sexually assaulted says something along the lines of, “You can wash a stain off a piece of clothing, but you can’t wash a stain off a soul”. The way she was haunted by nightmares of Xie Chi Chung lying on top of her saying, “Just a little bit more” was also excruciating. Again, I just want to applaud this drama for portraying the effects and aftermath of such a traumatic experience in such a raw and realistic way.
Sometimes we say that being aware of and looking away from sexual assault is equally bad or even worse than executing the assault itself. The one person in this drama that set my teeth on edge more than Xie Chi Chung himself was his wife, Xie Hui Chen. I honestly didn’t understand how she could live with herself. She admitted being aware of his sins and hating him for it, so why the hell did she keep blaming it all on the girls even after he died?! After walking in on her husband raping Chen Xi, she only steadied herself on the fridge for a SECOND before she put on MUSIC and started COOKING DINNER. Her accusations weren’t just a way to support her husband because she wasn’t actually aware of what went down, no, she’d seen it with her own eyes. I get that her husband may have put some pressure on her to hush it up but she kept accusing Chen Xi and Sheng Hua even after he died! Heck, she even took advantage of Chen Xi’s amnesia to fill her head with false facts about how Sheng Hua had probably killed her husband and also likely seduced Chen Xi’s father.
Even after Wan Fen came to visit her one last time to ask her why she did what she did, she still pretended to be a victim and that those girls ruined her marriage. She kept saying she had to keep up being a good wife, like, she didn’t even have a family anymore at this point, so why did she still keep accusing those girls? She was unbelievable. Honestly, even after seeing her get mad at her incapacitated husband in the final episode and telling him how much she’s always hated him for making her go along with his lies… I still believe that was on her. She went along with his lies even though she could’ve made the ultimate difference in busting him. So yeah, she’s not redeemed to me. She could’ve been pivotal in getting justice, and if she really hated her husband that much all this time it makes even less sense to me why she chose to keep up the pretense of a loyal wife.
I’d like to finish off this character analysis segment with Hao Ming/Xiao Liu because UGH this man has my heart. I’m not even lying when I say that I lowkey fell in love with him, lol.
Hao Ming was literally the greenest flag ever. Despite the fact that Chen Xi tried to distance herself from him, he kept trying to be there for her in every possible way. The way he cleaned her entire house for her out of his own volition after she told him she was looking for a cleaner because she made a mess at home?? The way he invited himself to her meeting with Danny after the assault and was ready to punch him in the face despite not even knowing what had happened yet?? The way he bawled his eyes out after discovering what she went through and reading her private blog about her dissociations?? The way he joined a freaking SUPPORT GROUP on how to support a traumatized partner?? The way he got in touch with her mother and paid off her entire house debt for her?? The way he was so respectful but kept showing her time and time again that he wasn’t going anywhere and pleaded with her to at least let him stay by her side?? Seriously, where can I get a Hao Ming? I want one. 😭
I’m glad that Chen Xi really loved him, at least. She didn’t want to break up because she felt uncomfortable with him, but because she wanted to protect him so he wouldn’t get hurt like Chiang Yuan had before. By the way, I thought it was really nice that Chiang Yuan was the one who urged Hao Ming to keep supporting her because her pushing him away meant that she actually really needed him. I thought that was very mature of him as an ex-boyfriend, also because it showed that even though he couldn’t handle it, he still cared about Chen Xi’s wellbeing and wanted her to be happy as well. The way that Chen Xi desperately tried to reach Hao Ming after what Danny did, even after she’d just told him that she wanted to break up with him, only confirmed all the more that she really loved Hao Ming and felt safe with him.
In the alternate reality, her mind somehow merges Hao Ming with that one police officer that once tried to help her out, who was called Xiao Liu. Although his personality and style are the complete opposite of the Hao Ming she knows, Chen Xi still finds herself drawn to him and vice versa. She ultimately admits to Hao Ming that she must have merged the two of them because he had always been that person to her who stood by her and wanted to help her. He was the best partner she could’ve ever wished for, all the more because he respected that she wasn’t well enough to think about marriage yet and he would be there for her all the way until she was. As much as I love a good romance and I would’ve loved to see a kiss between Hao Ming and Chen Xi, it made me love him all the more that he kept a respectful distance and didn’t touch her until she would tell him she was ready. We need more Hao Mings and Xiao Lius in the world.
Now that I’ve covered all the characters I wanted to discuss, I’d like to point out a couple of things that remained a bit vague to me until the end. There were a couple of storylines that were introduced in the alternate reality that I found hard to place within Chen Xi’s experiences. I’ve mentioned the examples of Chi Ling and Jia Ying before, but this also went for the storyline about Lin Yu Sheng protecting Sheng Hua, for example. I came up with a theory of my own, that he did it to somehow compensate for failing his daughter, but I still found it a bit weird. After all, it had been twenty years since the rape and Chen Xi was still around, so there must have been a way to still make it up to his own daughter instead of the other victim, right? The way his “relationship” with Sheng Hua was revealed and the way he seemingly wanted to put distance between himself and his wife, it really did feel like he was having an affair at first. I wish it would’ve been explained a bit more clearly how exactly Yu Sheng got involved with Sheng Hua. For Chen Ye, it was made clear that he overheard Sheng Hua tell an unconscious Chen Xi after her accident that she was going to “put him to sleep”, so I guess he acted on that. But even if it was meant as compensation for his daughter, I still couldn’t help but feel like it was a bit of a stretch for Yu Sheng to start caring so much for Sheng Hua instead. I would’ve liked a bit more explanation about that storyline.
I already mentioned this in the discussion of Chi Ling’s and Jia Ying’s storylines, but it really did remind me of The Light in Your Eyes. I remember that show also showed some storylines between supporting characters where the main character wasn’t even present, so I keep wondering how Chen Xi’s mind came up with these. Because of this, I also found it hard to gauge what exactly was the truth, like what really happened and what was just a figment of Chen Xi’s dissociation?
The scene in which the two worlds collided and Chen Xi woke up from the alternate reality only “explained” it in images and not words, and it went by so fast that I couldn’t make sense of all of it. I guess different elements from the real world were reflected in events from the alternate reality in one way or another and it wasn’t meant to be black and white, but after finishing the series I still couldn’t help but feel like I would’ve liked a little bit more explanation on certain storylines from the alternate reality.
Another element that I found a bit hard to place was the role of the blind street vendor girl, because she seemed to be quite significant even though she wasn’t based off of someone from the real world as far as I know. She appeared in the alternate reality as someone that Chen Xi knew, and she was the one who told Chen Xi that you could hear it clearly when someone was lying – which Chen Xi then tested out on Xie Hui Chen. Did the blind girl have another additional purpose that I missed? I feel like she must’ve been utilized as more than just a plot tool to tell Chen Xi about the lying.
I also found Chiang Yuan’s return in the alternate reality a bit hard to gauge. He didn’t seem to be any different from the real world, he was still her ex-boyfriend who traveled the world and sent her photos wherever he went, but it also seemed like he wanted to get back into her life or something. The way he and Jia Ying had that little rendezvous almost made it seem like they were plotting something together or were even having an affair. This turned out not to be the case, but I guess I would’ve liked a bit more clarity on how he related to Jia Ying, all the more since she made it clear to him in person that she didn’t care that much about Chen Xi. Chiang Yuan also seemed adamant on keeping Chen Xi away from the truth, and he specifically didn’t want her to remember Sheng Hua for some reason, but that was also not explained furthe. I guess it could just be that he was another person who thought the amnesia was a blessing in disguise that could finally help Chen Xi come out of her darkness.
So yeah, there were a couple of storylines and interactions between supporting characters that I didn’t fully understand and would’ve liked to grasp better.
As I was watching this series, it somehow reminded me of how I felt while watching Something in the Rain, another very good and empowering series that deals with sexual harrassment on the workfloor. I thought Shards of Her was incredibly powerful in its acting, writing and overall execution. I also liked that it ended with Chen Xi gradually picking herself up, in no rush to catch up to Hao Ming who was waiting for her at the end of the street with a smile on his face. I guess my only criticisms are really just those small ambiguities and question marks that I was left with after finishing it. While I appreciated the open ending, I guess I would’ve liked a bit more closure? At the end? But yeah, overall it really grabbed me and actually managed to move to tears multiple times, which doesn’t happen often.
Before moving on to my cast comments, I would like to make a couple final remarks about other elements from the show that I found interesting or made an impact on me.
First of all, the name “Seher”. We find out through Hao Ming’s perspective in the first episode that the name derives from a book of the same name by the Turkish writer Selahattin Demirtaş. I haven’t read it, but I found something interesting in the summary on Goodreads: apparently it’s a collection of short stories about “ordinary people living through extraordinary times”. The titular story “Seher” is about a young woman who is “robbed of her dreams in an unimaginable act of violence”. Sound familiar? Can’t say I blame Chen Xi for identifying with a story like that. I liked that they came up with such a unique and meaningful international name for her, it actually made me curious to read the book myself!
As I sometimes do, I would also like to compare the original and English titles of this series. The original Taiwanese title can be translated to something like “She, Her and Her”, if I’m correct. It features the character for “her” (她 ta) three times. I couldn’t help but wonder if that has anything to do with the three versions of Chen Xi that exist within the story? Her teen self and the two from the different realities? I think it’s a really interesting title. I also really like “Shards of Her”, because it doesn’t only refer to different versions or aspects of one person, but also to the literal image of breaking glass when Chen Xi finally manages to break out of her dissociation. I think it holds a very relevant ambiguity that directly relates to the mental state of the main character, so I find the English title very well chosen.
I also really loved the song that plays during the opening sequence. I thought it matched the vibe of the series very well, and it even had something melancholic and haunting to it. It’s called “Shattered Fullness” (very fitting, also with regards to the English title of the show) and it’s performed by an artist called Xiao Yu. I thought it was a really good song with great vocals, and it was utilized very powerfully within the show as well. When it played during that final sequence where Chen Xi narrated that she was finding her way back to the light and you saw all those people from different phases in their life, it actually gave me goosebumps. This show really knew how to combine music with images.
Lastly I just want to say a couple of things regarding the acting and casting in general. As I mentioned before, I thought the acting in this drama was VERY good. Something that jumped out to me in particular was how well the actors were made up to look like they aged. While Chen Xi and her friends had younger versions portraying them as teens, the actors for Chen Xi’s parents and the Xie couple remained the same, and I thought they did such a good job of aging them. I don’t know what they did to their skins and hair and how they added such natural looking old-age spots and greying hair effects, but it looked incredibly realistic. I’ve seen several dramas where people literally just get a blatant cheap white-hair wig to show they’ve aged, so the attention to detail even in the make-up really impressed me.
I also loved the consistency when it came to the casting of the younger versions of the main characters. I can imagine it’s really difficult to find a teenage actor that can pass for the younger version of an entirely different adult actor, and I’ve become accustomed to seeing younger versions that have completely different facial shapes. But in this case, holy cow! I honestly thought for a while that young and adult Sheng Hua were the same person because their faces look so much alike. I also really love that they kept the consistency of Chen Xi’s slightly Western-looking features by casting an actress with a Western lineage for both the younger and adult version of the character. Lin Yi Lan, or Charlize Lamb, who plays teen Chen Xi, is Taiwanese-American and Xu Wei Ning or Tiffany Xu, who plays adult Chen Xi, has an Italian-American father. It was really cool that, even though there weren’t any foreign roots in Chen Xi’s family, they still kept that slightly foreign beauty on Chen Xi throughout, that was really satisfying consistency.
The time has come for the cast comments! I knew basically no one from the cast, so I’m excited to make some first references here.
First of all, Xu Wei Ning/Tiffany Xu is absolutely gorgeous. She has such a unique face and beautiful features. When I checked MyDramaList and went through her records, I saw that she played a role in the Taiwanese ItaKiss, It Started With a Kiss. I don’t remember the Taiwanese names of the characters, but I believe she must have played Yuuko, the girl who becomes the college love rival, the one from the tennis court scene – my associations are shattered as well, lol. I was really impressed by her performance in this show, I thought she managed to convey the deep and dark layers of Chen Xi’s character and trauma very well. It must’ve been a very challenging role, but her emotional acting was incredible and she really showed different sides to her. It was very reassuring to see her in a more cheerful mood at the end of the show, it really made me root for her character to gradually heal now that she knew she was surrounded by people who genuinely cared about her. She was able to come across as both incredibly fragile and empowering, and that’s a really rare quality, I think. I really hope I’ll get to see more of her in the future!
As I mentioned, Li Cheng Bin/Toby Lee managed to steal my heart in this drama. I’m adding him to my Asian drama actor crushes as we speak, lol, because he is FINE. I really loved that he got to play two distinctly different roles, which he both performed amazingly well – I actually fell for two different people. I think he captured the gentleness and sincerity of Hao Ming as the supporting and caring boyfriend very well. It’s funny because in terms of character, Xiao Liu made a bigger impression on me. This is probably because we’re introduced to him more elaborately throughout the majority of the series than we are to Hao Ming in the first and last two episodes, but I somehow ended up loving them both to bits. In contrast to Hao Ming, who always wears a suit and presented himself as very neat, Xiao Liu is kind of shabby-looking and clearly doesn’t care too much about how he dresses. I also liked that they made the comparison of how scruffily he ate his food, lol. Xiao Liu is casual but good-hearted and it somehow hit me even more when he started feeling attached to Chen Xi and how he was like, “this never happened to me before, okay! 😳”, that was cute. I was just happy that Hao Ming and Chen Xi managed to work it out in the end, I kept praying that she wouldn’t end up pushing him away for good. I said it and I will say it again: I need a Hao Ming (or a Xiao Liu 👀) in my life as well.
Can I just say how impressed I was with Wu Kang Ren/Chris Wu’s acting in this show? When I realized that he was the main character from Copycat Killer, my mouth literally fell open because his role there and his portrayal of Danny are literally a world of difference! Despite the fact that Danny is undeniably the biggest red flag in this show, I just couldn’t help but enjoy his performance because he was SO GOOD. The way he actually produced tears as he was accusing Chen Xi of assaulting him and how pathetic he was with his face injury, he played it SO WELL. I was genuinely impressed by this completely other side of his acting. He was the only actor in this show that I’d seen in something else before, but at the same time it was like seeing him for the first time. I remember thinking he came across as such a caring guy in CK, and here he literally gave me the creeps with just one look. What an incredible actor, I’m definitely excited to see more from him now!
I ended up being very impressed by Jia Jing Wen/Alyssa Chia’s portrayal of Sheng Hua, especially because of the switch her character made in the final episode. Before that, she’s kind of the same, very timid and soft-spoken, but I really loved that they made her break out of that cycle in the final episode, that was so empowering to watch. Although the story was mainly about Chen Xi’s trauma, it was really cool how she became a part of that and the two ended up ending each other’s trauma together. Also, I’ll say it again, the casting of her younger version was insanely good, I actually believed they were the same person. MDL doesn’t credit the younger version actress, but I managed to find out from DramaWiki that she’s called Hu Miu Miu. They both did a really good job at portraying Sheng Hua’s fragility and simultaneous strength.
Apparently Li Pei Yu/Patty Lee is a singer! I really liked her portrayal of Chi Ling, she had a really nice vibe about her and seemed like a genuinely cool person to be around. Since I liked her so much as a character, it was reassuring to find out that she had been on Chen Xi’s good side all along and felt genuinely bad and ashamed about what happened and how she ended up spilling Chen Xi’s secret. They made a really fun trio, I thought the dynamic between them was really nice to watch. I also liked to get a better insight into how Chi Ling was as an individual through that little arc about her job. All in all I thought she brought a very relatable and fun energy to the show. I also really liked the performance of her younger version actress, Lin Si Ting/Tammy Lin), she brought a really nice cheekiness to the friend group.
I kept thinking I recognized Wen Chen Ling/Forest Wen from something, she looks really familiar. But maybe she just has “one of those faces”, I don’t know. Anyway, I liked that they gave her character a bit of an edge but still didn’t make her the typical “bitch” character. It was nice that, despite her jealousy towards Chen Xi, Jia Ying did actually feel bad for what happened to her and she actively tried to shut anyone up who spread rumors about Chen Xi had seduced the teacher. I think the actress managed to portray the different layers of her character, both the edgy petty side and the bubbly friendly side, very well. Her younger version actress, Xu Zhu Ting/Annika Xu (again not credited on MDL!) also did a good job, especially in the scenes where things between her and Chen Xi started to fracture.
One of the actresses that managed to impress me the most in this drama was Li Pei Ling/Ding Ning, who played Chen Xi’s mother. I thought her emotional acting in particular was amazing. I still can’t forget how she acted out the scenes where she came out of Chen Xi’s room after hearing the news and just crumbled down crying, the one where she went to confront Xie Hui Chen one more time, and the one where Chen Xi finally came to visit her in the final episode and they hugged while she was sobbing about why she left her all by herself. She genuinely seemed to be taken over by her emotions and the tears just started welling up automatically, and I thought that was incredible. I think she did a fantastic job.
Even though I hated her character, I was also very impressed by the actress who played Xie Hui Chen, Yu Zi Yu/Sara Yu. She has such a beautiful, characteristic face as well, I think that if she played a “good” character she would exude the warmest, most loving energy. I always say that an actor is all the better if they can pull off a truly hated character, and this truly applies here. Same as with Danny’s case, I was just so taken by the acting that the portrayal of the character became all the more impressive to me. It was really cool to see how she balanced the different layers of her character, because she was actually a good person who knew her husband did the unforgiveable, but somehow she still managed to trick herself into believing that she had to keep up appearances to protect her own reputation as well as his. It was a very messy balance, but I think the actress did a really good job.
Wang Yi Cheng/Vins Wang, who played Chen Xi’s father, also looked really familiar to me, but I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else before. There is one more Taiwanese drama on my list that he appears in, so we’ll see about that! As with every actor in this show, I think he did a really good job in terms of emotional acting. While he also had a rigid streak to him, especially in how he didn’t believe his own daughter at first, it was clear to see from Chen Xi’s first reaction to seeing him in the alternate reality that she really loved him and he was a really kind father. I especially loved the part between him and his daughter at the end, where she forgave him, that was performed really well by the both of them. I just loved how all the characters had such great chemistry, beit between parents and their children or friends amongst each other.
Apparently, Xu Jun Hao/Jake Xu was also in Life Plan A and B, although I don’t remember him from there. That was a really good show as well. I really loved the portrayed bond between Chen Xi and Chen Ye, and the way he talked to her during their final enouncter was absolutely heartwrenching. I don’t think it was established as such, but it really felt as if his own mental health started deteriorating from the moment his sister went through the assault – I guess that’s what you get with twins sometimes, that they’re telepathically connected in a way? I’m really curious what he set out to talk about with Xie Chi Chung on the day that he got into the accident. I thought he did a good job in portraying Chen Ye as both a loving and caring brother and someone who was battling his own demons.
I noticed that MDL also doesn’t credit the younger version actor for Chen Ye, but luckily DramaWiki does, he’s called Zhang Kai Zhe. His character made a big transformation from goofy and energetic teen to withdrawn and solemn adult. I wish there could’ve been a bit more revealed about Chen Ye’s psyche and personality, but he already managed to move me by being such a loving brother to Chen Xi.
Chen Yi Wen was another actor that looked familiar, but I don’t think I’ve seen him in anything else before. I see that he’s also directed and screenwritten several shows before. I think he was a really good casting choice for Xie Chi Chung: the way he suddenly changed from friendly teacher to predator was pretty scary. If he’d actually been a guy who temporarily got carried away by his longing for a daughter, I might’ve actually redeemed him because there were moments where he did seem to hold back, but when he finally struck he was absolutely merciless. As with the other actors portraying “bad people” in this show, while I watched his character I was partially disgusted and partially impressed because his acting was also really good. I honestly feel like this drama is a great example of characters that are horrible but not completely hateable because you just can’t deny what a great job the actors are doing.
I just want to make one final comment on Hu Yu Wai/George Hu, because it was only until after I finished the show that I realized he played the main lead in the Taiwanese adaptation of Hayate the Combat Butler, starring alongside Park Shin Hye. It’s been ages since I watched that, but once I saw his name I was like, “Hayate?!”, lol. I was a bit lost on what kind of person Chiang Yuan was in the beginning. When he first appeared in the alternate reality I honestly didn’t get a very good vibe from him, and in my mind I was already shooing him away as a potential love rival because I was already shipping Chen Xi and Xiao Liu at this point, lol. But it seemed that in the real world, he was a genuinely caring ex-boyfriend and I thought it was very mature of him to actually help Hao Ming out and supported him to do better for Chen Xi than he did. In hindsight, although there are still a couple of things I didn’t fully understand like his one-on-one talks with Jia Ying, I think he was a good guy and the actor did a good job as well.
I’ve actually managed to write this review in one day, woohoo! I’m guessing it’s because it’s a shorter series and the story was quite concise as well. It’s also been a while since I wrote so many cast comments, but that’s just because I was so impressed by all the actors that I wanted to give everyone some sort of shoutout.
This was a genuinely emotional and intense drama to watch, and I would urge people to take careful note of the trigger warnings in advance. Prepare and protect yourself, because it’s a wild ride. I’m very glad that I got to watch it though, I know it was going to be good and I wasn’t disappointed. I even obtained a new actor crush which was something I didn’t realize I was craving but it definitely was, lol. All in all, the acting, the writing, the music and the execution were all very impressive, and my criticism really doesn’t go much further than that I would’ve liked some elements to be explained a bit more clearly. I get that some things aren’t black and white, and some things can’t be properly put into words, but I personally would’ve like to gain a better understanding of how exactly this particular dissociation worked and how all the additional storylines fit into Chen Xi’s personal experience. Other than that, color me impressed and emotionally moved to the max.
I may be able to fit one more series in before the end of the year! December is going to be filled with social engagements and the final feedback applications for my translation, but I want to try and watch at least one more show before 2024 is over. We’ll see when the next review drops.
Until then, bye-bee! x
