This review may contain spoilers
Luke is not the only toxic one in this story; Tao is just as toxic in her own way
I want to take exception to the reviewers who want to make Luke the toxic one. He is problematic in the way many men are, especially if they have grown up in an already emotionally shut down family.Yes, Luke is frozen in one way: he cannot express the depth of his true feelings for Tao, but neither can she express her feelings for him or even tell him the basics he would need to know in order to keep going forward with him. And as another reviewer has mentioned: she doesn't let him in on any of the appropriate details of her life. He doesn't ask to keep their relationship secret, she does. Now, I am sure had she not asked for that secrecy, he would have if only to protect both of them. But she doesn't find any way to foster their relationship at all besides seeing him for sex which is pretty unclear as Chinese drama doesn't want to portray females as desiring sex. Imagine if a man told a woman that the sex they had just had was an accident, he would be pilloried on sight.
She is silent when she should definitely share or worse, lies outright so many times it is impossible to keep track. After they are in a relationship, and a bit before, he begins helping her in all sorts of ways that allow her to shine. She remains impervious to realizing this!
As an elder who has been a strong feminist since the early 70s at least, Tao made me far more frustrated than him. She never responds to the many ways he show his feelings for her, and always misinterprets his gestures. The expensive bags issue is just one example. Where I come from, a man giving you expensive gifts can mean he is trying to buy you, but nothing surrounding Luke's gifts ever suggests that. She never even opens these gifts!! Where I come from that is just rude. If she didn't want him giving her expensive gifts, she should have just told him. I would have, especially if they were over the top.
Basically, Tao is passive, and the level of her passivity drives me nuts. She, unlike him, had a loving mother and father who got along, who made her strong and let her go out into the world to succeed. Boy, I wish I had had one tenth of what they gave her.
In some ways, she acts more like a messed up male than he does -- hiding all sorts of things and lying again and again.
This script is excellent. I could see all these subtleties, why couldn't more of the reviewers here see them?
This is a toxic relationship which ultimately gets fixed; however, what Luke has to do to win her back is way, way over the top. If your lover cries in your arms over how much he misses you, you should show so much more than a steely, stoic face. I would have broken down in response or, if he was faking it in any way, told him to stop acting.
Both of them were shut down in complementary ways, but six+ whole years of this is really stretching credibility. That would be one criticism of the script; another would be its lack of illumination regarding WHY Tao is this frozen.
This is coming from a senior woman who was quite frozen as a young adult because of her family upbringing, but even I could not tolerate Tao's rigidity.
If this is Chinese feminism's stance, it needs deep rethinking. Feminism is not making women into men: it involves pushing men to be more like women.
Most people are messed up in some way. Except for extreme cases, we should all remain open to understanding the complexities of romantic relationships in light of this fact.
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