One of the best character-driven stories I've had the pleasure to watch, and a fantastic longform essay about family and love in Chinese culture. Legit recognized my relatives and parents in the characters and I really felt like I was seeing my own growing up experiences mirrored here.

I absolutely love how focused on character development this story was. It was very rewarding witnessing their growth, and I loved having hunches about a character's behavior and having it turn out to be true.

Originally, I felt that the female characters were quite poorly written because almost all the moms are major assholes, but that was a bit premature. I'm still in disagreement with the scriptwriters about Mingyue's mom and Chen Ting. I think they hadn't done enough to make up for the selfishness and hurt that they'd caused. But then again, their kids are fine with it. So maybe I'm judging too harshly because of my own parental baggage? Anyway. A bit draggy at the end and lots of unbelievable plot twists but overall I really loved this ???