Cdrama is an emotional experience for me.
As mainland diaspora, I was born right at the point in time where my direct family had permanent mental health distress from China coming out of the war, but right as we were looking forward to the economy getting better. Basically, from young I was told that though our people and the motherland were dirt poor, it was changing.
Cdrama was just something that we watched at home. Didn't really share it at school like Kdramas or literally anything Japanese. And frankly, a lot of it gave us secondhand embarrassment to watch, because the storytelling was clearly made for the older generation, and because of censorship, a lot of parts were...corny and preachy. Don't get me wrong, many Cdramas held a lot of the signatures of their style that have only flourished into today: If you want to get your heart wrecked, see your characters go through the worst things that could happen to a human, see them strategize and debate through tough situations, and go make morally gray decisions, I've seen very little western media that does it better. I'd argue -- from my experience alone -- that the trope of strategy and debate stems from a point of cultural pride, where we value problem-solving and thinking outside the box. But that's a more detailed rant for another day.
But the CGI was cringey to watch when the US was putting out Transformers, which was the biggest spectacle at the time. And censorship made it so that characters would literally be yelling their morals at people like in a US kid's show. It felt preachy.
All this to say, while Cdrama has always been a part of our lives, our relationship has been more hot and cold. For me personally, I was picky with my dramas and watched a new one once every few years, and I know that's more than most diaspora did.
Then the storytelling started changing. And this predates The Untamed craze and westerners getting into it, btw. Some themes miraculously passed censorship (Addicted is the biggest example), people stopped preaching. Because the target audience became my age range, a lot of the issues were resonating with us now. Also, the CGI got better. Still fake as hell, but at least they knew when to use their effects to make stylized choices or massive landscapes. (Still had a lot of garbage hiccups like The Untamed's giant dog, but you know, it was happening LESS.)
It was already on the rise for me. The explosion of all the Cdramas we see now with those qualities -- dramas that clearly had millennials on the scriptwriting team or were adapted from books written by millennials -- coincides with the time period when English-language fandoms started getting into Chinese entertainment. (I will be very generous and point at 2018 as an early start point, but it was still slow going back then. I'd say the actual explosion was in 2020.)
So I get ridiculously emotional now to see my generation and the culture we grew up in come into our own. We see our issues portrayed onscreen. People in my age range thriving and chasing careers in the arts. The incredible sets and cinematography that would win a fucking Oscar if those award shows weren't so western-centric. But we don't need their validation; instead of competing on these award shows and systems of merit they created, we found other ways. Streaming Cdramas on Netflix, putting them on YouTube for free with subtitles. And look at how much more popular these stories are now, when they're at their best.
I loathe to death that there's definitely a sense of Orientalism in our western fandoms and uncritical consumption of Cdramas -- like the people who're so excited about learning Chinese they proudly exclaim that they will only speak the most standard Mandarin and avoid other dialects and accents. Masquerading like they're experts on the culture, even over people who are from the culture. Not to mention the racism. Every diaspora member in Mo Dao deserves fucking compensation for the bullshit we went through, every microaggression that blew up into tone policing and all that other racist shit we already have to go through irl. But I will never, ever, ever regret that Cdramas are having their moment.
