#chinese notes

@merelhyn gave a prompt of "Meng Zhi + flowers" and because my brain is the least reasonable thing ever it flew right past "cute" to "but what if we made it hurt???"

Because...one of my favorite things in LYB (among, admittedly, many, many Favorite Things) the friendship that blossoms (heh) between best dashu Meng Zhi and everyone's favorite murder child Fei Liu. I've mentioned before how much I love me a good Meet Kill (meet-cutes are so yesterday, y'all), especially when it lays the foundation for interesting and mutually supportive relationships where beatdowns are a love language. I love the way Fei Liu just lights up when Su-gege says they can go visit "that person you can't beat," the way he casually says "Meng-dashu is better" while shit-talking Prince Jing in his own manor, the way he can tussle around with Meng Zhi without having to hold back because Meng-dashu can take it—

Of course, they never would have met if it hadn't been for Lin Shu, Mei Changsu, Fei Liu's beloved Su-gege, whom they both love and want to protect so much. I think it's a short step from that thought to the possibility that these two would find solace in each other if Mei Changsu dies at Meiling 2.0. They're both such affectionate, uncomplicated people; they'd know how to help each other process their grief while still remembering the one who brought them together, the one who is no longer there.

Which brings me to the plum blossoms. It's far from a coincidence that the 梅 méi in "plum blossom" (梅花 méihuā) is the same character as the méi in 梅长苏 Mei Changsu and in 梅岭 Méilǐng, the battlefield that bookended his first and second lives. It is similarly no coincidence that plum blossoms are associated with winter, and specifically endurance under harsh conditions. Aside from being a beautiful poetic image in their own right, plum blossoms are the perfect flowersona for Mei Changsu, an encapsulation of his grief, his fragility, his determination to beat the odds aligned against him.

Also, if you watch carefully in the show, meihua are everywhere—peeking over the walls of Prince Jing's house, littering the courtyards of Mu Manor, decorating Nihuang's hair and Fei Liu's flower vases. It's impossible to account for them all, just as it's impossible to extricate Mei Changsu's life and memory from the lives of the people who loved him. Even in his second life—especially in his second life—he still touched so many people, and it's possibly one of the greatest tragedies of the show that he ends it believing that nobody will mourn him as Mei Changsu.

So I used plum blossoms as a stand-in for Mei Changsu’s memory and his absence between these two lives he brought together, and then I thought, “why be subtle when I could add in some sad poetry and clobber my viewer with EVEN MORE FEELINGS?” It’s what Fei Liu would want. 

Source for poetry: original text here (pg. 95 of PDF, pg. 81 in-text), Pinyin transcription here. I took Wang Jiaosheng's translation (first source) as a jumping-off point but ended up doing a translation myself because I disagreed with some of his choices, such as referring to the plum blossoms in the poem with English feminine pronouns (she/her), or parsing the word 风流 fēngliú as "beautiful beyond words" when it can really be construed quite differently.

(Per a discussion with @hunxi-guilai, who knows way more about these things than I do, 风流 fēngliú is closer to "wild" or "unrestrained," to the degree that it can carry an almost masculine connotation. If it's romantic or beautiful, it's a chivalric sort of romance, a wild, rugged, wuxia-wanderer sort of beauty. So it's interesting that Lǐ Qīngzhào chooses to apply this masculine adjective to plum blossoms, which are more often described using more delicate, even feminine terms—but that's something to be explored elsewhere, outside this post.)