The Martial Arts Stunt Double of the Entertainment Circle – Chapter 35
by Little PandaThe two of them had only just agreed to head back to the set that afternoon and were debating where to have lunch when a car honked behind them. They turned — and there in the driver’s seat sat Li Yanrao. Chen Wanwan puffed out her cheeks and muttered:
“Eldest Cousin really never lets up for a single second. I was going to take you to a farmhouse resort1 for some fun. Well, so much for that…”
Tuoba Yan couldn’t help laughing. Li Yanrao lowered the window. “What are you making up about me this time, Wanwan?”
“Nothing! Eldest Cousin, you’ve wronged me,” Chen Wanwan declared, abandoning her complaints on the spot. She dragged Tuoba Yan over to the passenger door while Li Yanrao pressed the unlock button in perfect sync, letting Chen Wanwan wrench the door open and stuff the utterly bewildered Tuoba Yan into the passenger seat. “I’m just jealous of how well you two get along! Bye-bye, Eldest Cousin! Bye-bye, little mop! Have fun!”
With that, she and Zhao Mi fled as if their lives depended on it.
Tuoba Yan didn’t know whether to laugh or cry — she had never in her life seen someone sell out a friend so thoroughly for personal gain!
Li Yanrao raised the window. The car was superbly soundproofed, and a female singer’s soft, lingering voice filled the cabin. Li Yanrao glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s past eleven. Might I have the honor of treating you to lunch? Consider it a celebration of your landing Empress Yang.”
“That was settled less than ten minutes ago. Your sources are frighteningly fast, Yan-jiejie.”
Li Yanrao, for her part, had every confidence in her. “My intuition told me you had what it takes to carry Empress Yang.”
Bantering with Li Yanrao along the way, Tuoba Yan dialed Qiao Chunyi. “Mom, I passed the audition. Director Fang said to wait for the production crew to call me.”
Qiao Chunyi was overjoyed. “Yanyan, you’re amazing! Oh — did Wanwan pass too?”
General Tuoba was a little jealous. “She passed too. She’s playing Biyu’er. Mom, which one of us is actually your own daughter? How is it you only ever remember Wanwan?”
Qiao Chunyi said, “You ungrateful little thing — if you weren’t mine, would I have raised you for eighteen years?”
“I was joking.” Tuoba Yan giggled. “Oh, right — I want to celebrate with a friend, so I won’t be home for lunch. I’m going back to the Wu Zhen’er set this afternoon to keep filming, and I’ll still be home by seven tonight.”
Qiao Chunyi knew her daughter’s social calendar was full these days. She grumbled a few words, then made sure to remind her not to keep freeloading on other people’s treats — she had to reciprocate once in a while, and so on and so forth. Tuoba Yan agreed to all of it in her sweetest voice.
“Yan-jiejie, today it’s my turn to treat you.” She hung up and fastened her seatbelt. “I know a wonton shop that’s unbelievably good. I didn’t bring much money on me, so that’s all I can afford. You don’t mind, do you?”
As the saying goes, with love, even plain water satisfies2. How could Li Yanrao possibly refuse? Even kitchen disasters would have tasted like ambrosia.
Tuoba Yan programmed the navigation, and the two of them chatted on the way.
Li Yanrao asked, “I’ve noticed you’re always going around on your own. You haven’t found an agent or signed with a company yet, have you?”
“Where would I get connections like that?” Tuoba Yan said helplessly. “I was thinking of asking Wanwan to help me find someone suitable, but I haven’t brought it up with her yet.”
“When you were only doing stunt work, not having an agent was no great loss — one less layer skimming off the top. But now that you’re in Director Fang’s production, you can’t put it off any longer. Would you like to come to Weizhen?”
Weizhen Entertainment was a dark horse that had charged out of nowhere in recent years, single-handedly shattering the domestic tri-monopoly of Huayu, Huiying, and Xiangyu and swiftly climbing into the ranks of the nation’s top entertainment companies. What people loved to talk about most was its exceptionally generous treatment of signed artists — and the famous film stars it had lured under its banner with precisely that.
During her convalescence Tuoba Yan had crammed herself full of industry knowledge, so of course she knew of Weizhen Entertainment. She’d simply never dared imagine signing there herself — after all, its threshold was every bit as high as its benefits.
“You have connections at Weizhen, Yan-jiejie?”
Li Yanrao smiled. “The founder of Weizhen Entertainment is me.”
Tuoba Yan: “…”
The wonton shop Tuoba Yan had in mind was quite out of the way. Li Yanrao left the car at the nearest parking lot she could find, and the two of them went on foot — a good seven or eight minutes’ walk before they arrived. Li Yanrao silently thanked her luck: she’d chosen to drive herself for the sake of a sweet little world for two, so she hadn’t worn high heels. Otherwise, these rutted, uneven little lanes would have been enough to snap her ankles.
The wonton shop sat tucked in a small alley; from a distance they could already see the sign — Lao Zhao’s Wontons and Soup Dumplings.
It was a husband-and-wife operation. The ever-smiling proprietress was a beautiful woman, but a speech affliction left her unable to speak. Her husband was tall and broad with an honest, good-natured face, and they had a son in the sixth grade of primary school — a very well-behaved, endearing child. The family had run this wonton shop for years, and when business got busy the boy would come help after school, working with real polish at his young age, folding buns faster than his own mother.
The room was small but swept spotless and bright, the tables and chairs scrupulously clean. Tuoba Yan had Li Yanrao claim a seat first, then told the owner, “Brother Zhao — two big bowls of wontons, three baskets of buns.”
“You got it!” Boss Zhao called over his shoulder to his wife. “Two big bowls of wontons.”
Zhao’s wife’s hands flew as she cooked them.
The steaming little soup dumplings hit the table. Tuoba Yan poured out the vinegar dishes herself, and she and Li Yanrao each took a pair of chopsticks and fell to with gusto.
Word had it the soup dumpling technique had been passed down through the proprietress’s family. Since her generation had produced only this one mute daughter, the old master had had no choice but to teach the craft to her.
Eight small soup dumplings lay in the steamer basket, their skin unbelievably thin — the filling inside was nearly visible. At the lightest touch of Tuoba Yan’s chopsticks, she could see broth faintly rolling within. She lifted one up, bit open a little mouth in the skin, and carefully sucked down a sip of scalding soup — that fresh, savory bloom on the tongue, the supreme luxury of a body utterly at ease, was beyond what words could describe.
A basket and a half of buns demolished, the two bowls of wontons arrived. The broth was clear and delicate, with nothing in it but laver and a pinch of dried baby shrimp. The wonton filling and the bun filling were different recipes; eaten together, the two never once cloyed.
It wasn’t the most delicious meal Li Yanrao had ever had. But it was the most comfortable one she’d had in a very long time.
“Mom, I’m back.” At the voice, a tall, skinny boy walked in, set the two books in his hand on the corner of the table, washed up, and stationed himself behind the counter to fold buns alongside his mother. “You have no idea how unlucky I was today. On my way to school this morning, I actually…”
Boss Zhao seemed long accustomed to it, going right on serving customers and clearing away dishes.
Li Yanrao noticed Tuoba Yan tilting her head, watching the boy the whole time, and asked tentatively, “You like children?”
Tuoba Yan turned away and was silent for a moment before answering. “Mm. I do like them.”
Her thoughts had drifted to her Crown Prince again — the son she had carried ten months with child3 and brought into the world, raised from a wrinkled little red monkey into a fair, plump, darling baby. He had taken after her, eight parts in ten, and had learned early to mumble “Mama.” Tuoba Yan could happily have held him every waking hour.
She had caught a chill, and — terrified of passing the sickness to him — hadn’t dared go see him all morning after the fever struck.
By that afternoon, he was gone.
Because of that Wench An.
Li Yanrao watched the faraway look on Tuoba Yan’s face and felt something hollow open in her chest. She liked children that much.
“What a pity,” Tuoba Yan said, propping her cheek on her hand. “The state requires adoptive parents to be at least thirty-five, and I have no intention of ever marrying a man and having children — and the state doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage either. Sigh. How many years am I going to have to wait?”
Li Yanrao couldn’t believe her ears. She’d been struck clean through by joy arriving out of nowhere. The adoption age threshold. No plans to marry a man. Same-sex marriage…
Tuoba Yan, however, brought it up no further, and simply went on cradling her wonton bowl and eating.
Li Yanrao, with all that sitting on her heart, couldn’t manage another bite. Tuoba Yan pulled her bowl of wontons over and polished that off too, dealt with the remaining buns herself, and then ordered a bowl of sweet potato brown sugar rice balls on top of it all.
The girl could just eat like that!
For Li Yanrao, this one outing had already delivered a roundabout pledge that left her floating on air. It was only after dropping Tuoba Yan at the gates of Yuying that she remembered something.
She called Tuoba Yan back. “Xiao Yan, wait.”
She took a small cloth pouch from her bag and held it out. “For you. Congratulations on passing the audition.”
Tuoba Yan took it, puzzled. One look at the drawstring pouch told her a sewing novice had made it — the stitching wandered every which way, and the pouch itself had gone crooked out of shape. She loosened the drawstring. Inside sat a plain little square black leather wallet. The hide was excellent by sheen and by touch, though the stitching was far from tidy.
She popped the snap open. Set into the lower right corner of the interior was a small silver heart plate, engraved with the character of her own name — “Yan.”
Li Yanrao had gone out of her way to find a craftsman and learn to make this by hand.
Li Yanrao’s palms were sweating with nerves when Tuoba Yan abruptly stepped forward and caught her hand. Sure enough — the pads of her fingers were scored with scratches and red welts. Tuoba Yan let out a soft sigh and lightly kissed Li Yanrao’s fingertips.
“I love it. You went to a lot of trouble.”
The instant those soft lips brushed her fingertip, it was as though a current discharged with a roar and rolled through her entire body. To this day Li Yanrao couldn’t say how she’d managed her goodbye — she just sat in the car staring blankly at her fingers, lost in a daze.
Then, as if possessed by some ghost, she caught her fingertip between her teeth and nibble-nibble-nibbled!
Tuoba Yan tucked her loose change, her bus card, and her visitor pass neatly into the wallet and strolled off toward the Wu Zhen’er soundstage. Every dozen steps or so she’d fish the wallet back out of her pocket, open it, look, and put it away again — for all the world like a lunatic.
Weizhen Entertainment kept its headquarters in Yuchuan, because its founder Li Yanrao had made her fortune in Yuchuan City; the greater part of her business empire radiated outward with Yuchuan at its heart. That Yuchuan’s development and construction now stood shoulder to shoulder with the provincial capital of Tianyun City was, one had to admit, partly the glow cast by Li Yanrao, the Female God of Wealth.
Tuoba Yan tilted her head back to take in the headquarters tower. Li Yanrao’s office sat on the top floor — and she had even given Tuoba Yan a card for the private elevator, quietly hoping Tuoba Yan might deliver herself right to her door.
Tuoba Yan walked into the lobby. The interior was cold, hard, and spare, silver metal used in sweeping sheets, chill to the eye. A good number of strikingly attractive people moved through the hall — Weizhen’s artists, presumably. She registered at the front desk, received a visitor pass, took the designated elevator bay, and rode up to the floor named in last night’s phone call.
Tuoba Yan found the room marked Director’s Office. The door stood open a crack, and she knocked.
A male voice inside said, “Come in.”
Only then did Tuoba Yan push the door open.
The director was very young — gold wire-rimmed glasses, hair styled sharp and capable. He set down the documents in his hand and smiled. “Miss Tuoba, I take it?”
Tuoba Yan nodded. He rose from behind the desk and offered his hand. “Hello. I’m Li Chengmao.”
Going by the face and the surname, the man likely shared some blood tie with Li Yanrao. After a few pleasantries, Li Chengmao got straight to the point and handed her a stack of contracts. “This is the signing agreement. Have a look through.”
Tuoba Yan leafed through it briefly. The terms Weizhen had drawn up for her were things an ordinary newcomer wouldn’t dare dream of — and Tuoba Yan understood perfectly that this was entirely on Li Yanrao’s account.
She showed no panic, no giddy rapture, nothing so flighty — her expression didn’t shift by a hair. Li Chengmao couldn’t help but rate this young woman a notch higher in his estimation, thinking to himself that someone the Female Tyrant Li Yanrao had set her eye on was bound to be no ordinary sort.
Tuoba Yan signed both copies of the contract. Li Chengmao took them, gave them a glance, and smiled. “Welcome to Weizhen, Miss Tuoba. Tomorrow the agent we’ve arranged for you will call to set a time and place to meet.”
The author has something to say:
Today’s update is late — sorry about that!
—
Li Yanrao: Delighted!
Chen Wanwan: Give the little mop a good scrub and ship her straight aboard Eldest Cousin’s boat!
Tuoba Yan: …The two of you are really too much!
Footnotes
- 农家乐 | nóngjiālè | Literally 'farm family joy' — rural homesteads converted into countryside restaurants and guesthouses; a hugely popular urban getaway format offering home-style cooking, orchard picking, and fishing ponds.
- 有情饮水饱 | yǒu qíng yǐn shuǐ bǎo | Literally 'with love, drinking water sates you' — a Cantonese-derived proverb holding that when two people truly love each other, even the plainest shared meal feels like a feast.
- 十月怀胎 | shí yuè huái tāi | Literally 'ten months with child' — Chinese custom counts pregnancy in ten lunar months of twenty-eight days each, roughly the forty-week full term; a stock phrase for carrying a baby to term.
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