The Martial Arts Stunt Double of the Entertainment Circle – Chapter 36
by Little PandaThe talent agent Weizhen assigned her was named Tao Shen; the two of them arranged to meet at a café across from the Weizhen tower.
Tao Shen was a woman of about thirty, fair-faced and genteel, wearing a pair of metal-framed clear-lens glasses that lent her a thoroughly executive air. Tuoba Yan shook her hand, and they settled face to face, exchanging a few opening pleasantries.
For the moment, Tao Shen was reasonably satisfied with what she saw. When Li Chengmao had first told her she’d be taking on a newcomer, she’d agreed readily enough while privately bracing for yet another “relative” parachuted in from some executive suite. But one offhand line from Li Chengmao over the phone had killed any thought of fobbing the girl off:
“This newcomer was signed by the President herself.”
Tao Shen studied Tuoba Yan covertly. For a girl her age, the outfit was plain past the point of plain. That waterfall of long hair bore no trace of dye or perm, gathered high at the back of her head with an old-fashioned grey cloth hair tie; no pierced ears, no necklace or bangles, nails clean and trim without so much as a coat of clear polish — jeans, sneakers, a baseball jacket.
She wasn’t even wearing makeup, and Tao Shen’s eye was sharp. Those elegant brows showed no trace of artifice; that fair, smooth face had at most a dab of moisturizer on it.
A lotus rising from clear water, untouched by any carver’s hand1.
Where on earth had President Li unearthed such a tender little lotus blossom?
Tao Shen’s face betrayed nothing, and Tuoba Yan carried herself with easy poise. After a brief round of introductions, Tao Shen asked, “You mentioned wanting to develop in film and television. Any acting experience before now? School skits, stage plays, that sort of thing?”
Tuoba Yan considered. “I’ve done background extra work. At the Yuying base.”
Tao Shen perked up with interest. “Oh? Extra work is a grueling line. How long did you do it? Any shots where your face actually made it on camera?”
“Half a day, and I played a corpse. There was a two-second close-up, though. Made 80 yuan.” Tuoba Yan answered with perfect honesty.
A silence settled between them. A mournful love song drifted through the café’s speakers. Tao Shen asked:
“…Anything else?”
“I’m currently working a job as a martial stunt double.”
In all her years at Weizhen, the roster of artists under Tao Shen’s hand had turned over more times than she could count, and never once had she met one with this much… personality. She decided she’d better stop asking questions — she was all but being led around by the nose: “Since you want to act, shall I sign you up for a beginner’s acting class? You’ve nothing else scheduled at the moment, I trust?”
Tuoba Yan shook her head. “I may be tied up for a while.”
Whatever good impression Tao Shen had formed was by now mostly rubble. If not for her memory of the President standing behind this girl, she’d have turned on her heel and walked out then and there. “Why not?”
“I’ll be joining the 《Emperor of a Dynasty》 production when filming starts on the 10th of this month.”
Even braced as she was for whatever bizarre answer might come, Tao Shen froze for a beat.
She knew the production, of course — Ming Huan, the popular female idol on her own roster, had landed a small supporting role with a few scenes in it. But this featherbrain who’d just admitted, without a flicker of shame, to playing corpses and doing stunt doubling was now suddenly connected to Director Fang Zhengqin’s 《Emperor of a Dynasty》. Tao Shen felt herself yanked clean from hell up to heaven.
Recovering herself, she blurted out with a distinct lapse of grace, “You’re doing the stunt doubling on it?”
Tuoba Yan smiled with great magnanimity. “No. I’m playing Empress Yang.”
That answer startled her all over again, though she caught herself quickly this time, apologizing with a laugh. “My apologies. If you’ve already won Director Fang Zhengqin’s approval, then yes — the acting class would indeed be unnecessary.”
Watching the fine-grained shifts cross Tao Shen’s face, Tuoba Yan kept her smile in place. This agent was clearly an old hand at serving each dish to match the diner2. Showing a bit of her strength now was no bad thing, or the woman might go on thinking Tuoba Yan was soft clay for the molding.
For her part, Tao Shen could no longer sound this girl’s depths. Was that sweet, demure smile real or counterfeit? She had a nagging sense she’d been played, yet couldn’t pin it down — after all, the girl hadn’t said one aggressive word. The one who’d lost composure, repeatedly, was Tao Shen herself.
In any case, she could no longer fob the girl off with the attitude reserved for ordinary newcomers. A few more roundabout questions confirmed that the role of Empress Yang was genuine, and Tao Shen’s tone turned positively warm — asking after her health and comfort, down to the smallest particulars — as though that faintly contemptuous question about “stunt doubling” had never been spoken at all.
Her talk with Tao Shen concluded, Tuoba Yan ambled off toward the bus stop.
A snob who fawned on the high and trampled the low, perhaps — but that was still preferable to the smooth-faced hypocrite. She was still working out how to handle this particular agent when a car horn sounded at her side. She turned to look, and couldn’t help laughing.
Li Yanrao lowered the window. “Any plans for lunch?”
Tuoba Yan grinned. “You’re everywhere.”
Li Yanrao was fairly certain she’d contracted some illness whose sole symptom was an unbearable itch at the sight of Tuoba Yan. She boasted grandly, “Wherever you are, there I am.”
Tuoba Yan made a show of considering it. “Doesn’t look like I have anything on today. Where does President Li mean to take me?”
“The morning’s yours to command. This afternoon, I’m taking you to meet someone.”
Tuoba Yan arched an eyebrow. “Taking me to meet the family? I haven’t said yes to your suit yet, you know.”
Li Yanrao replied without a shred of shame. “Which is exactly why I’m going full throttle this morning. I aim to have you won over within two hours.”
From across the way, Tao Shen watched Tuoba Yan climb into that black Maybach, and a thread of disdain showed on her face.
Tuoba Yan sprawled into the passenger seat with zero regard for her image, humming with contentment. “This car of yours is genuinely comfortable.”
Li Yanrao declared with magnificent swagger, “If you like it, take it.”
“And the person in it? Can I take her too?”
The words landed on Li Yanrao as a critical hit straight to the heart. Somewhere inside she was screaming I’ll go with you anywhere, but all she managed after a long moment was, “Take me where?”
“Yuchuan City Zoo.”
Li Yanrao: “…”
And so they actually drove to the zoo, bought tickets, and went in.
Tuoba Yan charged through the gates with childlike abandon. The crowds pressed shoulder to shoulder on every side, most of them parents shepherding children in to see the animals, and the tantrums, wailing, and shrieking drilled through Li Yanrao’s skull until it throbbed. It took her a good while to spot Tuoba Yan — queuing at the ice cream cart.
Li Yanrao squeezed through to her side. Tuoba Yan was deliberating. “Yanrao, which do you think is better — chocolate, or vanilla?”
That one word — Yanrao — short-circuited President Li’s brain entirely. Tuoba Yan arrived at her decision. “Boss, two ice creams — one vanilla, one chocolate.”
The ice cream here was, naturally, cheap mass-market stuff, but the portions were generous. Tuoba Yan pressed the chocolate one on Li Yanrao. “You start on this one. I’ll try the vanilla, and we’ll swap in a bit.”
Tuoba Yan ate her ice cream with eyes narrowed in bliss, tugging Li Yanrao along by the wrist — but Li Yanrao’s gaze had snagged on her mouth and refused all orders to detach. That rosy tongue-tip flickered in and out of view, and Li Yanrao’s heart bobbed up and down in time with it. Her mouth went dry; her whole body burned.
A sudden chill on her hand jolted her back to her senses: the chocolate ice cream had melted, slathering her fingers in viscous chocolate sludge. Tuoba Yan leaned over at once to help her eat it. “Quick, quick, eat it — it’s melting!”
Li Yanrao decided she could do with some cooling down herself, and licked at it absently — then froze solid. Tuoba Yan had already eaten from this one!
President Li stopped dead in her tracks, hardly believing it, drifting as though in a dream. She was just leaning in for another taste when a bratty kid slammed into her out of nowhere; the scoop of ice cream plummeted to the ground in tragedy, and President Li’s heart shattered with it. Shattered…
A few steps on, Tuoba Yan noticed she’d left Li Yanrao behind and doubled back. “What a waste…”
By the time Li Yanrao thought to hunt down the little brat, he’d dissolved into the boundless sea of people. Tuoba Yan patted her shoulder in consolation and, with great magnanimity, presented her with the vanilla one — by now little more than a bare cone.
And so Li Yanrao crunched through that cone in vengeful sorrow, and the two of them entered the panda house — where, at first glance, there wasn’t a single panda to be seen. A closer look revealed two of them up in the trees, and a third soaking in a small pond.
Three roly-poly pandas, two grown and one small. The two big ones lay flung across the branches like a pair of thick, heavy blankets, each sprawled in five-limbed prostration across its own fork of the tree, their postures synchronized to an uncanny degree, tongues lolling loose in their sleep, wholly indifferent to the children screaming themselves hoarse for their attention.
The smaller one steeped in the pond, preening and posing for the visitors, even scooping up water in its paws to splash at them — an absolute ham the moment a crowd gathered.
Tuoba Yan laughed in pure delight, tugging at Li Yanrao. “Yanrao, look at the panda! It’s so cute!”
Li Yanrao stood wedged in the crowd, hemmed in on all sides by laughter and chatter. Tuoba Yan was doubled over at the panda wiggling its rear at the audience, and watching the open, radiant joy of her laughing face, Li Yanrao found herself smiling too.
What was there to be afraid of? Everyone was laughing. You’d have to put your lips right against her ear just to pick her voice out from the din.
Once they’d had their fill of the national treasures — the roly-polies3 — the two of them drifted along with the flow of the crowd: elephants, monkeys, crocodiles… all the way to the big cat hall. The leopard enclosure drew the thickest knot of onlookers, any number of brats pounding willfully on the glass, while the leopard wore the face of a creature who had renounced all hope of living, sprawled lazily asleep on the ground. Next door to the leopard was a sleek, powerful black panther, its black coat gleaming like oiled silk. Tuoba Yan pointed at the panther and shouted excitedly into Li Yanrao’s ear:
“Haha! Isn’t that you!”
Li Yanrao followed her finger to the panther, which was at that moment rolling on the ground, all four paws in the air, belly bared, writhing around like an oversized house cat — while wearing an expression of supreme, world-disdaining arrogance, as though everyone screaming around its enclosure were a fucking idiot.
Li Yanrao: Holy shit, that is absolutely not me.
After a full morning’s play, President Li had washed down a respectable quantity of cheap junk food with the view of General Tuoba’s lovely face. Lunch was settled at the zoo as well — the restaurant was overpriced and awful, but the steady graze of snacks along the way had filled them up nicely enough.
Emerging from the reptile house, the last exhibit, the two returned to the zoo parking lot and brought the car around. Li Yanrao asked, “Want to nap in the car for a bit? How about this afternoon we go to my grandfather’s place?”
Tuoba Yan wasn’t tired in the least. She smiled. “I still haven’t said yes to you, you know. So eager to meet the family?”
Li Yanrao wilted. “The trials aren’t over yet?”
Tuoba Yan giggled. Her gaze came to rest on Li Yanrao’s forehead, and she sat up and leaned in close:
“There’s a little bug in your hair.”
Li Yanrao went rigid at once. The mere thought of a bug on her body set her skin crawling, and she urged frantically, “Get it off me! Quick!”
Tuoba Yan knelt up on the seat, reached across, and steadied herself on Li Yanrao’s shoulder. Then she drew closer, slowly, until she could feel the other woman’s breath brushing the tip of her nose — and suddenly pecked her on the lips.
No lingering tangle, no slow deep kiss — only a quick, light touch, and the instant the strike landed the attacker withdrew, leaving Li Yanrao sitting there dumbstruck, no longer sure whether that soft, sweet brush of lips had been a dream.
Tuoba Yan clicked her seatbelt home. “Let’s go. We’re meeting the family.”
The author has something to say:
Ahhh, I finally made the deadline! There’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for ages that I want to raise — the matter of Tuoba Xiao Mei’s ending. The original plan was to pair her with Li, and today’s chapter was supposed to give the two of them the bulk of the page time, but I just can’t find the spark no matter how I write it… Could everyone accept swapping Li out of the pairing?
—
Li Yanrao (frowning): Why do I feel like the atmosphere between me and Yan-mei is a little strange??
Tuoba Yan (smiling): An illusion, surely. Have you been overworking? I’ll stew you a nourishing tonic soup.
Li Yanrao (beaming dopily): Okaaay!
Footnotes
- 清水出芙蓉，天然去雕饰 | Qīngshuǐ chū fúróng, tiānrán qù diāoshì | Lines from the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai: 'a lotus rising from clear water, natural, uncarved.' The classical gold standard for beauty that needs no ornament — here applied to a bare face.
- 看碟下菜 | kàn dié xià cài | Literally 'look at the plate, serve the dish' — restaurant idiom for sizing up a customer's status before deciding how they're treated; flatter the big spenders, stint everyone else.
- 滚滚 | Gǔngǔn | 'Roly-poly,' China's affectionate national nickname for the giant panda, coined for its round shape and tumbling gait; a staple of Chinese internet animal memes.
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