The Martial Arts Stunt Double of the Entertainment Circle – Chapter 41
by Little PandaAll the grueling work Tuoba Yan had put in these past days finally showed results today.
It hadn’t been for nothing, all those days spent playing the lunatic in front of her bedroom mirror — running lines, working through movements, splitting her attention between the performance itself and her own face. Which angle was most flattering. How much force to put behind a smile, and what effect it produced. How to cry beautifully without looking affected or cloying, and still be moving…
The girl in red held her chin high, her skin whiter than snow, her face vivid and lovely. As she dismounted, the hem of her cape swirled up around her, and she looked altogether like a tongue of flame burning at its fiercest — dazzling and dangerous, as if anyone who came too close would be scorched.
But this insufferably arrogant, haughty young noble — who complained out loud about the little beggar being a blind nuisance in her way — was still willing to square off against someone on his behalf, for no other reason than that she couldn’t stomach watching the strong bully the weak.
Yang Xiujin’s character was, in truth, a contentious one. Because Qin Xiang’er existed, she was fated for tragedy. If Yang Xiujin’s first impression on the audience were merely a pretty, spoiled, willful girl, then the audience wouldn’t feel much indignation on her behalf when the emperor later turned cold on her.
But Yang Xiujin’s character had flashes of light impossible to ignore.
Get the balance right, and the figure would come across as many-faceted, three-dimensional, alive. Play her as a stiff, formulaic type, and she wouldn’t just fail to add any luster to Emperor of a Dynasty — she’d drag the whole production’s quality down with her. Which was exactly why Fang Zhengqin had refused, flat out, to let Bai Yi’an play Yang Xiujin.
Tuoba Yan’s technique could hardly be called masterly, but Fang Zhengqin could see that she had genuinely studied the part and understood it through and through. And for a newcomer standing in front of a camera for the first time, she was unnervingly composed for a girl her age — her eyes quick and spirited, her line delivery beyond reproach.
Fang Zhengqin’s gamble had paid off.
Greenness in acting can be coached out over time. What’s fatal is a purely mechanical rendering of a role — a mistake even plenty of veterans make. They work out in advance roughly how a scene should go, and then when they actually stand before the lens, they never enter the character at all. They just copy the gestures and expressions they settled on beforehand.
An ordinary director might be perfectly happy to use an actor who looks ‘seasoned’ like that, but Fang Zhengqin was famous for being picky. The role of the Noble Imperial Consort Yi couldn’t be changed now — so there was no way he was handing over Empress Yang as well, and her part was hardly small.
For the final shot, Yang Xiujin and Biyu’er — clutching her rabbit — entered the general’s residence. The little beggar picked himself up off the ground, and a household servant quietly pressed a cloth pouch into his hands. “A reward from our Eldest Miss.”
The little beggar cradled the heavy money pouch, and through the cloth he could feel the shapes of coin after coin — copper cash1.
The servant said, “The Eldest Miss says you’re to stop stealing from now on. If the horse doesn’t kick you to death, somebody will catch you and beat you to death.” Even as he said it, the servant found it a little funny, and added, “Better put that away safe.”
The little beggar silently tucked the pouch inside his robe, dropped resolutely to his knees, and knocked his head against the ground three times before the Yang residence — bang, bang, bang. Then he rose and said to the servant, “Good sir, I, Dongfang Ning, will surely repay the Eldest Miss’s kindness in this lifetime.”
The moment that scene wrapped, the crew’s attitude toward Tuoba Yan underwent a wholesale transformation. Plenty of them had privately written her off as a parachuted newcomer — nothing said aloud, but no real respect behind it either. Now Tuoba Yan’s performance landed like a slap, hard, across the faces of everyone who’d been putting her and Bai Yi’an in the same breath.
Chen Wanwan basked in the glory of Tuoba Yan’s brilliant performance, gesticulating with even more glee than Tuoba Yan herself.
Back in the makeup room, the next scene up was Bai Yi’an’s first. She had changed into her costume at some point and sat before the vanity while the hairstylist worked on her hair.
Since Qin Xiang’er and Yang Xiujin came from different stations in life, Bai Yi’an’s costume was far plainer than the red gown Tuoba Yan wore — but real care had gone into the hairstyle, marking her out as the true female lead.
Bai Yi’an acted as though she hadn’t seen Tuoba Yan come in, staring darkly at her own reflection in the mirror.
Tuoba Yan opened a bottle of mineral water, thinking that the woman had piled far too much pressure onto herself. With a mindset this far gone, her actual turn in front of the camera was likely to be a disaster.
Sure enough, Bai Yi’an had barely gotten out her first line when Fang Zhengqin shouted, “Cut!”
He scratched at his hair, irritated. “Xiao Bai, you’re pushing way too hard — your expressions aren’t landing. You’re an orphaned busker scraping a living on the jianghu2, not some pampered young lady like Yang Xiujin. Spirited is fine — but not this exaggerated. Again!”
Five cuts in a row without a single pass, and Fang Zhengqin was practically roaring:
“What is wrong with you? How are you getting worse with every take? You can’t even remember your lines — what are you doing calling yourself an actor? Did you leave your brain at home today? All these people, waiting on you alone! If they’re not sick of you yet, I am! I explained it so clearly just now, and you said you understood — so how is it that the second you’re in front of the camera you turn into a robot?!”
The set was dead silent. It was nearly one o’clock, but nobody dared speak, terrified of drawing down the fury of Director Fang in his deranged state.
Bai Yi’an stood before Fang Zhengqin with her head bowed, her skull buzzing. It wasn’t his booming voice — her state had been wrong from the moment she first stepped on set. Having watched Tuoba Yan’s performance, Bai Yi’an simply could not settle her mind. At first it was only her expressions missing the mark; then the blunders piled up, until even Xie Cheng, the male lead, was visibly displeased.
No one said anything to her face, but the contempt in their eyes heaped the pressure on her, until her head was filled with nothing but ‘What must they think of me’ and ‘Losing face in front of all these people’ and ‘If this keeps up, will I be thrown out on my ear’ — she couldn’t even hold on to her lines.
Bai Yi’an felt as though mosquitoes were circling her ears; Fang Zhengqin’s voice swelled and shrank. The blood was rushing through her veins, an itch pricking at her from the inside out, and she heard herself say, “I’m sorry, Director Fang…”
“And what good is sorry?” Fang Zhengqin was so angry his face had gone red to the collar.
Unit Manager Zhao hurriedly took hold of Fang Zhengqin and murmured soothingly at him, and only with great difficulty did he get the man to cool down. He sighed, head aching. “It’s noon — everyone go eat and rest. We shoot as scheduled this afternoon. Xiao Bai, you think it over too. If it still isn’t working, I really will have to consider recasting the role.”
Chen Wanwan tugged Tuoba Yan along. “Zhao Mi made silkie soup. Let’s go drink soup.”
They had barely lifted the lid of the insulated food carrier when Bai Yi’an came rushing in, panicked. She went into her own dressing room, hurried back out clutching a small black leather handbag, and Tuoba Yan’s sharp eye caught that something was off in her gaze — her fingertips trembling neurotically, as if she were holding something back.
In her haste, Bai Yi’an hadn’t noticed the zipper on the bag was half open, and a stainless-steel lighter slipped out and clattered onto the floor.
Tuoba Yan said to Chen Wanwan, who was leering at the soup: “Wanwan, I’m stepping out for a bit — you start without me. Remember to save me some.” To lend the lie credibility, General Tuoba deliberately added one more line, thick with reluctance.
Chen Wanwan promised up and down: “Okay, okay!”
Bai Yi’an all but spent the last of her strength getting to the restroom. She shut herself into a stall, turned the lock, sat down on the toilet, and rifled through her bag.
She found the little cigarette case without any trouble, tapped out a cigarette, clamped it between her lips — and went looking for the lighter. But the lighter that absolutely should have been in there was gone!
A loud sob of desperation escaped her. She upended the entire contents of the bag in one rough dump — and still that one Zippo was missing.
She clutched at her own collar. The pain — like ten million ants gnawing through her body — would not let her calm down. Her hands and feet were twitching; she couldn’t even pick her phone up off the floor to call her assistant.
Just then, someone came into the restroom, checking stall by stall, and finally stopped in front of Bai Yi’an’s door.
Bai Yi’an was on the edge of despair. She fought with everything she had to suppress her breathing, to keep those agonized gasps from carrying — but in an empty restroom you could hear a mosquito fly past with perfect clarity, let alone her ragged, racing breath.
The person outside slid a lighter through the gap beneath the stall door:
“Bai-jie, you dropped this.”
It was Tuoba Yan!
But Bai Yi’an couldn’t care. As if her body had been handed back to her in an instant, she snatched up the lighter, flicked it open, and lit the cigarette laced with marijuana. A harsh, grassy smell laced with a trace of sweetness spread through the stall. Bai Yi’an drew the smoke deep, deep into her lungs, and the biting, crawling agony across her body slowly ebbed away.
She smoked half of it with her eyes half-closed — and then, swimming up through the haze, she remembered that Tuoba Yan was still out there. She froze mid-motion.
Tuoba Yan’s voice drifted over: “Bai-jie, what kind of cigarette is that? It’s really harsh.”
Bai Yi’an had no idea how to answer that, but Tuoba Yan changed the subject herself: “Bai-jie, look how desperate you were just now — the craving must be pretty strong, huh? Smoking really isn’t good for you. Never mind the dependence; long-term smokers’ teeth turn yellow. You’re so beautiful — how ugly would it be if your teeth got stained? And it causes cancer, too.”
Listening to her run on and on like this — impossible to tell whether she was playing dumb or genuinely dumb — Bai Yi’an found herself hoping the girl really was that oblivious. She took another drag and said hoarsely, “What I smoke is my business. What’s it to you?”
Tuoba Yan laughed softly through the door.
“Fine. I came because I wanted to talk to you, Bai-jie, about Qin Xiang’er.”
Bai Yi’an said through gritted teeth, “Did you come to laugh at me?”
“Hardly — you’re overthinking it, Bai-jie,” Tuoba Yan said. “Qin Xiang’er is a street-market woman, yes, but she isn’t merely shallow and shrewish. On the contrary, she has a great many virtues. What drew Emperor Shuncheng’s attention was never her domineering side. The emperor may have been a wastrel, but he was no fool.”
After a long moment, Bai Yi’an asked glumly, “What else?”
Tuoba Yan went on:
“Qin Xiang’er saved Emperor Shuncheng’s life, and for a man who lost his mother the day he was born, that planted a dependence on her. He did truly fall in love with her later — but I’d say the emperor’s feelings for Qin Xiang’er, at the very start, were a lonely child’s adoration of a woman whose nature radiated motherhood.”
“Qin Xiang’er was the first woman in his life to appear in the role of protector, and she stood firmly at his side ever after. Qin Xiang’er may have been rough and unbound by etiquette — but then, the emperor himself had no love for etiquette.”
“You could almost call it heaven’s design, that two people whose natures completed each other should ever have met.”
The author has something to say:
Don’t touch drugs, don’t touch drugs, don’t touch drugs! Don’t touch them in any form whatsoever — drugs will wreck your entire life!! For your own sake, and for the sake of everyone around you, stay far away from drugs!!
Footnotes
- 铜钱 | tóngqián | Cast bronze coins with a square hole punched through the center, imperial China's everyday currency for over two thousand years, typically strung together on a cord through the hole. A pouch of them is the beggar's first honest fortune.
- 江湖 | jiānghú | Literally 'rivers and lakes' — the classical Chinese world of drifters outside settled society, roamed by itinerant performers, martial artists, and fortune-seekers with no home or protector. 'Busking the jianghu' means surviving town to town on street performance.
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