Television's Big Night: 'Life Tree' and Song Jia Top China's Golden Eagle Awards
The 33rd Golden Eagle Awards crowned 'Life Tree' best drama and gave Song Jia best actress for playing the educator Zhang Guimei — while a 2005 sitcom reunion and one shut-out hit argued in the margins.
Television's biggest honours went out in Changsha on Tuesday night, and the 33rd Golden Eagle Awards split their top prizes between two very different faces of Chinese drama. Best drama and best screenplay went to "Life Tree," the series starring Yang Zi and Hu Ge that also took best supporting actress for Mei Ting; best actor went to Yu Hewei for "Silent Honour," in which he plays an intelligence officer; and Song Jia took best actress for "When the Mountain Flowers Bloom," a drama built around the educator Zhang Guimei. The results ran three slots deep on Baidu's trending board within the hour — the awards and the board agreeing, for once, on what mattered.
Song Jia's win carried the most weight. Her subject, Zhang Guimei, founded China's first free high school for girls in the mountains of Yunnan and pushed more than 2,000 students from the poorest families into university; she is one of the few living Chinese people whom playing on screen is itself a public test. Accepting the award, Song Jia's eyes reddened before she spoke, and she opened with the other nominees rather than herself: all of them had carried their work to the same place, she said, and their reverence for the craft did not rank. She closed by promising to keep making good work and to keep being a decent person — plainer words than most award seasons produce, and received accordingly.
Yu Hewei turned his prize outward too. The honour, he said, belonged to the man he played: General Wu Shi, a senior officer who passed secrets to the Communists and was executed in Taipei in 1950, whose story "Silent Honour" brought to mainstream television.
The night's other plot was nostalgia. During the ceremony, Yang Zi and Zhang Yishan — the onscreen siblings from "Home with Kids," the 2005 family sitcom that an entire generation grew up on — were filmed chatting in the audience, and the clip ran under tags declaring that childhood had reassembled itself. Hu Ge and Yan Ni supplied the comedy: their antics at the podium, and a tipsy glance from Yan Ni when asked whom she wanted to hug, trended within minutes.
Not everything got a prize. "Alley Household," the ratings hit starring Yan Ni and Jiang Xin, ended the night with nothing, and the hashtag saying so — "a pity" — gathered a familiar argument: heat, ratings, word of mouth, acting — which one did the show lack? The academy's answer, in effect, was that prestige lies elsewhere this year: with a drama about a mountain schoolteacher and another about a martyred general.
