An Actress's Goodbye Letter to Her Character's Parents Caps the Finale of China's Biggest Drama
As the CCTV-8 drama 'Lan Xiang Ru Gu' aired its finale, Tan Songyun published a letter in her character's voice to the character's dying mother — and a viral side-plot involving a five-year-old lookalike showed how completely the show has escaped its time slot.
The letter was addressed to "Dad and Mom of the Xu family," and it began the way a letter home begins: "I miss you — I miss the little courtyard, I miss my time with you both." It was published on Monday morning by Tan Songyun, one of Chinese television's most reliable leading actresses, and within hours it had been reposted nearly 12,000 times. The strangest part of the document is that neither of its recipients exists.
Tan wrote it in the voice of Xu Lanxiang, the character she plays in "Lan Xiang Ru Gu," the period drama that ended its CCTV-8 run on Monday night. The letter visits the finale's deaths: the mother, dying, says "Lanxiang has come for me," and the father stands beside the bed with tears in his eyes, insisting to the end that his wife had been a blessed woman. Then it lands on the line viewers had already adopted as the show's thesis, the mother's parting advice: "Live well, like wild grass — without shame, without dignity, but alive." Wild grass, the letter agrees, is the thing fire cannot finish; next spring the hillside is green again. Qianjiang Video printed the full text, and the comments filled with readers quoting it back.
This is how the biggest Chinese dramas now close their runs: the cast does not simply leave. In-character farewell letters, deleted scenes, letters home from the actors to the families their characters married into — the aftercare is part of the production schedule, an acknowledgment that a hit drama is a national mood that must be gently landed, not merely cancelled. Earlier in the run the site followed how the show's 'second sister' became the character everyone envied; Monday's letter was the same phenomenon from the inside, an actress and her audience agreeing, jointly, not to let go yet.
The show's escape from its own time slot was measured elsewhere, too. A father-influencer named Zhang Zhibo realized his five-year-old son had the round eyes and apple cheeks of Tan Songyun herself — viewers declared him young Xu Lanxiang exactly, and cast him in an imaginary sequel as the character's child. The father's response answered in period-drama grammar: "As his father, I approve." The joke works only because a five-year-old has the face of a thirty-something actress's most famous character — which is to say, only because the whole country has been watching the same thing at half past nine.