A Ten-Year Feud Ends on 'Hou Hui You Qi' as Its Catchphrases Spread Off-Screen
Ma Tianyu and Zhang Meng re-added each other on WeChat after ten years of silence on the reunion show 'Hou Hui You Qi' — while the show's own catchphrases have begun turning up in comedy clubs and talk events.
Actor Ma Tianyu and actress-producer Zhang Meng have re-added each other on WeChat after nearly a decade of silence — the latest reconciliation delivered by "Hou Hui You Qi" (后会友期, roughly "meet again as friends"), the show the site has followed as it outperforms China's hit dramas with the simple premise of estranged friends talking things out.
The two met while filming "Ice Fantasy" and were once close; then a declined casting invitation and one sentence said in anger ended the friendship, WeChat accounts deleted, ten years of nothing. Zhang Meng invited Ma onto the show herself. On the trip they laid out the old grievance face to face; Ma Tianyu, whose years of confiding in an AI chatbot rather than people the site wrote about last month, showed the lonely, sensitive side he keeps off camera, and Zhang Meng — who admitted she regretted putting him through it — got the conversation she had spent a decade not having. A still from the episode carries the on-screen caption "张萌，你今天还会删我吗？" — Zhang Meng, would you still delete me today?
The show's reach now extends well past its episodes. At a live event in Guangzhou held by the publishing-and-audio brand Kan Lixiang, comedian Niao Niao was asked to introduce herself without any title or job. "I'm a newly minted duck-tongue enthusiast," she announced. "I've drawn a prison around myself, friends" — 画地为牢, the phrase that trended at No. 7 on Weibo's list this weekend. Both halves of the sentence are show references: duck tongues were the snack Xu Fei and Li Na shared in their Super Girl days twenty years ago, and "drawing a prison on the ground" is Xu Fei's own line about the old friendship that holds her still. Her panel-mates Zhan Qingyun and Pang Ying played along on stage; one post called the self-introduction "a long-distance handshake with everyone hooked on this story" — catchphrases doubling as recognition signals between strangers.
That is the show's real product. Its reconciliations are deliberately unsentimental — "forgiveness is easy; restoration is hard," as one summary post put it, noting that Ma and Zhang both said on camera they cannot go back to what they were. What the show offers instead is a vocabulary for the fact that adult friendships end over small things and rarely return to what they were: reconciliation, in the show's phrasing, means making peace with the regret rather than erasing it.
Ma Tianyu and Zhang Meng's WeChat re-add closes a decade of silence without promising to undo it. Niao Niao's duck tongues suggest the vocabulary is already doing its own traveling — from a reunion episode, to a comedy stage, to strangers who need only one phrase to recognize each other.