On August 26, 2005, 21-year-old Li Yuchun was voted the winner of Super Girl. Two weeks later, the movie Waiting Alone starring Xia Yu, Li Bingbing, and Gong Beibi was released. Xia Yu was 29 years old that year, and director Dayyan Eng was 30. Like the blue sky and colorful music in the movie, that year seemed to mark the last golden age of Chinese pop culture.
The story begins in a bar, and it seems that only the bar in Waiting Alone is full of youthful beauty and hormones. Similar scenes in subsequent movies always make people feel impatient.
The plot of the movie is simple: Xia Yu, who likes to write fantasy novels and runs an antique store for a living, falls in love with Li Bingbing, but Li Bingbing chooses a rich man. Gong Beibi has been secretly in love with Xia Yu for years, but Xia Yu only treats her as a friend. In the end, the movie ends with the line “Dedicated to the one who slipped away from you.” You can certainly see it as a boy-romance, but there are some parts that are suspicious. For example, Li Bingbing, the girl who haunts Xia Yu and male moviegoers, is probably just a “particularly annoying person” to women.
So why the discrepancy? From a boy’s point of view, his romantic history may also become his bragging history. For example, Wang Shuo once wrote in Animal Fierce:
“This story, which I started to tell with a sincere desire, has become full of lies through my enormous, persistent efforts. I am no longer sure what is true, what happened, and what is false, stolen, or just made up.”
If so understood, Li Bingbing’s return to the small antique shop for the reunion might not have happened. Gong Beibi has been playing with Xia Yu since childhood, but the train platform farewell might be Xia Yu’s imagination. The whole “youth story” is perhaps the best “ghost story” written by Xia Yu. That is why we say “I know/blow through the bull/will also be with youth a laugh away/let me trapped in the city/to commemorate you” – waiting alone.