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<b>Showbiz* Sexy Queen (XI)</b>
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After Mei Mu Lan hung up the phone, she opened the webpage and searched for the novel 《Love in a Fallen City》.
As mentioned in the plot, Bai Jieying, a newcomer to the industry, became a sensation after appearing in this controversial film.
And just now Miss S called, informing her to go to Ling’s Group tomorrow, the entertainment company’s drama team for an audition.
This coincided with her intentions, so she opened the pages of the novel now, and carefully read through, the subject of the novel is lesbianism, 《Love in a Fallen City》.
Love in a Fallen City, a novel set in the early Republic of China; The story takes place in Hangzhou, an ancient water town; The protagonist of the story is the wife of the second son of the local warlord Xiao Sheng Yan.
The wife of the Major, who was a second generation warlord along with her husband, was of noble birth. She is the ninth daughter of Ling Ye Chong, the warlord of the southwest region, and the only legitimate daughter among Ling Ye Chong’s 18 daughters. A much higher status than her other sisters.
Although the two Xiao Ling families were married out of interest, the newlyweds were a good match for each other.
And the her husband who is a Major, the second son of Xiao Shi Yan, was a dashing and suave-looking man who fought heroically and was, by all accounts, a wonderful man.
But naturally, such a man has a downside: he is lustful and likes to abuse his partner.
This hobby of Xiao Er Shao’s was harmless to the society of the time.
And when he was confronted with the wife of the famous Major, he could not lay hands on her out of love and reason.
Therefore, he left the lady cold and spent many years in the company of playboys and prostitutes, which made her cold to him.
The story opens with the lady sitting on a carved wooden stool, wearing a goose-yellow antique dress and a wooden face as she allows her maid to do her make-up.
Listening to the maid’s report of Xiao Er Shao’s whereabouts in her ears, like,
“The young master has gone drinking again today,”
“The young master has played with his hands again today,”
“The young master is throwing his money away again today for a ‘thing’,”……
The lady looked at her reflection in the bronze mirror, the flowery beauty in it, but now her heart was as dry as a half-hundred-year-old woman’s.
A young girl, as young as a flower, is tortured by this feudal society and has lost her vitality.
And it was on such early mornings as these for three years that the maid mentioned a woman, a beauty much loved by her own husband, a singing opera singer of unclean origins.
She smiled softly as she listened to the hilarity and said,
“The right way to be a wife is not to be jealous or afraid. I don’t blame my husband for being sentimental, he’s at that age, he loves to play, so let him go, it’s just a thing. If he likes it, he can take it into his house and no one can say a word against it. All right, it’s almost time to go and pay my respects to the old lady, let’s go.”
The 'thing’ that the lady refers to is the other female lead in the story, the lover with whom the lady is entangled for life.
The story shifts perspective to a woman in a large red costume behind a noisy theater stage in the downtown area, now holding a black ink pencil and tracing narrow eyeliner for herself.
The troupe master beside her also muttered to her about this young man who had been so generous recently.
She listened unconcernedly, her hands flowing with makeup, and when she heard the troupe master mention the man’s wife, the woman finally felt a little different emotion.
She smiled lightly and said,
“The woman in such a deep house is most uninteresting. From what you are saying, this Major’s wife is not a small person. But even if she is the daughter of the Emperor, she is nothing more than a plaything for men to hold in their hands. We are both women, but one is a high-class prostitute and the other a slightly lower class.
I hope this young lady will not be like those ladies before her who could not control their own men and went after men’s women, which is really annoying.”
Two women responding very differently to the same incident.
One is as cool as an immortal, the other is as feminine as a demon.
It left a little mark on each other’s hearts, so much so that when they first met later, they couldn’t help but feel close to each other.
The lady relieves the theater’s chastising punishment for the ladies, and the theater’s son settles the city’s ruffians for the lady; two seemingly worlds apart, and so they cross paths.
One is the wife of a noble and noble family Major, and the other is a lowly opera singer who is trampled on by others. They experience the sweetness of meeting, knowing, companioning, cherishing and loving each other, and the pain of clinging, thinking, remembering and wanting to say goodbye.
Because of the difference in their status, they could only see each other a few times a year, and the rest of the time they were in brocade, but this forbidden love affair brought both of them to life.
The lady refuses to share her bed with Xiao Er Shao for this reason, and is treated coldly by her husband’s family, making her life worse every day.
The opera singer refused to share a bed with a wealthy guest for this reason and was tortured by the troupe, in a state of wretchedness worse than death.
Finally, the women decide that they will do something shocking, and that is to elope together and settle down to farm in the opera singer’s hometown.
They looked forward to a bright future with each other and each escaped their shackles one winter’s day, but the very moment they escaped to embrace each other, both parties sent someone after them.
Xiao Er Shao’s face turned blue when he saw the two embracing each other.
How could he let them go when one was his legitimate wife and the other was a opera singer whom he truly loved and now, they were together, making him the laughing stock of everyone?!
He ordered the underlings of the Xiao Family, and took the lady back by force, while the opera singer was beaten alive with sticks by the underlings.
Blood stained the clean white snow, splattered out like cold winter plums, falling and falling, bodies left unmanaged and finally bones.
When the lady learned of this incident, she went mad, but begged for death and was severely tortured by Xiao Er Shao.
She spent every day and night alone in a cold, crumbling house, begging for her life and unable to die.
Until she met the opera singer in red, pale and with crimson lips, a month later on a bloody night, when she winked at her and babbled and sang a soft song under her breath.
Towards the end of the song, her flirtatious phoenix eyes, moist with moisture, stared at her as she said to her,
“Cease to be like this and live.”
The Major’s wife began to regain her senses, and because she herself was of noble birth, the people of the Xiao Family couldn’t just club her to death like they did with the opera singer, but had to go out of their way to cover up and pretend that the incident had never happened.
The Major’s wife, a woman from the deep house of yore, but different again from before, has an additional female ghost in red in her room.
When no one is around, they will snuggle, they will compose songs together, they will be in love.
Doing all the things that lovers everywhere, would do.
Until Xiao suffered defeat, all Xiao’s men died in battle, the revolutionary army defeated the warlords and stragglers broke into Xiao’s residence.
The ladies live in a trance, rejecting the reality of the Xiao House’s decay, while the servants carry their bags and scurry around for their lives.
Once again the Lady sat in front of the mirror, an unseen hand, holding a brush, tracing gently over her pale face.
From top to bottom, the inky eyebrows, the slightly powdered blush and the sweet red lips are a living example of a pretty girl from back in the day.
The lady smiled lightly and changed into a red dress, and the house burned naturally with no one in the second young lady’s room in the Xiao residence.
Under the bright flames, a beautiful woman in red can be clearly seen, wrapping her arms around a woman in a long goose yellow dress, slowly swaying and dancing, embracing each other intimately and kissing deeply.
The story ends with excerpts from the novel. Written is:
From a family dinner in spring, one plays out life and death on stage, while the other dresses up as a virtuous wife offstage.
By the cold night of the ninth month, one was intercepted by a domestic servant inside the fence and the other was brutally beaten to death outside the fence.
In the old theater, a woman’s watery sleeves danced and her feet moved; a woman’s mouth smiled and her feelings were deep. To look at each other is to have no regrets about true love.
Mei Mu Lan’s eyes were dazed, emotionally trapped in the story, unable to pull out of it for several days.
She closed the webpage and lay back** with her eyes closed, a story like this, it did hit home, Miss S’s writing was excellent, she really wrote this story from an outsider’s point of view.
In her writing, each person is portrayed vividly, and a scene of the Republic leaps into the reader’s mind.
She doesn’t stand up for the state and try to put a sacred veil on this fringe romance; she simply depicts a story that feels like an event that actually happened in the Republic.
In the midst of the Republic, when times were up and down and in turmoil**, everything changed, but only the relationship between the lady and the opera singer remained the same.
They experience great sorrow, great joy, great ups and downs, and every chapter of the story depicts the cold reality.
But, near the end, she recounts the transformation of the opera singer into a ghost, and the novel after this describes the happy life between them.
But, unfortunately, everyone else in the story, and the readers outside of it, all know that the opera singer may be a figment of the Lady’s imagination after she has gone mad.
But, it is this plausible description, punctuated by joy against sorrow, that gives the story an unconventional and sublime ending.
The happiness visible in the story, at the end when the two are buried in the fire, the reader’s heart unconsciously breathes a sigh of relief for the Lady, thinking: at last it is over, at least the Lady thinks they are living together.
The opera singer at the end paints the lady’s make-up and she smiles in the light of the fire, sharing a poignant ending.
A lady in a large courtyard, deprived of the freedom of her body and firmly imprisoned by feudal society; a lowly opera singer in the marketplace, deprived of the freedom of her mind and oppressed by those around her every day.
These are two ordinary women who lived in that particular era, representing two classes.
The women under such oppression fall in love and their lives are rejuvenated, giving rise to the most sincere love, but this emotion meets with social barriers and ends up as a tragedy rather than joy, leaving the reader with a shocking and sorrowful ending.
Mei Mu Lan took a few deep breaths to ease her mind and she began to think calmly.
The novel is about to be turned into a far-reaching film, and in the plot of the novel, it is mentioned that Bai Jieying ends up as the lady in the 《Love in a Fallen City》, while Ling Yi Yao becomes the opera singer in it.
And now, with her ambition for the film, then, after considering her own strengths, she chose to go for the role of the opera singer.
And the next morning, she went to the place where Miss S had agreed.
By the time she arrived on set, the crew had already begun auditions and she was greeted, taken straight to Miss S and then dragged off to have her make-up applied.
This was followed by an ethnic opera which she sang in front of many invested parties.
Her fluent singing voice, vivid expressions and agile figure overwhelmed everyone in the audience in a flash. And she was successfully selected to be an acting actress within the cast of the play.
Mui Mu Lan had been made to look like a fool today by Miss S. By the time she got back to her senses, she heard the news that she had been selected and she grinned broadly with excitement.
After verbally thanking Miss S, she immediately returned to Jiangnan Town, where she knocked on the door and walked into Ling Yi Yao’s villa to tell Ling Yi Yao the good news that she had been chosen as an opera singer.
After hearing this, Ling Yi Yao had a strange expression on her face, and under Mei Mu Lan’s persistent questioning, she replied,
“Congratulations, Miss Mei, at the same time. Your co-star in this film, unfortunately, is me.”
Mei Mu Lan understood the meaning of her words and immediately jumped up and said,
“Great, you’re playing the role of the Major’s wife, aren’t you? The casting people had a good eye, they could tell right away that we were a couple.”
Ling Yi Yao: “……”
Suddenly, Mei Mu Lan covered her mouth in shyness as she stared at Ling Yi Yao, her eyes cooing and darting about.
Ling Yi Yao suddenly felt a chill run down her spine, and she had an ominous feeling.
Sure enough, Mei Mu Lan said 'shyly’ in the next moment,
“Oh, it’s written that they did this and that, and the opera singer did this and that to the lady, so I can do that to you too, come on, don’t be shy, let’s rehearse this and that so we don’t get rusty when we’re acting.”
Ling Yi Yao: “……” Lifting Mei Mu Lan’s collar with one hand, she threw her out the door.