Story of Minglan Rewatch - Episode 3

[laleia]

Episode 3

(Note re: any observations I make on English subtitles — I’m watching episode 3 on YouTube on the CN DRAMA channel.)

This episode could be named “I can’t believe Concubine Lin got away with this!”

Scene - Grandpa Bai’s funeral!

• The first time I watched this, I definitely thought this was Gu Tingye’s funeral. In retrospect, that would make no sense because why would people not in Gu Tingye’s family hold his funeral in a city they don’t live in? In my defense, this is all very confusing for a first-time viewer.
• Papa Sheng’s colleague agrees with me about the WTF-ery of douche!Yuan randomly bringing Gu Tingye incognito to an engagement ceremony.
• Nanny Chang! Her hair is all black, to represent that she is still young compared to her gray hair later.
  • Side note, sometimes I forget that everybody in these period dramas is wearing wigs. I once looked into this because I was curious about how men and women in ancient China managed their hair, and how women in particular did up their very complicated hairstyles. I was aware that actresses in period dramas and hanfu enthusiasts use fake hairpieces (both wigs / pieces with fake hair as well as, for example, wooden or other structural elements to shape their hair around. I learned after some digging that old-timey Chinese women did as well! We have relics of their wigs, fake hair stuff, etc. More information here: 1, 2, 3
• Gu Tingye has a dramatic entrance and Changbai is ecstatic. I don’t think Minglan reacted this dramatically anytime Gu Tingye showed up after a presumed death.
• I appreciate the funny music when Uncle Bai tries to swear that he was rightfully named heir, but can’t quite commit to swearing on the souls of his ancestors because he knows he’s a lying liar who lies.
• Why did all these people show up making a ruckus, asking for their slave contracts to be returned to them? Was this organized by Gu Tingye or Nanny Chang? Is this meant to be on purpose or just coincidental? Why does this spur Papa Sheng’s boss into being willing to intervene in this matter? Are the noisy people supposed to be servants whose slave contracts were owned by Grandpa Bai, who were supposed to receive their slave contracts back on his death but those contracts have been wrongfully seized by the usurping Bais? And I guess they showed up based on prior planning with Gu Tingye & Nanny Chang? (Although Nanny Chang was surprised that Gu Tingye was alive, so presumably just one of them.) And so their presence is a sign to Papa Sheng and his boss that something is wrong here and as they are the authorities, they have to figure it out? Very unclear if so, and I don’t think this thread ever gets brought up again and we just move on.
• On the subject from last episode about characters being able to protect their servants — young Gu Tingye is not able to protect his manservant Zhique, who died and whose body he swapped with himself. He’s not capable enough yet of protecting his subordinates.
  • By the way, did we see Zhique previously? Despite efforts I made to try to remember names and faces this rewatch, did I miss the servant being on screen? I have no idea who this person is, I don’t think we saw any servant around Gu Tingye in any of his scenes so far.
  • OK, I just checked, and we get a scene in episode 2 of Gu Tingye and Changbai walking around with two other men, who I suppose are Zhique and Changbai’s servant who gets rescued with him from the water? And at the very beginning of the ambush on the boat, someone runs down the hallway shouting “公子!” before he gets slashed to death, so I suppose that’s Zhique? Someone else also shouts “公子快走” later during the ambush. Maybe that could be Zhique, and he dies off-screen and gets identity-swapped? Or maybe that was Changbai’s servant, who jumps after Changbai at the end of the ambush? I also checked the touhu scene in episode 1 and didn’t see anyone around. Anyways, I don’t feel bad about having no impression of him.
• I gotta say, this scene where Changbai expresses how worried he was and Gu Tingye reassures him is very … intimate. I haven’t historically been a Gu Tingye/Changbai shipper, but this scene is much more open, vulnerable, and emotional than parallel scenes Gu Tingye and Minglan have later on when they reunite. No doubt this is because everyone is still young and not as guarded as they become when they are adults.
  • Changbai has a very sajiao attitude when he says something along the lines of “You should have looked for me if you were fine. I haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep these last few days”.
  • In response, Gu Tingye explains that he was protecting Changbai which he wraps up with “放心吧,啊?” which … I don’t know how to explain this. It’s translated in the subs as “Be at ease,” which is correct. But his tone when he says it, and the gentle 啊 at the end is very … a response to a sajiao comment, almost.
  • I guess I should explain sajiao, which is a concept I don’t super get myself. As far as I understand, it is when someone acts spoiled or acts cute in order to get attention or get something. The most common example is when a girlfriend pouts at her boyfriend, or stamps her feet, or complains in a particularly pouty tone, in order to get her boyfriend to comfort her, spoil her, give her attention, etc.
  • And that’s the vibe I get from this scene — Changbai is complaining about being worried and seeking comfort, Gu Tingye is reassuring him in a particularly “I have everything under control and am taking care of you” way. I don’t know why that 啊 gives me such strong “protector” vibes, but it does.
  • I should note that when I Googled sajiao, most of the English-language articles I skimmed treated sajiao as very gendered — something girls perform. My sense though is that it is not exclusively done by women. Children sajiao with their parents (even adult children re adult parents), and some of the English-language articles acknowledged that men sajiao as well, whether in a parenthetical or a brief aside. I’ve definitely read about men sajiao-ing in webnovels as well (both at their boyfriends in M/M novels and at their girlfriends in M/F novels), it just depended on the tone of the webnovel. I’ve seen takes online that sajiao doesn’t have to be a romantic or sexual or flirtatious dynamic, that friends can sajiao with each other. I don’t want to imply that just because Changbai is being sajiao-y that that means he and Gu Tingye have relationship vibes. He’s just being sajiao-y AND I’m getting relationship vibes.
• I’m not sure I follow the logic of the scene with the letters. So the officials gather Grandpa Bai’s documents, but even after review, they aren’t willing to commit that they can identify the handwriting on the will. Then Gu Tingye pulls out a second letter, which reveals that the reason why Grandpa Bai was willing to say as such in his will was because the other Bais were super shitty, and suddenly Grandpa Bai’s old friend (I don’t think he’s an official? I think Papa Sheng and his boss are the only officials, and this is just an old family friend? But unclear) speaks up and confirms that the letter and will are in Grandpa Bai’s handwriting. Is this supposed to mean that before, the officials could confirm the handwriting on the will but didn’t want to because it seemed illogical and they suspected shenanigans, only for them to change their mind once they understood why Grandpa Bai disliked the other Bais? If this old man is Grandpa Bai’s friend, shouldn’t he have known Grandpa Bai’s story already? Wouldn’t a disinheritance like that have been gossip fodder in a city like this? Or is this city big enough (or maybe the Bais lived in a different town when Grandpa Bai moved to Yangzhou) so nobody knew his story? Overall, I don’t super get it.

Interlude:

I noticed The Story of Minglan really emphasizes the importance of ancestors and funeral rites

• At the end of the prior scene, we get very dramatic swelling music when Gu Tingye leads the funeral and smashes the crockery, and it’s clearly significant in symbolizing him stepping into his inheritance.
• Compare this with how cruel it is to him later on when the Gu family won’t let him attend his own father’s funeral and he has to pay his respects / do his bows from afar, and how much grief that causes him.
• To Minglan, the idea of putting Concubine Lin’s memorial tablet by her mother’s memorial table is blasphemy.
• To Gu Tingye, it is important to have his mother’s memorial tablet at his wedding, and to be able to accumulate honors for her in the Gu family shrine.
• And at the end, Madam Qin’s mental breakdown is encapsulated by her burning down the Gu family shrine, which the Shengs gather to rebuild for our happy ending.

I don’t think any of this is a deliberately seeded theme, rather it’s just the endemic cultural touchstones of historical China, things that everyone believed in and cared about back then (and to a smaller extent nowadays), so that you can only authentically portray daily life in old-timey China if you show how their lives are impacted by this belief. Granted, I say this as someone whose knowledge of historical China comes almost entirely from period Chinese dramas, which are about as historically accurate as period Western TV shows are about Western historical periods (which is to say, some are more historical than others, some make things up wholesale, historical fashion experts find the costumes wildly inaccurate — I have seen Chinese fashion experts complain that the clothing in a Chinese drama came from the wrong decade in the century in question for the outfits to be accurate, and I have seen European fashion experts make the same complaint about Regency fashions coming from the wrong decade in a given century — but for better or for worse, your average layperson’s assumptions about that historical period are shaped by these shows they watch about them).

Side note: I googled the crockery shattering thing because I was curious and came across what appears to be the Chinese version of Yahoo Answers (I guess now the Chinese version of Quora), where someone explained that this symbolized you were willing to shatter your family’s assets to express your grief, and someone else explained this was a superstitious thing about luck and spirits and stuff, and I gave up reading through all the Chinese to see what the right answer was (probably this is one of those things that holds multiple significances).


Scene - The dangers of childbirth!

• We start off establishing that Grandmother is gone, and Papa Sheng / Big Madam are gone. I don’t think I realized on my first watch that the reason Papa Sheng and Big Madam were visiting Big Madam’s family was because Papa Sheng was about to go to the capital city for his job transfer so Big Madam is essentially bidding farewell.
• Concubine Wei says she’s worried because Xiaodie is gone; bb!Minglan naively expresses that everything in their room is great right now, similar to what she said at the end of the last episode. Concubine Wei can’t pinpoint exactly what is wrong but she knows that Concubine Lin is not nice, and would not be sending nourishing (and expensive) foods without an ulterior motive.
• Concubine Wei makes reference to Chu Long persuading the Empress Dowager Zhao.
  • I cursorily Googled this, but it’s a story recorded from the Warring States era about when the court was trying to persuade the Empress Dowager to send her younger son to serve as a hostage in a foreign nation in order to get an ally for their country. She didn’t want to because she liked her younger son and didn’t want him to suffer. Chu Long, one of her officials, had a conversation with her where he advised that if parents truly loved their children, they would plan for their future. Spoiling your child so they live in comfort is not good for their development and they will end up with bad moral character — you have to take a long-term view. He made a few other similar arguments and pointed out that apparently there was a lot of opportunity in the country where the younger son would be hostaged, that would give him opportunities for fame and fortune (I think?). This persuaded Empress Dowager Zhao to send her son to be a hostage and I guess there was a happy ending.
  • Anyways, this is the story that Minglan references ~20 episodes from now when she persuades Gu Tingye by the river to get his daughter some schooling. I have watched that scene a million times, but hadn’t realized we get this parable actually referenced on-screen.
  • I should note, none of the summaries I found about this teachable moment explained what exactly happened to that younger son and if he did in fact get a happy ending; the happy ending that everyone references was for the country. I was not motivated enough to read Chinese articles to find out for sure, but I suspect the historical record ends with him getting sent off to be a hostage and there is no further information about him. Personally, I feel like that ruins the punchline of the story. If the moral is “plan for your kids’ future, be willing to give them some tough love if needed, they'll be better off in the long run”, but the story ends with that toughened-up kid dying as a hostage (which is what happened to most hostages), it’s not a very effective fable. Maybe I’m missing something.
• Then Concubine Wei goes into labor, and everything goes wrong.
• This midwife claims she has to go check on the fire because the kitchen won’t boil water properly. It’s clear she’s been paid by Concubine Lin to slip out (or possibly just that she knew the birth was not going well and wanted to leave before she got blamed for it), but that’s such a stupid excuse. Even Big Madam calls this a stupid excuse to fall for, at the end of the episode. The midwife has a slightly rural accent, presumably to indicate that she is lower-class.
• Concubine Lin says it’s been two shichen, which the subs translate as two hours, but actually a shichen is two hours so two shichen is four hours. I know labor can take a long time but I have to say, I can’t imagine being in labor that long, and I know plenty of people are in labor for longer! And in ancient times, they didn’t have anesthesia! Absolutely insane.
• Even though there’s only Minglan and Xiaotao is there and everyone else is “their” people, Concubine Lin and Xueniang still put on a show and verbalize out loud why they aren’t doing more, that they are worried but think Concubine Wei will be fine, etc., to give themselves plausible deniability. When Xueniang is a little too panicked about getting Minglan out of there, Concubine Lin scolds her, saying that it’s all very natural for Minglan to bring Concubine Wei some cakes (subtext: don’t give away the game!).
• When Minglan gives Concubine Wei some cakes, Concubine Wei makes up that the rag is soiled so she can get the servant (aka spy) out of the room and give Minglan real instructions. Concubine Wei says “去大娘子房里”, which the subtitles incorrectly translate as “Go to my room”. She is actually saying “Go to Big Madam’s rooms”, because she wants Minglan to find Big Madam’s servants that are familiar with childbirth and can help out.
• That bit after Minglan runs out, where Concubine Wei puts the rag in her mouth and bites down, prepared to try to deliver that baby all on her lonesome …. Ugh, it gives me feels. And she’s staring at a painting of what I assume is Guanyin (who is a bodhisattva that in Chinese culture serves as a goddess of mercy and in Chinese legends has local variations specifically associated with fertility, children, safe childbirth, etc.)
• Minglan and Xiaotao run around the Sheng household but it’s no use. Li-momo is not currently in the Sheng household and Zhao-momo is drunk thanks to Guan-niangzi. bb!Minglan has great instincts, she wakes up Zhao-momo, but nobody in the kitchen will help her. Is Guan-niangzi here the same woman who wouldn’t give Xiaodie charcoal in episode 1, and thwarted her from leaving normally to sell her charcoal in episode 2? Yes, it is! (Yes, I did just go back and check.)
• Minglan crawls out of the Sheng household through the ancient Chinese equivalent of the flaps people put on their front door for their pets (which I guess they shouldn’t because housepets should be indoor pets?) and climbs over a wall in her (doomed) quest for an obstetrician. The dramatic background music is just so sad.
• And then Gu Tingye tries to help! He brings her on his carriage, gives her his cloak, then decides to go on horseback with her because it’s faster (leaving the cloak behind in the carriage, btw). All I can think of is Gu Tingye in the future talking about how he felt when he saw Minglan running through the streets, how much he empathized with her and how he thought of his own mother dying in childbirth.
• By the way, she never told him that her mother was in labor, just that she was going to Longevity Hall. Is he just a good guesser? Was that just implied? Is Longevity Hall the kind of name only an obstetric practice would have? Did that explanation happen off-screen? From a dramatic portrayal perspective, the explanation would have bogged down the mounting tension in this scene. I’m just curious.
• Even when they get to the doctor’s, the doctor in question is napping and Minglan and Gu Tingye have to jump through hoops to get him.
• The way that clerk says to Minglan “This thing with your house is no small matter” paired with how he tried to obstruct Minglan earlier makes me wonder if he was paid off by Concubine Lin’s people to try to ensure that no doctor went to the Sheng Household. Concubine Lin was smart enough to cover her bases that way.
• And the moment Minglan, who was running around earlier, gets a second to breathe as she waits for the carriage to take her back, she starts sobbing.
• Gotta say, the CGI as Gu Tingye and the doctor gallop to the Sheng house is so bad … IIRC, most of the horse-related CGI is not very good. But that makes sense. Horse scenes must be hard to film and CGI is safer.
• The poor doctor is like, I’ve never had to break into a house in order to save a life, this seems a little out of my wheelhouse and I’m not sure I’m down for this. He wants to run off because he doesn’t think this is on the up-and-up, he doesn’t want to enter into the “rear courtyard” (which, it is true that according to webnovels and period dramas, men from the outside rarely enter the rear courtyard), then Gu Tingye beats everyone up.
• After the doctor goes to Concubine Wei, Gu Tingye has such an intense look in his eyes as he stares down Concubine Lin and Xueniang. They look kind of scared of him.
• When Minglan gets back, the doctor tells her that by the time he got there, it was already too late. He then gives Concubine Wei some acupuncture to give her the strength to say her final words to Minglan.
• Interlude to note: This is a very nice doctor!
  • He didn’t seem to mind being woken from his nap to save a life (I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that it’s at the house of a fairly important person).
  • Even though the whole breaking-and-entering aspect freaked him out, he went inside with Gu Tingye.
  • He was uncertain of breaking social rules around the rear courtyard but as soon as he heard Concubine Wei’s cry, he prioritized being able to save a life over everything else and ran inside without regard for Concubine Lin’s words.
  • And here, he knows that what probably matters for Concubine Wei is being able to have her last moments with Minglan and he gives her that.
• This final scene with Minglan and Concubine Wei is heartwrenching. I have to say, bb!Minglan’s actress is fantastic. I have seen adult actors and actresses who weren’t as good at acting. The emotions this girl delivers in this scene are *chef's kiss*. She’s absolutely gutted, the hitch in her voice when she talks to her mother on her deathbed, the breakdown she has … I’m very impressed.
• I guess this is the last time we hear Minglan refer to her mother as 阿娘 (a-niang) instead of 小娘 (xiao-niang), which Gu Tingye calls out ~40 episodes from now.
• This whole scene started with Minglan and her mother fighting because Minglan doesn’t want to go to Grandmother’s. It ends with Minglan promising her mother on her deathbed that she’ll go to Grandmother’s.
• God, the slo-mo of Minglan leaving, crying, breaking down, with nobody in the courtyard beside Gu Tingye giving her any comfort, is just tragic. Granted, his “I don’t have a mother either, you’re going to be alone in the future, you must cherish yourself” is not particularly comforting but I give him a pass because he’s a pre-teen / teenaged boy.
• And then Minglan collapses. She has the knee-guards to give Gu Tingye but I guess she collapsed before she could give them to him so she doesn’t do so until the next episode.

Scene - The aftermath!

• We get a scene with Big Madam where we learn that only one of the servants was a spy from Concubine Lin. The other was one of Concubine Lin’s servants, but was actually someone Big Madam stuffed into Concubine Lin’s courtyard to (presumably openly) spy on her.
• It’s interesting to consider this — as Big Madam complains, this was clearly part of Concubine Lin’s plan. Concubine Lin tries to cause Concubine Wei to die, so she inserts her own servant for that purpose. By also inserting the servant that Big Madam thrust on her, she gets rid of someone who was spying on her, and implicates Big Madam in anything that happens to Concubine Wei.
• Honestly, this servant seems like an idiot. I rewatched the labor scenes to see if I could tell if one servant was particularly not-evil or less-incompetent, or if I could tell which one was Zhulou (Concubine Lin’s servant) and which was Big Madam’s. I couldn’t tell, which just means that Big Madam’s servant at her most sincere did not distinguish herself from the deliberately-incompetent evil one.
• Although the way that Big Madam accuses the servant of allowing Zhulou to instigate / manipulate her, I wonder if Big Madam’s servant did actively participate in the attempted murder.
• Big Madam sure swears a lot in this scene. She keeps on calling the servant a 王八 (wangba) and 王八子 (wangbazi). She uses 贱人 (jianren) a lot too in general.
  • Here is where I confess that swear words and insults are one of the big black boxes for me in Chinese.
  • I’m primarily a heritage speaker, so I learned Chinese from my parents. My parents either didn’t swear in front of us (many parents make an effort not to swear in front of their children for some part of their children’s lives), or they were effective at convincing me that the words they used were not that bad.
  • As a result, it’s very hard for me to gauge whether insults / swear-words are more of a “drat”, a “damn” or a “fuck”. There are definitely phrases I thought were not that bad like 他妈的 (tamade) (that I must have heard from my parents, or from TV), that I might have placed at “drat” level swearing, that I learned were rather more offensive, more like a “fuck/shit” expletive.
  • And then, of course, even after you’ve established the level of offensive-ness, swear words and insults have different vibes — some are more old-timey, some can be used in an affectionately insulting context and others can’t, some of that is generational and some of that is regional. There’s a certain level of “will someone beat me up in a bar for saying this?” knowledge you should have before saying the swear/insult, and I have no context for any of that in Chinese. I assume that webnovels will be more a true-to-life guide to this than dramas, as I assume that dramas do a certain amount of bleeping/scrubbing for air.
  • Anyways, this is all to say that 王八蛋 (wangbadan), or turtle’s egg, is supposed to be pretty offensive (though I did read a thread of differing opinions as to whether it’s a little dated these days), but 王八 (wangba), or turtle, is supposed to be a little less offensive/insulting, but it’s not clear to me how much so and how much that would be the same or different in Ming Dynasty China.
  • For context, the subs translated 王八 (wangba) as “fool”. As mentioned, it literally means turtle. Some googling and poking around at the free Google Books excerpt of “An Anatomy of Chinese Offensive Words: A Lexical and Semantic Analysis” indicates that 王八 (wangba), historically (by which I mean, like, a millennia ago), came to mean a cuckolded man or the husband of a prostitute. This was partly because the head of a turtle is supposed to look kind of like a penis. And partly because husbands of prostitutes were required to wear green scarves during part of the Yuan Dynasty and turtles are green. And partly because wangba is a homophone for some other bad character traits in Chinese. As a result of all of that, 王八 (wangba) became an insult, one that Big Madam is throwing around an awful lot in this scene and I still have no idea how I’m supposed to take that.
  • And just because I mentioned 贱人 (jianren), several of the female character, including Big Madam, say that a lot and I think subs often translate it to “slut”, but I’ve always thought of the term as old-timey. That said, it gets listed in Wikipedia’s article on Mandarin Chinese profanity as meaning “bitch” or “cheap woman” in their Promiscuity-related insults section and there’s no indication that it’s dated.
• Hualan shows up! Answering my question in episode 2 about whether we see her again before mid-series. For context, I recalled nothing about when people showed up (unless they were regular characters) in my first watch. In my subsequent rewatches, I tended to skip everything before episode 10 because it’s too depressing. That all said, I did a full rewatch of this drama as recently as last summer because I was getting my friend to watch it, so I know I watched this scene. I saw Hualan walk her mother through the best strategy for handling Concubine Lin, and act as the cold, rational person in the room. And yet I forgot??? And wrote a whole-ass question in the last episode about whether she has already left for her new husband’s household? And said that if Hualan shows up again, I had no recollection of it? Brains are weird.
• We get a scene where Concubine Lin heartbreakingly (fakely) takes on all responsibility (by only describing things that are clearly not her fault). Then she collapses (fakely) and fucking Papa Sheng falls for it.
• We get more of Hualan plotting for her mother, trying to socratically lead her mother to the right answer and trying to teach her mother how to use subtlety to sabotage Concubine Lin, rather than forthrightly making a fuss (and acting as the shrew that Papa Sheng always accuses her of being). Hualan knows what’s up. Too bad Big Madam doesn’t know what subtlety means.
• Dongrong shows up again — we learn that the same skills he used in episode 1 to beat Changfeng without Changfeng suffering much pain were again used this episode on Zhulou and Guan-niangzi. I guess we don’t get any context behind these magic flogging skills until episode ~30, and I suppose we never really learn how Concubine Lin found out about them.
• Dongrong also leaks that Concubine Wei’s relatives are here. Fucking Dongrong.

And that's the end of episode 3! We have to watch episode 4 to learn more!

So let’s talk about how premeditated the death of Concubine Wei is. Set aside the bit where they fed her nourishing foods (e.g., edible bird’s nests and ginseng) for the purpose of getting the baby “too big” to birth easily. The doctor will go in more detail on that in ~20 eps, so we can cover that there. This is about the actual labor itself.

1. Obviously, Concubine Lin removed Xiaodie and inserted her own servant Zhulou, plus Big Madam’s servant. Zhulou was a spy who immediately reported to Concubine Lin when Concubine Wei was in labor (though to be fair to her, she would have had to anyways).
2. The midwife was obviously paid to run off.
3. Zhulou (and possibly the one from Big Madam) were instructed to be as slow and useless as possible. So they take forever to get Concubine Wei any water or give her any food. They are trying to wear away her energy so she doesn't have the strength to push, which is why Xueniang freaks out when Minglan runs to give her mom some cakes. Concubine Lin is better at acting.
4. They also tried really hard to keep bb!Minglan out of it because they know she's too smart. But bb!Minglan is too clever to be tricked!
5. Li-momo having left to take care of her grandson was probably a lucky break only in that if Li-momo hadn’t done so, Concubine Lin would have made separate plans to render her useless. Guan-niangzi is one of Concubine Lin’s people, and deliberately intoxicated Zhang-momo. (I think the people in the kitchen refusing to help is likely due to general fear of Concubine Lin rather than prior instruction from her.)
6. Concubine Lin should have sent for a doctor but didn't. She didn't even try.
7. I even suspect she made sure that nobody was at the door to send for a doctor if Minglan went for one (which she did).
8. I’ve already expressed my suspicion that Concubine Lin paid off the clerk at Longevity Hall to make sure nobody would send for a doctor.
9. Then we get the egregious scene where they won't let the doctor in, and nothing more needs to be said there.

The only thing I’m not sure about is whether the timing of the labor was luck or premeditation. This was a very (in)convenient time for Concubine Wei to go into labor (convenient for Concubine Lin; inconvenient for Concubine Wei). Grandmother, Papa Sheng and Big Madam are all out of the house so Concubine Lin can control everything. But you can’t control the timing of labor. How could Concubine Lin have guaranteed that Concubine Wei would give birth at this time (as opposed to after one of them came back)? Did she induce Concubine Wei’s labor? I feel like if so, we would have gotten more hints or significant scenes. Was this just a lucky break for Concubine Lin? Or did she calculate when Concubine Wei was likely to go into labor and use pillow talk to get Papa Sheng to go visit Big Madam’s family at a time that was convenient for her?

A few other observations:

• I think it’s already apparent in context why Concubine Wei forces Minglan to change her address from 阿娘 (a-niang) to 小娘 (xiaoniang), but here is some more background in case it helps.
  • The word 娘 (niang) is a dated word for mother. According to a quick Google search, it is primarily used in period dramas; in modern day it may get used by old people or in rural areas, but not very often. (I tried really hard to recall if I’ve heard my parents or aunts/uncles ever using 娘 (niang), but I couldn’t remember).
  • It also generally means “woman” and gets added to phrases accordingly. 姑娘 (guniang) means young woman or maiden. 新娘 (xinniang) means bride. In the part of China my family is from, it, together with a number, refers to an aunt who married to your father’s older brother. My 大娘 (daniang) is the wife of my father’s oldest brother. My father only has one brother, but presumably if he had two older brothers, the second brother’s wife would be my 二娘 (erniang). (There are different terms for aunts who are married to my father’s younger brothers, aunts who are my father’s sisters, aunts who are my mother’s sisters, and aunts who are married to my mother’s brothers.) (And of course there are regional variations for all of these relative-terms.)
  • 阿 (a) is an affectionate prefix, so 阿娘 (a-niang) basically means mother. Minglan calls Concubine Wei that; Molan calls Concubine Lin that. I understand from webnovels and period dramas (and not actual historical research) that this is not legally correct. Technically, the Sheng children have one “legal” mother, the 嫡 (di) mother, their father’s legal 嫡 (di) wife — Big Madam. In most households, concubines aren’t even allowed to raise their own children absent special permission from the main/legal wife. They get away with it because Concubine Lin has a lot of power, Papa Sheng has a lot of sympathy for his concubines (because he, too, was a concubine’s son), and he lets Concubine Lin do what she wants.
  • 小娘 (xiaoniang) translates as “little mother”, I guess, but is a term for and title for a concubine. Every time the subs call someone Concubine Lin or Concubine Wei, they are saying Lin-xiaoniang and Wei-xiaoniang. I guess 小娘 (xiaoniang) is the corollary to 大娘子 (daniangzi) (Big Madam), which is technically the “big mother”?
  • I’ve also seen other novels/dramas refer to concubines as 姨娘 (yiniang), which would translate as aunt-mother, I guess? 姨娘 (yiniang) also means aunt in certain regions at different time periods (but the kind of aunt who is a sister of your mother), and wives and concubines often refer to each other as sisters, so I wonder if the idea is supposed to be that these are the main wife’s “sisters”?
  • Anyways, Concubine Wei forces Minglan to change how she addresses her in order to strictly adhere to social/cultural requirements, partly in order to gain the favor of (or at least not piss off) Big Madam, but also to teach her the importance of being able to bend / yield / submit. If you are powerless and you can’t bend, you will break. She knows that Minglan has too strong of a personality, (c.f., Minglan’s reaction to having charcoal withheld) so she tries to teach her one last lesson in how to survive before she dies.
• Concubine Wei gifts Minglan her embroidery of Lady Li guarding Niangzi Pass. Niangzi Pass (or “Ladies’ Pass”, I guess — this is the 娘 (niang) from earlier) is a real place. It’s a mountain pass somewhere in Shanxi that was famously guarded by Princess Pingyang of the Tang Dynasty. Her father, Li Yuan (later Emperor Gaozu) was the founding emperor of the Tang Dynasty, thanks in no small part to her military exploits. When Li Yuan led his rebellion against the prior dynasty, Princess Pingyang formed an army called the 娘子军 (niangzijun) or Ladies’ Army. I’ve seen some conflicting accounts (aka blog posts) as to whether this was an army composed entirely of women, or just an army that was led by a woman (and possibly had other women in it) but had men in it too. Princess Pingyang guarded this mountain pass against the enemy, successfully holding them off, and the pass ended up being called 娘子关 (niagnziguan) or Ladies’ Pass in her honor. Princess Pingyang’s military exploits were comparable to her brothers’ and people seem to generally acknowledge that she was instrumental in her father becoming the first emperor of the Tang Dynasty. When she passed away, she received a grand military funeral. The meaning behind this is pretty straightforward — even while Concubine Wei tries to teach Minglan how to yield and give way, she also wants her to remember that women can be badass as well, and don’t have to (and in Minglan’s case, can’t) rely on others. This painting because Minglan’s motivating reminder when she plans her revenge later on.
• The novel begins after Concubine Wei has already died. A modern-day grown-ass woman transmigrates into the body of five-year-old Minglan right after Concubine Wei has died, when her servants are plotting to transfer out of her courtyard rather than work for a disfavored and powerless mistress. Transmigrated!Minglan doesn’t care about Concubine Wei’s death, doesn’t care about avenging her mother, and the story is weaker for it. (Transmigrated!Minglan just wants to sleep all day because she’s depressed because she died and woke up in the ancient past in the body of a small child and has no power. To be fair to her, I would react the same way as well in her situation, moping the loss of running water and indoor plumbing. The story would be weaker if I were the protag as well.) It’s just one of many reasons I’m such a huge fan of how the drama adapted the story, the way they use this motivational backstory to both contextualize who Minglan is as well as give her closure later on. (Compare this to The Sword and the Brocade, which also added in an “avenging my mother’s death” plotline that wasn’t in the novel. Unfortunately, that plotline was completely unnecessary and just plain annoying, and the drama was weaker for it.)

OK, that’s all for this episode!