My Years as a Copyist in Taiwan

Wu Deng saw Zhao Wen reading a "newspaper" that criticized him, and the more he read, the happier he became. He wondered if his little brother had been scolded into a daze.

"Ah Wen, what's making you so happy?"

"Brother Deng, he's right, that's why I'm happy!"

"But this guy... I glanced at it, there were too many words, I didn't even finish reading it. If he keeps hurling insults like this, the ratings next week are going to plummet!"

"No, not only will he not jump off the building, he'll climb even higher. You'll believe me on Friday. Li Ao is a highly cultured man. Look, he only criticized me personally, criticized my thoughts. He didn't mention a word about the quality of the show itself... Come on, Brother Deng, let me explain in detail..."

Que Shi, Li Ao's first insult was that Zhao Wen glorified the emperor and whitewashed the autocratic imperial power.

Who was Emperor Qianlong? He was a tyrant who instigated over 170 literary inquisitions, silencing scholars across the land; an extravagant emperor who emptied the national treasury with his six southern tours. Yet in your "Princess Pearl," he's portrayed as a kind and benevolent emperor—it's utterly ridiculous!

By portraying a cannibalistic emperor as a benevolent ruler, you're telling the audience that emperors are good people and even slaves can rise above their circumstances. What is this? It's spiritual opium! You've forgotten the cruelty of imperial power; Zhao Wen, you're a spineless coward!

Furthermore, the bizarre phenomenon of everyone binge-watching TV dramas that you fabricated is the culprit behind the cultural regression of our island!

Nowadays, night markets are closed, taxis have stopped running, and people are not going to work. The entire island is glued to the TV watching a mindless and soulless romance drama, which shows how spiritually deficient people are these days.

Instead of doing anything productive, they're obsessed with a soap opera, discussing the plot more than their own lives. This isn't cultural prosperity; it's collective spiritual decay, a victory for vulgar and stale culture.

Phoenix has already poisoned a generation, and now even Zhao Wen is joining in the fun. How lamentable!

I'm publicly criticizing Zhao Wen by name today not because I want to cause trouble for him, but because I feel he shouldn't stop there.

He has the talent to write timeless masterpieces; he shouldn't have gotten involved in this vulgar soap opera, and he shouldn't have wasted his talent on such servile and obsequious things for a few coins.

The whole island is praising "Princess Pearl" and Zhao Wen is incredibly talented, but I'm going to sing a different tune.

Whether a work is good or not has nothing to do with popularity or ratings, but it has to do with substance. Something without substance, no matter how popular, is still vulgar and clichéd!

I, Li Ao, will put this into words: the more frenzied the adoration is today, the more ridiculous it will seem in retrospect!

...

Zhao Wen was explaining to Brother Deng just how disgusting and inhumane his drama was when the phone rang upstairs. His younger brother said it was for Mr. Snail.

Zhao Wen went upstairs and answered the phone. Miss Yi'an's voice, which she tried hard to keep calm, came through: "Sir, have you read that tabloid article that criticized us?"

"I've read it; it's very convincingly written. Truly the best writer of vernacular Chinese!"

"what!"

"What's wrong, Manager Yi'an?"

"Hmm, it's nothing, sir. You're very composed. So, what should we do now?"

"You don't need to do anything. Just call your team leaders immediately and tell them not to argue with Mr. Li Ao in tomorrow's newspaper! Remember that, call right away, okay?"

"Okay! Definitely!" Yi'an put down the phone, rubbed her furrowed brows, and sighed. Mr. Snail, he's so kind! He even anticipated the team leaders' reactions and told us not to rush things. How can there be such a gentle gentleman...?

Whether Zhao Wen was gentle or not, Aunt Phoenix didn't know. All she knew was that this time, he was dragged out and whipped again.

"My Fair Princess" was written by you, Zhao Wen, and the praise was spontaneous from the audience. The money was earned by you, Zhao Wen, and that... big brother. What does it have to do with me?! Why am I being criticized even more harshly?

"President, I feel like I have absolutely no creative desire left. I feel like I'm going to die..."

Looking at his grief-stricken lover, the club president tenderly lifted her round face and gently comforted her, "Darling, you need to think about this from the other side. Look, Li Ao not only insulted you, but he's started scorning him too. This isn't over yet. Zhao Wen will have to fight him. Wouldn't it be a good thing for us if they fought?"

In 1982, Zhao Wen considered Li Ao to be among the top five most charismatic figures in Taiwan. His magazine license had long been revoked, so he published a monthly volume of the "Qianqiu Review Series," all of which were banned books and could only circulate through underground channels.

This hastily printed edition of "Qianqiu Review" must have really infuriated Mr. Snail...

Most ordinary citizens have heard of Li Ao's name, but the vast majority have never read his books. His real readers are concentrated among young students and culturally radical youths. He was Taiwan's first generation of cultural icons, and he became famous more than a decade earlier than Gu Long and Gao Yang.

Therefore, from now until the next few decades, no one in the cultural circle will question Li Ao's talent, but almost no one dares to get close to him—he holds grudges to the extreme. If you offend him, as long as he finds something wrong with you, he can turn around and write it into an article...

For example, top-tier actress and Golden Horse Award winner Hu Yingmeng had a whirlwind marriage with Li Ao in 1980, only to divorce him three months later. After the divorce, Li Ao relentlessly criticized his ex-wife in his articles for decades. Later, the actress even said, "If I had known he was so vengeful, I really wouldn't have divorced him..."

This self-proclaimed champion of "the greatest writer of vernacular Chinese in the last fifty years" viciously criticized "Princess Pearl," which was exactly what Zhao Wen wanted.

When I first wrote this script, I was just copying it with the mindset of "using magic to defeat magic". This would prevent Phoenix from using this drama to win the favor of mainland audiences more than ten years later, and stop her from harming countless innocent girls with more melodramatic dramas. It would also allow the most angry Taiwanese writers at that time to criticize "Princess Pearl" in advance.

Zhao Wen had even planned out how to write a long apology, in which he would solemnly express that he had been poisoned by Aunt Phoenix and had gone down this bad path... Now let Uncle Taibao's bullets fly again...

At that time, Mr. Snail will achieve a win-win-win situation, a win-win-win-win situation...

However, at this moment, in the small coffee bar in the main lobby of the Grand Hotel, Mr. Wicker Chair waited patiently, waiting for the lovely Manager Gao Yi'an.

Yi-An was on the other side of the coffee bar, calming down several indignant local Taipei team leaders.

The group leaders' fervor for Mr. Snail made Yi'an somewhat uneasy. Only two years had passed since John Lennon's story, and she worried that the group she had painstakingly built might ultimately betray Mr. Snail...

"So, you must firmly believe in Mr. [Sir]. What he says and does must be correct. We don't need to care how he responds to Mr. Li Ao. All we can do is hold our home—Snail Home—okay, Sister Zhizhi?"