Hua Yu

Hua Yu is an urban-life web novel by Ershou Nanren Dang Ziqiang, serialized on Baidu Novels from May 2016 to October 2017. It spans roughly 2.37 million Chinese characters across more than a thousand chapters. The story follows Li Sheng, a down-and-out bar singer in 2020 who unexpectedly wakes up back in 1999. Having grown up in a Shaolin temple, he heads north to Hengdian and starts out scraping a living as a stunt performer and body double. There he meets the agent Qin Lei, and after someone overhears him singing by the river, he gets a shot at an audition. Step by step he moves from the edges of the frame to center stage, transitioning from stunt work to acting and finding his way amid the surge of the Chinese-language film and television industry around the turn of the millennium. Beyond the protagonist's struggles on set, debates over acting schools, and the maneuvering around opportunities and auditions, the novel also traces a romance between a man and a literary-minded young woman, and captures both the workings of the industry and the texture of everyday street life. It stands as one of the more representative long works in the early "rebirth into the late 1990s to make it in the Chinese entertainment world" genre.