Cheng's Musings

This 40-episode series is not your usual Chinese drama series. Each episode is almost independent of each other, with glimpses of continuity in the male and female leads in the series – Fan Si Si and Li Tian Ran, respectively portrayed by Yukee Chen and Zheng Kai. The unlikely couple is as different as day and night, land and sea, but circumstances at work provides opportunities for them to interact more with each other, finding love in their journey. Most of the stories are based at Gaofa Technology, a high technology company with office politics and the struggles of the ordinary workers.

Fan Si Si is the calculative office worker, who aims to deliver the minimum with the least effort. At the extreme end of the spectrum, Li Tian Ran is the laid-back but committed office worker, not the most productive but always the cheerleaders for others. When Fan Si Si is transferred to Department 3 of Gaofa Technology as team lead, crushing Li Tian Ran’s ambition to be the team lead, the two starts off shakily with wariness against each other. In addition to being colleagues, the couple also live next to each other, providing more time for them to spend with each other after work.

The Gaofa office is full of different characters with diverse personalities:

• Department 3 is headed by Director Yu, an old-timer who contributed towards Gaofa’s success over the decades – a rocker but low-profile leader
• Manager Yao, a driven team lead who is adept at pushing away responsibilities and taking in praises
• Manager Ji, an old timer who is slacking off most of the time and always fearful of his fierce wife but a responsible husband and father
• Bai Ma Shuai, an apprentice who is super excited to assist in any projects but who is actually the son of rival technology owner
• Yi Mei, an accountant who is addicted to cosmetic surgery
• Jiang Mei, a young gen z worker surviving in the city
• Wu Ming Shi, a super low profile worker who is almost always ignored

Other characters include:

• The super villain of the sitcom is in the form of Director Zheng, the arch rival of Department 3 and brother in law to owner Hao You Fen.
• He is often assisted by the super competitive & selfish Gao De Fen, who is only interested in self-benefits at others’ expenses.

As each episode has its own storyline, the independent story provides snippets of themes of relationship, livelihood and even office politics. And many of the snippets are so reflective of the daily grinding life of an officer worker. And the specialty of this series is how comedic the scenes are put through to reflect the situations.

Theme #1 Team Work – One scene that I really like is how the sarcastic Director Yu emphasizes all the great traits of the team members, leaving behind poor Li Tian Ran at the starting point. But as he raises the other emotional traits that supported the team, it suddenly pushes Li Tian Ran over the ranking to be first. It re-emphasises how important a cheerleader in a team can motivate the members to make it a great team.

Theme #2 Being Calculative – Trust Fan Si Si being the calculative person to come up with the method to calculate and claim personal time during office hours (for all the time spent on overtime). For me, the key takeaway from the episode is a happy employee is a productive employee. Rather than be restrictive in the time spent in office (and as expected of the villainous Director Zheng, who is even able to monitor the time spent with the computer), might as well find other ways to motivate the employees to be productive.

Theme #3 Ra-ra Motivational Camps – This is also a gem, as at least a few of the episode explores the many methods a company will take to do motivational sessions for its employees. The usual reactions would be for employees to try to avoid such motivational camps (definitely can relate! This is eating into our personal time). But unfortunately, there is still the bare minimum to provide some commitment by showing up for the activities, be it get-to-know each other dinner, or multi-day camps to foster teamwork. Often enough, these motivational activities achieve nothing more than superficial kind of connection. But morale of the story is the sincerity & genuine connections can foster better teamwork and productivity.

Theme #4 Retirement Goals – This is one of my favourite episode, whereby the villainous Director Zheng sets up a machine that will process the retirement goals of each employee & provides a specific goals to them. The episode raises a pertinent question to all employees – the real reason in working. Most employees want a stable monetary piggy bank after retirement, some wants to be recognised for their effort (who else but Wu Si Ming) and the weirdo wants to be Ultraman (our dear funny man Manager Ji) Of course, Director Zheng’s reason is to improve the productivity of the employees (at the expense of the employees’ well-being) by setting them high goals. But the ultimate game is finally rejected by the very employees it tried to trick.

Theme #5 Mentoring & Taking Over – In a few different situations, the mentoring shown is reflective of real life situation in office. Manager Ji mentoring the younger Lead Manager Yao, but ended up reporting to him at a later stage. Li Tian Ran mentoring the enthusiastic apprentice Bai Ma Shuai (portrayed by Dylan Wang) and finally acknowledging that the apprentice has now overtaken the master. In office, this is bound to happen and I love the way Li Tian Ran is so generous with sharing his knowledge.

Last but not least, the series also provides a slow growth and journey for both Fan Si Si and Li Tian Ran to discover each other. I love how they just realise that they have gotten so used to each other, falling in love in the most natural way. And I love how conflicted the selfish Fan Si Si is, when she puts in her resignation to Director Yu (company policy does not allow love relationship amongst team members, especially supervisor and subordinate) to give a chance to Li Tian Ran to stay on.

Conclusion 8/10

A gem of a find – I actually stumbled upon this great sitcom. Laidback, really funny (lots of cackling while chasing for the episodes), great acting from Yukee Chen Yu Qi and Zheng Kai. Both are so natural in their character. As this is my first time watching Zheng Kai, he is really quite a great comedian and actor. Special shoutout to Dylan Wang who portrays Bai Ma Shuai, who may not be the lead but is so funny as the over enthusiastic son of the rival company, ever humble to learn but always trying to hide the fact that he is actually a second generation rich kid.

I like the way that they put up short scenes in each episode whereby the egg is either broken or eaten, representing the situations at work. For employees of the world, watch this to just laugh at our really comedic situations at work just to let off steam. You will definitely be able to relate to your daily office life.