Zheng Xiaolong has created a number of hotly discussed female images in TV series such as “Desire”, “The Legend of Zhen Huan” and “Happiness to Ten Thousand Family”.
In 2009, a girl named He Xingfu married into Wanjiazhuang, a famous “star village” in Shili Baxiang, and became the wife of Wang Qinglai, an honest young man. Just when she was looking forward to a better life, her own sister, who was a bridesmaid, was molested by Wan Chuanjia, the son of the village party secretary, in the name of “marriage”. He Xingfu broke the head of Wan Chuan’s family in order to save his sister. The in-law’s family was afraid of offending others and forced the newly married couple to come to apologize. The Wang family is a small surname in Wanjiazhuang, and it may be tolerated if it is changed to ordinary people, but happiness is not convinced, and she wants to come to the door to ask for an explanation. In this way, discussions about “emotion and law”, “new and old”, “city and countryside”, and “men and women” began.
This is the opening plot of the TV series “Happiness to Ten Thousand Homes”. Because He Xingfu continued to suffer injustice, he was commented by netizens as “the blood pressure came up after watching one episode”.
In “Happiness Comes to Ten Thousand Homes”, Zheng Xiaolong presents an ordinary village, which is neither as backward as the northwest mountain village in “A Case of Qiu Ju”, nor is it an idyllic idyll to escape the hustle and bustle of a big city. Zheng Xiaolong told the Southern Weekend reporter that the important reason why he served as the chief director of “Happiness to Ten Thousand Homes” is that he hopes to show what spiritual deficiencies still exist in contemporary people after their material life is prosperous.
This drama is adapted from Chen Yuanbin’s novel “The Legend of Qiu Ju”, which is in the same vein as Zhang Yimou’s “Qiu Ju Litigation”, but presents a completely different appearance of Chinese rural women. In 1992, Qiu Ju in “The Case of Qiu Ju” was stubborn and ignorant, and was once criticized for “smearing China’s reality”. Of course, looking back after thirty years, Qiu Ju in the film fully reflects the traditional patriarchal concept in the bones of Chinese rural women, and has become an unforgettable image in Chinese film history.
“Happiness to Ten Thousand Homes” has been greatly adapted from the original work. The contemporary “Qiu Ju” played by the heroine He Xingfu inherits the character’s belief that “it’s just a statement”, but under the reshaping of director Zheng Xiaolong and screenwriter Zhao Dongling, Happiness started from a simple pursuit of justice and respect, and then gradually developed legal awareness and grew into a new generation of rural youth.
In 1990, Zheng Xiaolong served as the producer of China’s first full-length indoor drama “Desire”, and the image of the heroine Liu Huifang has almost become the silver screen memory of Chinese people of an era. After that, he went to the United States to establish Huayi Film and Television Program Co., Ltd., and distributed TV series produced by Beijing TV Art Center in North America. Immediately afterwards, Zheng Xiaolong began his directorial career, and filmed many works such as “Beijing People in New York”, “Never Give Up”, “Happiness Like Flowers”, “Golden Wedding”, “The Legend of Zhen Huan” and “Red Sorghum”.
Due to the popularity of “The Legend of Zhen Huan” on the Internet, the name Zheng Xiaolong has also become a “stalk” commonly used by netizens. Since the birth of this drama, netizens have never stopped researching and re-creating this drama. In the face of such a phenomenon, Zheng Xiaolong understands it and doesn’t understand it. In his opinion, TV dramas cannot be viewed with a magnifying glass, nor can they be viewed frame by frame, because “this does not conform to the laws of creation”.
As a post-50s generation, Zheng Xiaolong may not fully understand the current Internet culture, but he hopes that his dramas can bring audiences to think beyond entertainment. On July 7, 2022, a Southern Weekly reporter conducted an exclusive interview with Zheng Xiaolong in his office.
“Happiness to Ten Thousand Homes” tells the story of the awakening of a rural woman’s legal consciousness.
I want to show the change in people’s spiritual level
Southern Weekend:“Happiness to Thousands of Homes” and “The Lawsuit of Qiu Ju” actually originated from the literary works of the “Qiu Ju” series by writer Chen Yuanbin. Your previous creations rarely touched on the problems of rural China, especially the bead of “The Law of Qiu Ju”.