"Suspected to be an actor coming"
On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month in the tenth year of Chongzhen, it snowed heavily in the capital.
Shen Buyi, the eldest son of Shen Heting, the imperial censor of Zuoqiandu of the Procuratorate, met a person at the hall of the Grand Scholar's Palace - Xie Ling, a Huadan from the He family class. Across the hall full of fine clothes and half a pond of frozen water, he saw the man stroking his hands to keep warm backstage. His fingers were blue and purple from the cold, and he had to apply powder to cover them up.
He put his gilt hand stove behind the pillar, turned around and left. It was the tenth year of Chongzhen, and he was nineteen years old. He didn't know that taking this step would last a lifetime.
Xie Ling was sold into a theater troupe at the age of five. She was beaten, starved and frozen. After standing in the mud for more than ten years, her bones were stronger than anyone else's. He doesn't kneel, he doesn't please, he doesn't accept his fate. He only sings opera. He thought this would be it for the rest of his life - until a man wearing a navy blue t-shirt walked into the dilapidated courtyard of Huaishu Alley, thrust an old playbook into his hand, and said: Your hands are still cold.
From that moment on, everything started to be different.
In the Shen Mansion's ancestral hall, his leg was broken with Jifa's wooden staff. Shen Heting asked him if he would change his ways. He knelt in front of the ancestral tablet and said: If a son is unfilial, he will not regret it. He was left in the snow with a broken leg, no home, and nothing left but his life. Xie Ling carried him back from the snow without saying anything, and just put a bowl of hot porridge in his hand.
Together, the two of them survived the locust plague in the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, the artillery fire that destroyed the city and destroyed the country, and the thousands of miles of displacement after the Qing troops entered the country. Shen Buji drags a lame leg, and Xie Ling clings to a voice that no longer speaks, relying on each other in troubled times.
Later, the Qing court liquidated the remaining officials of the previous dynasty, and the entire Shen family was in danger. Xie Ling put on the same costume she wore when she first met Shen Buyi and said to him: I have been acting all my life, and I will play you again. You wait for me at home.
Shen Buyi waited for three days. On the fourth day, someone sent a set of costumes, neatly folded.
For the rest of his life, he dragged his lame leg from the capital to the south of the Yangtze River, asking everyone he met: Have you ever seen a Huadan singer? His name is Xie Ling.
Some said he was crazy. He just didn't want to wake up.
Concept: In troubled times, two of the humblest people serve as each other's salvation.