1982: The First Year of the Spring Festival Gala

At eight o’clock on Lunar New Year’s Eve, over a billion people sit before their televisions, waiting to hear those words: “Happy New Year.” No one remembers what the first show was like. In 1983, in a shabby hall without even a hint of color, dozens of people crowded around a black-and-white monitor. They were dirt poor, but their eyes shone bright. Lin Yue was there. He was a nameless nobody, hauling cables. He was nineteen that year. In truth, he had come back from forty years in the future. On Lunar New Year’s Eve at the age of sixty, he had collapsed at the director’s console. The program never missed a second, and no one knew that a man had fallen in the backstage area. He could hear the cause of a microphone’s feedback at a glance. When viewers wanted to request songs, they gave him four phone lines, and he could bring the New Year’s Eve celebrations from across the country into that little room. It was the poorest show, and the best one, too. This time, he didn’t want to keep shrinking into the shadows. The people backstage deserved to have names, too.