- Year – 2016
- Episodes – 40
- Genre – Melodrama
To Be a Better Man is quite polished. Sun Hong Lei is an accomplished actor, and in this drama he plays a man, Lu Yuan, who worked hard in America to become a 3 star Michelin chef, a near impossible achievement. Most people think he’s a crazy, wild, devil incarnate (think Gordon Ramsey for those who watch Hell’s Kitchen). Those who love him though know he is an unconventional “good gentleman”, full of feeling and kindness. (Brief summary from Baidu Baike.)
The opening sequence is facile, sleek, and makes me think of a moody thriller. The first episode feels well thought out to deliver the back story and the current events without being confusing or slow. We meet Lu Yuan in America as he is being driven somewhere by a friend. For some reason not fully explained in the scene yet he has almost completely downed a bottle of hard liquor. Then they are in a massive car accident in which his friend is killed, this friend who just recently got his American citizenship. There is lingering regret and guilt in his sudden death.
Scenes flash as we meet the dead friend’s daughter and together they go back to China to scatter his ashes. We see a flashback of when he and his friend, both working in a restaurant, were held up by a group of thugs, he knocks one of the thugs out, allowing him and the restaurant staff to all run out. This establishes why they were good friends as well as a possible explanation of what happens later.
Arriving in Shanghai, his old friend Jiang Hao-kun (Wang Yao-qing) invites him to a party that night. At this party, Hao-kun proposes to Gan Jing (Che Xiao), who was Lu Yuan’s love from the past but is the girl Hao-kun has pursued for the last three years. We flash back to when Lu Yuan proposed to her and see how she happily agreed to be his wife. Back to the present Gan Jing doesn’t look like she wants to accept Hao-kun’s proposal, so Lu Yuan steps in by throwing pepper in Hao-kun’s face, then he flings Gan Jing over his shoulder and runs off with her.
Down some empty hallway he stops and apologizes. Saying he only abducted her because it looked like she wanted to get out of there. She yells and screams at him asking him why he disappeared so many years ago? She’s been desperately searching for him all these long years, and in her darker moments thought that he might have died all alone somewhere. He apologizes again, but for her the years of pain are not alleviated by a few words and can not forgive him.
They walk back to the now empty party and Lu Yuan and Hao-kun confront each other. Lu Yuan saying why didn’t you tell me back then you loved her so much? Hao-kun side stepping the question with a rhetorical question of his own – didn’t you tell me to keep it all a secret? Last scene flashes back to Lu Yuan wearing orange jumpers in an American jail, but the episode ends leaving us in suspense as to how he got there.
That’s my quick summary which cuts out a lot of details and some of the character introductions, but gets to the meat of the story. It’s a love triangle, at least initially, where our protagonist is a somewhat tortured, damaged soul starting life again to be a better man. I like that the story isn’t spoon fed to us but makes us connect the dots to understand the story.
It looks like it could be melodramatic and possibly overwrought. So far I like everyone in the first episode, and especially took a liking to the fast talking younger sister of Hao-kun, Jiang Lai, whom I skipped mentioning in the summary because she was incidental to the core plot in the set up. She might eventually end up being his true romantic interest, and from her brief but flamboyant appearance in Episode one she seems worthy. The production is slick, the writing is fast, and the acting is good. (☺☺☺)
Update:
Episode 2 had some cringe inducing English dialog. Even though they are dubbing over with native English speakers it’s still obvious it is dubbed and sadly the scenes while highly likely are still very awkwardly assembled.
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