Silence

I finished Silence (深情密碼/Shen Qing Mi Ma) today, a Taiwanese romance that could be considered tragic... and bittersweet, depending on you and how you see it. In all honesty, I watched it because I heard how utterly depressing it was, haha. It stars Vic Zhou, Park Eun Hye, Andy Hui, Megan Lai, and Kingone Wang. The summary is as follows, taken from DramaWiki, though with some editing on my part:

Zhao Shen Shen loses her voice after a bus accident and gets taken to the hospital by her friend Zuo Jun (who blames himself for making her mute), where she meets Qi Wei Yi, a boy who got his leg broken by jealous peers. He finds a letter she had placed in a bomb shelter wall. They leave each other letters and promise to come back in the Christmas of 2006. They become good friends and fall in love but Wei Yi is unaware that Shen Shen is mute. When he has to leave, he gives her his phone number and tells her to call him. Years pass and in the year of 2006, they meet again but is unaware of who each other is until Wei Yi finds out he has liver cancer and is dying. So, he decides to go back to the hospital he went to as a child and he finds out that Shen Shen is his childhood love, but not wanting to hurt her when he dies, he hides his identity and eventually pushes her away.

I found the cast for this pretty interesting since they're from Taiwan (Vic and Megan), Hong Kong (Andy), and Korea (Eun Hye). Pretty diverse, I'd say. Of course, this means several things has to happen. Zhao Shen Shen was made to be a mute [spoiler] until the very end [end spoiler] because (and this is me assuming) her Mandarin isn't all that good. Some Korean is spoken, but really, it was more like just two phrases throughout the entire drama. In fact, Cantonese was spoken more than that. As someone who understand Cantonese and can speak it... to an extent, I found it interesting when the conversations between Zuo Jun and his father are half in Mandarin and half in Cantonese. I like diversity. :)

What I also like is things that veer from the norm. For a romance drama, it has the sweet moments, but all in all, the moments between the main couple aren't really all that much until the very end. There's the really slow process from getting to know one another, to friendship, through obstacles and hardship, and to the ultimate getting-together stage. Of course, this all happens in the course of just a couple of months (and in 20 episodes) and in the end, Qi Wei Yi dies, which makes it more interesting because Shen Shen only knows about his illness at the VERY END. I mean, we know from the beginning-middle of the drama what would happen to him, so it's looming above our heads, but then we go through everything. It doesn't go too in-depth on what's happening to it, so sorry, medicine enthusiasts (like me, hehe), but it's somewhat believeable enough. The acting, overall, is not bad.

I'm glad that everything worked out in the end, and though it was sort of a little too quick to be all that believable, but death can do some unbelieveable things, yeah? It's sad, and though there seems to be a sort of sense of closure for Zhao Shen Shen, it also sort of just leaves us there. Personally, I thought an epilogue of some sort could be in order, but that's just me. :) In the end, I thought it was enjoyable, but not one of my favorite tragic dramas (that still goes to One Litre of Tears), but it's not bad. I mean, it has to be hard when one of the main characters is mute - but I applaud her for learning Chinese sign language!

You can watch it here.