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The first thing Shen Jiu learned about fame is that it smells like old velvet and the sweat of hot stage lights, sweet and suffocating, if a little rotten. Everything is either dimly lit or deliberately a notch too bright.
Fame, he learned later, is not something you possess. It is something that possesses you —slowly and thoroughly, until even your private thoughts feel staged. There is always an audience.
Systems like these cannot sustain themselves on chaos alone, there are always figures somewhere behind the curtain; someone verily playing checkers with the pieces.
Director Wu was one of these shadowy figures. He seemed to view the industry as a vast, private menagerie. He didn’t cast actors so much as collect them. He moved through the industry like a high-end taxidermist, treating talent as a rare, skittish species. He kept the rarest ones in metaphorical cages, feeding them roles to play instead of food to eat, watching with patient, clinical interest to see which ones thrive and which ones struggle. He had a way of looking through people, stripping away their names until only their utility remained.
His latest concept was a fever dream of his apparently, some drama about a reclusive, award-winning literary critic[1], struggling with the death of his twin brother, results in hiring a method actor to live with him and mimic his brother’s mannerisms. Shen Jiu had always wanted to do a horror piece.
Later today, they’re filming a hallucination sequence.
Wu Yanzi himself was unremarkable at first glance. Tall and lithe, with slightly underfed features and a shoulder-length mop of dark hair always combed back in a deliberately inadvertent manner. He often wore a fitted black suit with wide swooping legs and a patterned tie. There was nothing especially striking about him until he opened his mouth, and after he does the room tends to reorganize itself around him.
Shen Jiu rolled a cigarette between his fingers, feeling the paper itch against his skin. He hates this industry, with its boastful, shallow glamour. Every decision is made to sell tickets, every performance shaved down into something plain and palatable, easily consumed and forgotten. Shots stripped to their bare bones and dressed back up as products. Director Wu is not like these other directors, cheap and asinine. Instead, everything in his films must have some sort of convoluted meaning, if it is the stage of decay the apples in the twelfth (twelve is apparently some sort of fucking fairytale number representing “the full cycle of things”) fruitbowl on set are in, or the subtle implications of the word ‘set’, which carries hundreds of connotations depending on who is asking and what they want it to mean. [2]
In the wider industry, there are always comparisons people liked to make. Between rising actors and has-beens, between “types”, between who could endure this-and-that. It wasn’t uncommon to see careers burn bright and vanish just as quickly, especially among performers from backgrounds where stability was never guaranteed to begin with: migrants, working-class entrants, those who did not inherit guarantees along with opportunity (Shen Jiu has a special place of hate in his blackened heart to utterly loathe the nepotists of the entertainment industry. That Liu brat with even more fervor than the others). This industry rewarded visibility, not wellbeing. It rewarded hunger, the subtle self-destruction that could still be framed as dedication. It liked people who would do anything to be the best.
Shen Jiu knows exactly what kind of person he looks like when he walks into a room. He just doesn't care enough to do anything about it.
It's not as if he believes public perception doesn’t matter — of course it does, it matters miles too much. Only, once people begin to look, they don’t stop at surface level.
Viewers inflict their own expectations, not just on your performance, but your politics, your stance on everything ethical. You, not your act, becomes the product — your looks, your wit, your relationships and involvement in petty, ever-shifting public disputes no one in the real world gives a shit about.
He puts down the cigarette. Why is he still so disgustingly obsessed with being the best if he loathes the very air he breathes, and lives like shit? He lives on black coffee, spite, and a pack of cigs a day, his body a vessel for work. Though, he admits he hates show business only in the abstract sense, the way one might hate weather that refuses to stop changing. And yet he is still here, performing, chasing roles that demand more of him than they should. It is not affection that keeps him in place, nor any clean ambition that could be admired without complication.
Perhaps it is because the alternative to superiority was being invisible, a fate far more agonizing than the slow erosion of his health.
Shen Jiu is obsessed with being the best because if he is not he will be replaced. There are always ten people to take his place at any moment. This is the way it is, and knowing it ensures he remains at the apex, looking down at the less perceptive. It’s a constant race of importance.
But, it isn't the competition that keeps him awake at night. Competition implies a contest with rules, a structure, a finish line. Which would be fine, rules are easy. What he feels is closer to something akin to a pressure, bearing upon his shoulders, existing whether or not anyone is actively pushing him.
Though, if there were no adversaries to challenge him, none of his accomplishments would exude worth. Without them, there would still be the same underlying certainty — he is always one mistake away from being irrelevant. Not because the troupe itself is cruel, nor because Wu Yanzi is especially merciless, but because that is how things are.
In a quieter life, this paranoia would have nowhere to go, rotting inward and eating through his heart. Looping endlessly with no means to discharge the tension. He would be a nightmare of a neighbor, a ghost in a cheap flat, pacing through the same few meters of his existence until he wore grooves into the floorboards. But in Wu Yanzi's troupe, this almost cult-like system where performance is pushed to extremity, it becomes functional. Even rewarded. Aestheticized.
There is a strange comfort in that. An understandable structure he can sense, predictable in nature and therefore usable.
Usable things can be navigated, optimized, endured, turned into advantage. Even suffering, when written out, becomes a kind of map. Nevertheless, if something can be used, it might stop being separate from him. Becoming part of how he thinks. Part of how he is. Which in turn means there is no real line between the system and himself anymore. One day, he might be simply replaced, his old self rotting in a run-down shed with the rest of the mutts. Some impostor playing house in his skin.
The thought sticks, half-formed and ugly, and he shoves it down before it can finish becoming true.
Shen Jiu is bitter, bitter that he is rotten, that he doesn’t deserve to be loved and yet yearns for love so very fiercely. He has a lot of unresolved anger. He likes to be in control, and has a pride poignant enough to cut through most conversations, and yes — he is painfully aware of all of it. He knows these are ‘flaws’. That word is too soft, actually. They are liabilities. He is aware of that with perfect clarity. He isn’t naïve enough to pretend otherwise. Acting just gives him a socially acceptable container for all of it. On stage, intensity and fervid perfectionism is commitment. Precision is talent. Coldness is discipline. Offstage, those same traits would isolate him. Onstage, they make him valuable, and he won’t ever let this advantage slip.
Acting lets him do something he can't safely do in real life: become absolute. For a few minutes, he doesn't have to negotiate being a person who might be dismissed or replaced. He becomes a fixed point where everything else bends around him.
It’s a fragile illusion, of course. The moment the scene ends, he is put back in the endless clash of shifting perceptions. But those highs are enough to keep him chasing the next, and the next, and the next.
And he cannot decide which is worse: being constantly replaceable, or not being defined by replaceability at all. In real life, identity feels unstable. Negotiated. Other people get a say in who you are. That's the hook. The answer is messy on purpose: he's in entertainment because it rewards his tendencies, and punishes him in ways that make him feel like he has a purpose to strive towards. This is exactly why he both hates it and can't bear the thought of leaving it. Acting is the closest the world has to magic. Acting gives you power to shape the very physics of a room. It allows you to take root in the minds of others, plant a flag in their subconscious and declare yourself the only thing worth looking at. To stop acting would kill him.
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The dressing room mirror is bordered with lightbulbs that burn just a little too hot. Someone is behind him, dabbing product onto his face with a clinical detachment. Brushes sweep, pause, return. The air smells faintly of powder and something chemical, meant to imitate cleanliness.
Wu Yanzi's personal assistant knocks once before stepping in, already halfway through speaking. A schedule change, he says. Director Wu wants everyone on set forty-five minutes early.
Shen Jiu smiles at the man. It’s a beautiful smile. Soft. Slightly apologetic. The kind of smile that means nothing at all, and therefore can mean anything.
“Did he now,” he says lightly.
He loathes being rushed. He wants to sweep the pencils and brushes off the table, watch the fragile receptacle containing them shatter into a thousand bloodied pieces.
His already fragile mood curdles further as Wu Yanzi's voice tears through the hallway like a knife. Director Wu is standing over a sobbing intern who had the misfortune of bringing him tea that was a few degrees too cool. The kitchen's fault, really. His eyes dart with a manic, cruel intelligence. It wouldn’t surprise Shen Jiu if he got off on this. There is a rhythm to it, this humiliation. Rehearsed and refined, a magnificent act of unjust anger. Because that’s what it is —an act. When Wu Yanzi is truly angry, it's a stewing, silent rage.
He continues to bellow, his face inches away from the girl’s.
Shen Jiu reached for the silver case in his pocket, a reflexive movement meant to ground the lightning-wire tension in his nerves. He didn't even want the nicotine, just the comfort of ritual. He pulled out a cigarette, the slim white cylinder looking stark against his pale, trembling fingers. The screaming continues. In another life, he might’ve intervened. Or at least pretended to. There are actors who make a career of that particular moral posture, soft concern packaged for cameras, selfless acts of kindness timed perfectly for maximum adoration. But, nothing is being filmed right now. Virtue would be wasted here.
Besides, Shen Jiu is all-too aware of the invisible hierarchy. The girl is merely a sacrifice to their neurotic god of a director. Shen Jiu adjusts his collar, his movement fluid and elegant, successful in hiding the tremors of nicotine and days without a proper meal. If you asked his younger self if he would voluntarily deny himself nourishment with this much money in his possession, he would’ve spat in your face.
For a brief, uncomfortable moment, he imagines himself in the girl's place. Small, replaceable in such an effortless way. The thought immediately curdles. He would rather die than be that insignificant.
He watches the intern flee, a blur of weeping apology, and he feels the familiar, bitter rising of his own pride. Shen Jiu finds himself without pity for the girl; only a cold, dark envy. Her problems are simple. She can leave this building and disappear into the blessed anonymity of the mundane life. Shen Jiu, however, has long since traded the quiet dignity of a private life for the loud, hollow architecture of a persona. He’s traded his soul for the burn of the spotlight, and so he steps into the hallway to meet Director Wu’s inevitable gaze.
It rakes over Shen Jiu’s raw-boned frame. A slow, thin smile spread across Wu Yanzi's face, not properly reaching his eyes.
“Jiu-er, you look positively deceased! Don’t let them put any more colour on your cheeks, will you?”
Shen Jiu lets the diminutive slide. He has the inane urge to throw a punch. Instead, he takes a slow, deliberate drag of his now-lit cigarette, though the "no smoking" signs are plastered every ten feet. He is the exception. He has made himself the exception through the sheer, exhausting effort of being better than everyone else.
He exhales slowly, the smoke curling beautifully upwards in an act of deliberate provocation. Wu Yanzi watches him do it. Of course he does, the pervert.
This attention — sharp and appraising, almost intimate — has always been the most dangerous thing in the room.
He remembers the few moments he has been praised, singled out, elevated above the rest of Director Wu’s shifting hierarchy. They register as exposure, immediate, destabilising, and utterly euphoric. The higher he is placed, the more visible the eventual fall becomes.