They issued statements where needed, shaped public opinion, sued where appropriate, and redirected the fire as required.
The company seized on Kong Liyuan’s words at the cemetery as their breakout point. They unearthed a flood of old interviews with Kong Yan, dissecting them in articles. Fang Mo’s Weibo post declaring “she has zero connection to who her dad is” sealed the shift.
The controversy, originally aimed at Kong Liyuan and Winter Storm, swung toward Kong Yan, who had stayed conspicuously silent.
Kong Yan was a sharp man. The next day, he responded publicly, denying any investment in Kong Liyuan for Winter Storm and lambasting the media for profiting off tragedy. Bound by the devoted father and husband image he had cultivated, he had little choice but to become the target of her agency’s PR strategy.
Her agent advised her: since there was no real bond between her and Kong Yan, she should use everything she could against him. If she didn’t, he certainly would use her.
The storm blew over faster than Kong Liyuan expected. By then, she had joined the cast of Memory Beginning, filming Yang Lu’s pursuit scenes in Ordos.
This agent, who had picked her—a film newcomer—out of a sea of traffic stars, harbored unusually bold ambitions.
She laid out a clearer path for Kong Liyuan’s future, convinced that instead of chasing trends with the influencers happy to play that game, Kong Liyuan—fresh in the public eye from Li Yi and Zhang Yu—should blaze her own trail. One only she could walk, daring others to even try copying it without measuring their worth.
That summer of 2020, after Paradox, the name Kong Liyuan carried more weight. Its mere appearance on a cast list promised strong reviews and box office success.
And the more lives Kong Liyuan lived through film—lives not her own—the greater the commercial value of her name, and the tighter the hold of Kong Yan and Jiang Man upon it.
The more ads and images of her flickered across screens big and small, the more invasive the gazes fixed upon her.
It felt like a zero-sum game played solely with herself, split into two opposing halves.
One desperate to escape “Kong Liyuan,” the other determined to become her. One’s gain was the other’s loss.
The very opposite of what she had once dreamed of becoming at twenty-four.
Sometimes she wondered if plunging into this world—knowing full well the industry’s ups and downs were far more treacherous than she had imagined—had been a mistake.
More often, though, amid Inner Mongolia’s endless grasslands, during breaks from rehearsing scenes, she pondered:
If not movies, what else could she do?
The answer was clear: without film, Kong Liyuan could do nothing. Nor could she hold onto that journey so vividly, like sunlight leaking through summer clouds.
The script for Daytime Blizzard had come early, but at first, Kong Liyuan set it aside after glancing at the character breakdown.
The reason was simple: Ayang shared similarities with Li Yi, and the film’s eerie, arthouse vibe was much the same.
In her brief life, she saw no need to relive such a story.
But the director called confidently. “Ayang isn’t like Li Yi. Li Yi is a blood-red summer; Ayang is an intense winter. I believe Teacher Kong will have her own insights after reading the script. Ayang is a role worth seeing.”
After hanging up, she sat in a room lined with corpse specimens and idly reopened the script.
The “blizzard”—a key plot point from the later acts—had been cleverly placed at the beginning by the director.
At those three words, she looked up in a daze. Her reflection stared back from the clear glass.
Then another reflection overlaid it: that summer of 2017, snowflakes drifting through the stifling California heat. Someone smiling as they told her:
“I hate winter, but I kind of like snow.”
She realized she had never starred in a film centered on winter snow. And so she read on.
Daytime Blizzard surprised her. Ayang differed greatly from Li Yi.
She was a stubbornly idealistic young sculptor with an artist’s temperament—Ayang’s opposite in every way from the utterly defeated, bottom-rung Li Yi.
Her agent reviewed the script and production team, advising it was worth considering but not essential. It was a strong project, but early noise might claim she was recycling her persona from Memory Beginning to cash in after missing awards. Still, a good outcome could flip the narrative triumphantly.
Time had grown more crowded and swift than before, shuttling between three lush, overlapping segments of life and three cities, passing like that classic movie caption on a black background in white letters: “Four years later.”
And just like that, it was 2021, just a few days before the longest day in the Northern Hemisphere.
Kong Liyuan arrived at the sanatorium in Los Angeles, carrying the script for Daytime Blizzard that she had marked up with circles and annotations.
In the muggy California wind, she tuned the radio to FM 93.1 once again. But the station no longer aired that segment, no longer played that song on repeat.
The only thing still looping endlessly seemed to be her.
She kept recalling that phrase: “Safe travels.” Each time she looked back, she realized the media storm after Winter Storm had been nothing more than a minor blip.
It had felt huge to a newcomer who believed that starring in great films and nailing roles was the biggest deal in the world.
But to the ever-fluctuating entertainment industry, an incident like that—happening to someone as insignificant as her, leaving her besieged on all sides—was something that could be forgotten at any moment, even flipped into a reputation booster.
Safe travels.
—It was as if every time she thought of those words, everything that followed was nothing but good fortune.
Winter Storm won her Best Newcomer. Blue Book officially branded her a “film actress.” She met her current agent in the aftermath of that scandal, successfully turning the tide on the controversy that had nearly devoured her young self. Paradox brought a double harvest of acclaim and buzz upon release. Memory Beginning earned her a Film Queen nomination…
It all seemed designed to prove that, from her debut at twenty-four with Winter Storm to Memory Beginning now, Kong Liyuan had indeed been soaring straight up the path of film, carving out the career she wanted. Even the tabloid hype calling her life “smooth sailing” wasn’t far off.
So every time she returned to California, amid the relentless roar of traffic, she couldn’t help wondering once again—how could anyone deliver such a simple farewell and blessing, yet make it shine so brightly for the recipient?
Li Qiao had added extra layers of privacy measures to the room she’d specially reserved for Kong Liyuan’s comfort.
Kong Liyuan stepped into the empty space and immediately spotted it: a faded Winter Storm poster still plastered to the vast transparent window.
In the poster, Kong Liyuan looked just as she had at twenty-four.
Her features young and raw, gazing out through fogged, misty glass, a sparsely lit cigarette pinched between her fingers.
“What do you think? It’s been a while since you last saw her, hasn’t it?” Li Qiao’s voice came suddenly from behind her. She referred to the young woman on the poster as “her.”
Kong Liyuan stood before the enormous glass window, lost in a daze as fog spread like a vast net, coalescing into a blanket of white.
Like a movie cut, the reflection in the glass sharpened into a clear young face.
It could have been Li Yi. Or Kong Liyuan at twenty-four.
—Dazed, she slowly raised her hand.
~~~
“Long time no see.”
—Winter 2021, Shanghai, inside a cramped, dingy twenty-square-meter room.
A slender finger hovered before the old poster, a fresh red scar visible at the knuckle of the ring finger.
The whisper, meant for one person alone, was quickly swallowed by the city’s clamor.
The scarred finger gently smoothed the wrinkled corner of the poster on Kong Liyuan’s face, the motion slow and deliberate, its owner clearly patient.
The damp cuff of a coat sleeve wiped away the condensation on the glass, making the vivid red scar stand out even more against the clear pane.
For a moment, the deep, brooding eyes of Kong Liyuan on the old poster blurred in the dissipating mist.
Then they sharpened again.
On the rain-streaked window, a pale, strikingly beautiful young face reflected back.
Fuzzy and swaying, it nearly overlapped with the faded Kong Liyuan on the poster.
A hazy drizzle had washed Shanghai clean, leaving it thoroughly chilled and wet.
There was a young woman, so down-and-out that she hadn’t even had time to comb her freshly dyed hair before ducking for cover from the rain.
She was drenched to the bone.
Dragging a rattling suitcase as she hunted for a place to live, she ended up in this narrow, damp, filthy rental.
Hauling the heavy suitcase up to the sixth floor had taken real effort; her exposed fingers were nearly numb from the cold.
Yet she stubbornly smoothed out the curled, wrinkled edges of the Winter Storm poster on the rental’s window.
The poster’s once-vibrant colors had faded to a stale yellowish-green, now rendered even more somber by the icy rain outside.
The woman in the poster, already exuding a air of desolation, lost even more hue in Shanghai’s gray chill, turning to a dull, muted tone—like something out of the late twentieth century.
A woman’s voice sounded from behind her. It had been brisk and authoritative from downstairs, but in the tight confines of the room, it sharpened into something shrill.
“Sis, I’m telling you, this place really won’t do. It’s a bit cheaper, sure, but I wouldn’t recommend it. No AC in the dead of winter, and such a huge window to boot—top floor, stairs are a killer, and even cracking it open for air lets in a gale. Why not spend a little more for that bigger room on the fifth floor?”
The landlady chattered on, squinting as her eyes roamed up and down, appraising the travel-worn, destitute young woman.
Her freshly dyed black hair looked unnaturally stark—too pure, too flat. And that pretty face was white to an extreme.
As if drained of all color by the wet rain, or simply too thin and malnourished.
Anyway, she was beautiful, sure, but too… what was the word? Oh, right—wretched.
The landlady grumbled inwardly.
Noticing the woman’s fixed stare at the poster, as if her soul had wandered off.
Assuming she had an issue with it.
The landlady stepped forward unprompted, muttering, “Little Red Guy moved out and didn’t even clean up—left the poster behind.” She reached to tear it down.
But halfway there, her hand was intercepted. A slim, pale wrist shot out, gently encircling it.
“Hey, what’re you doing?!” The landlady jumped, clutching her pounding chest.
Twenty-four-year-old Fu Tingli turned, her wet, youthful face open and unguarded.
She released the landlady’s hand lightly and slowly, curling her fingers to hide the fresh red scar on her ring finger.
With an apologetic smile, she said softly,
“Auntie, can I move in right now?”
