Chapter 106

In July Li Jingyu was invited onto a show. It was called Brothers and Sisters, a new online variety programme from Mango TV, and the idea was to film celebrities and their actual siblings together in a reality show. Celebrities' children aren't allowed on television these days, and parents watching their own children's programmes isn't new either, so somebody had turned the thought around and looked at the siblings instead, to see whether anything interesting came of it. Li Jingyu was one of the guests.

He'd done reasonably well since his debut. The year before he'd taken the second male lead in a costume idol drama. The production had wanted him for his following and had meant to give him the lead, and then somebody else cut in and he ended up second. It was his first drama and he didn't want a fight over it, so second was fine. Mostly he didn't think much of the lead's character anyway. Rudeness dressed up as being masterful, sugar shoved at the audience every other scene, and the same moves people had been mocking for years.

The second lead was the gentle, well-mannered sort. Feelings for the heroine, all of them kept inside the bounds of propriety, and with everyone else he was courteous on the surface and cold underneath. Li Jingyu thought that was a far better part than the lead's. It also didn't need especially good acting. The lead was the harder job, and a step wrong in either direction and you joined the ranks of the smarmy.

Once he'd signed he worked at the script properly. His acting certainly wasn't good, given he'd had less than a year of classes at school, so he was nervous the whole time. After he'd been through the script he watched a pile of dramas with similar characters in them and took a lot of notes.

On set he still had no idea how he was doing, because in his view the director called OK on performances from the lead that were painful to watch, so good or bad meant nothing. His own standard was simple. When he watched the playback, it shouldn't make his skin crawl.

All he hoped, once filming finished, was that he wouldn't get torn apart when it aired.

There wasn't much he could do about it. It wasn't that he didn't want good scripts. He knew what he was, and what he was, in everybody's mouth, was a pretty face with a following, one step short of wearing "can't act" on his forehead. The serious productions weren't going to call him. Idol dramas were all he could get until he made the change and proved he could act.

Being an idol forever was no plan for a life. The agency wanted him moving into television, and this drama was the start of it.

When it aired he watched a few episodes and found that no, his acting wasn't good, but somehow he was the best actor in the thing. The two leads got a lot of stick for stiff performances and for a plot that force-fed the audience romance, and his second lead picked up a good deal of praise instead. His fans cut his scenes out into clips, and with a filter and some music over them the effect was surprisingly good. He looked well in the costumes, too, and gained a fair number of casual fans off it.

Not being laughed at by the whole internet on his first drama was enough for him. Seeing that the first one hadn't crashed, the agency's confidence shot up and they got him a second costume idol drama. Nobody cut in for the part this time and he played the lead without trouble. The feedback on the first hadn't been bad, but he didn't relax on the second. Honestly, he'd lasted two minutes watching his own scenes in the first drama before he had to stop. His fans thought he was stunning. Li Cheng, in private, laughed at him for a solid hour.

So on the second drama, when he wasn't shooting, he was either reading the script or asking the older actors how to play something. He couldn't go and sit in a classroom, so asking people was all he had. He used the study methods Li Lan had taught him years ago on it as well, and he told the director to stop him whenever he was bad. He must have had some talent for it, because the longer he shot the better he felt, and by the later stages the director was stopping him far less than before.

That drama had finished filming two months earlier and was in post-production, so it would be out soon. His manager's view was that he had no regular variety show at the moment, and this one was a good chance to be seen, and to plug the new drama while he was at it.

Li Jingyu talked it over with Li Cheng and they both said yes. Filming for the first episode started a fortnight later, at the old house in Beiguan.

Chen Ying and Li Quan were beside themselves once they knew a programme was being filmed in the house. New clothes, haircuts, and then the whole place cleaned from end to end. Li Cheng and Li Jingyu got a shock walking in. The last time it had been that tidy was probably the week they moved in.

Chen Ying got even stiffer once the recording started, and Li Quan simply dodged the camera wherever he went. In the end Li Cheng talked to her mother. "Mum, they're filming several episodes here. If you keep being this awkward, you might not suffer but I will."

Chen Ying couldn't help herself and whacked her daughter hard on the back. "Talking rubbish. When was I awkward?"

The crew also said they wouldn't be airing everything, since the two of them were the point of it.

Nothing much happened the first evening. The next day Li Jingyu and Li Cheng took the crew to the primary school they'd both been to, and spent the walk remembering things and making fun of each other, which gave the programme plenty of laughs. One thing did puzzle the crew. Every so often the pair mentioned somebody called Li Lan, and when they asked, it turned out there was an older sister above the two of them. Hearing that she was at work and had no time to come back, the crew assumed she was an ordinary person and left it there.

The second day, after a while at home, Chen Ying and Li Quan got ready to go out and work the fields, and the crew sent Li Cheng and Li Jingyu along too. They got a surprising amount of good footage out of it, especially Li Jingyu driving the tractor to haul onions under Li Quan's direction, since he couldn't drive it and flattened a fair number of onions on the way. Li Cheng enjoyed every second of it and reported him to their father besides. The cameraman watched Li Jingyu driving a tractor in his fashionable clothes, white trainers included, which by then were a mess of mud and water, and watched him take his father's instructions with a guilty look on his face, and felt deeply satisfied. Where was the man who filled a stage two metres in every direction? This was blood pulling rank.

Two days of shooting gave them roughly enough for the first episode. Besides Li Cheng and Li Jingyu there were three other pairs, and each pair would get twenty or thirty minutes, so two days' material was about right.

Variety shooting moves fast. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were the fixed filming days, and a fortnight later, on the first Saturday in August, the first episode of Brothers and Sisters went up.

The format was new enough to win a lot of people over. Besides Li Cheng and Li Jingyu, one of the other pairs was two sisters, the elder a popular young actress, and the first episode showed what it's like to have a sister who likes the same things you do. Eating, drinking, the occasional squabble. Another pair was a brother and sister, the brother a talent-show idol like Li Jingyu, with a big gap in age between them and the sister still at primary school, which fitted the current fashion for doting older brothers. That one was skating close to the line, but the sister didn't count as a celebrity's child, so it wasn't much of a problem, and the two of them drew plenty of fans. The last pair was two brothers, the younger a variety performer, and their first episode of clumsy joint cooking was good for a lot of laughs.

The first episode did very well, and Li Jingyu's fans in particular chose to enjoy his humiliation exactly as much as Li Cheng had. Somebody put a photo of him on stage next to a photo of him on the tractor, and the contrast spoke for itself.

The second episode came round fast, and it brought Li Jingyu the biggest challenge of his life. The family supermarket had opened in August, so every summer they ran a promotion, the kind with a stage built for it. This year, egged on by the crew, Chen Ying actually made Li Jingyu and Li Cheng get up and perform.

She'd had no such idea to begin with. The crew talked her into it in about a minute. They were sly about it, too. They knew that if they asked the pair themselves they'd be refused, so they went to Chen Ying instead.

So the cameraman got to watch Li Jingyu sing and dance in front of a crowd of baffled village aunties and uncles, with Li Cheng beside him throwing flower petals as a special effect, and he laughed hard enough to shake the camera several times. Every angle and every camera recorded Li Jingyu's very professional performance. He wasn't without support, either. It was the summer holidays and a lot of students were home, and plenty of the girls at the front of the shop were his fans, so there was a decent amount of screaming when he finished. The aunties and uncles didn't understand it, but they smiled and clapped anyway.

When the second episode aired it did what the crew had predicted and pushed the view count up another level. During the village stage performance the comment stream was nothing but rows of hahahaha, and some fans, enjoying the trouble, said there was no shame in selling your own family's goods.

The third shoot fell on Qixi. Before it started Li Jingyu rang to say his sister's birthday was in a couple of days, and if she ended up on camera he'd like her face blurred. The crew heard a small request and agreed without thinking about it.

He rang because Li Lan had told the family group she'd be home shortly. She loves her work, but she takes a trip or two every year, and that summer, having given her research group its usual break, she went travelling on her own. She'd meant to take Chen Ying and Li Quan with her, only the two of them said they'd rather be on television and the travelling could wait, so she went alone and got back just before her birthday.

The day before the shoot, the crew came round early to set up the cameras. Somebody knocked, and the door was opened by a girl none of them knew who looked oddly familiar. Seeing the cameras on their shoulders, she understood at once. "You're from the programme? Come in."

They came in smiling, with no idea who she was, and from the kitchen Chen Ying called out, "Lanlan, go down and bring up some more fruit. The crew will be here soon."

Li Lan went to the kitchen. "They're already here. I'll go down for it."

Chen Ying came out at that. "Goodness, you're early today. Sit down, sit down. Jingyu and Chengcheng have gone down for the vegetables, they'll be up in a minute."

The crew made the usual noises and started setting up the cameras. Then one of them, who spent his life on Bilibili, thought about what Chen Ying had just called her and worked out why the woman had looked familiar, and got out his phone and searched. His eyes went wide at the results, and he carried the phone over to the cameraman and dropped his voice. "Boss. I think that was Li Lan."

The cameraman didn't follow. "Li Lan? Which Li Lan?"

He held the search results up in front of him and spoke fast and quietly. "That Li Lan. The hydroxy insulin researcher. Cerulean's boss. The youngest professor at Peking University."

The cameraman looked. The photo on the phone was the woman who'd just opened the door for them. He knew who Li Lan was, because his father used to be diabetic. Used to be, since he'd been given hydroxy insulin and was cured. When he heard his father was well again he'd thanked Cerulean's researchers from the bottom of his heart, and now here he was running into her in somebody's front room.

"Are you sure?" He was startled and delighted, and got there straight away. If it was true, this episode was going to blow up.

He picked up the camera. "Come on. Let's ask Auntie Chen."

In the kitchen, asked about it, Chen Ying said proudly, "I don't know what this hydroxy insulin of yours is, but my daughter is a professor at Peking University, yes. She's got some company as well, I think. When Lanlan was doing her doctorate a few years back, two of them came to see her off. Something with a lan in it."

Chen Ying and Li Quan didn't know much about their daughter's work. To this day she had no clear idea what Li Lan actually did, only that it was to do with researching medicines and that it was impressive.

That was because Li Lan never volunteered it. You can't tell everybody you meet that you invented hydroxy insulin. Li Cheng and Li Jingyu only learned that she'd developed it from that video, and Li Jingyu only found out then that Cerulean's largest shareholder was his sister, which explained why the talks about endorsing Cerulean's products had gone so smoothly.

It hadn't occurred to the crew that the Lanlan the family mentioned all the time was this large an easter egg. Thinking back, in the first episode Chen Ying had shown them family photos and said the eldest was called Li Lan, with a lot of pride in her voice, only there are a great many people with the same name, and their attention had all been on Li Cheng and Li Jingyu, and they'd assumed she was an ordinary person and been too polite to ask.

The cameraman could have kicked himself for not asking one more question at the time. It wasn't too late, though. At least they hadn't found out after the show ended, and the story was theirs now. Then he remembered Li Jingyu's phone call about blurring her face a few days earlier, which must have been fear of her turning up in the programme. He didn't understand it. What a chance to waste. Once he had what he wanted he stepped aside and rang the director, since the director could be the one to talk to Li Jingyu.

The director didn't believe his ears either, then saw the opportunity and rang Li Jingyu at once.

Just then the three of them came back up with the food, one after another. Li Jingyu heard what the director wanted and refused flat, mostly because he was afraid of how it would affect his sister. They went round it for half an hour and he wouldn't give an inch, so the director gave up and messaged the cameraman to think of something, ideally to talk Li Lan into it.

The cameraman thought about it, saw the three of them sitting on the sofa talking, and walked over. Li Jingyu saw him coming and knew what he was there for, and after half an hour of arguing with the director he was already out of patience, so his tone was sharp. "Did the director send you? I've said no. Give it up."

The cameraman didn't take offence, since the crew were in the wrong to begin with. Li Cheng saw her brother's temper and asked, "What's going on?"

He told her, and she was about to refuse as well, and then Li Lan said, "It's fine, don't blur it."

She looked at their confused faces. She hadn't known they'd asked the crew for any such thing, so she explained. "Did you think I was hiding it on purpose? I wasn't. When that video went up I assumed he'd know one of you was my brother and one was my sister, and nobody's worked it out even now. And I don't think it can stay quiet much longer anyway. Relatives, friends, people we were at school with, they all know. I've no idea why none of them has said anything. Since it's going to come out sooner or later, we may as well get some use out of it. It's good for your programme."

She meant it. When that blogger posted his video she'd expected him to mention Li Jingyu and Li Cheng in it, and their names never came up. Fine, then, they didn't come up. But there were still all the people who knew the three of them. Li Jingyu was much younger and had never been at school with them, but she and Li Cheng had been at school together since they were small, and she genuinely couldn't work out why nothing had ever surfaced online.

In fact it had. Somebody had said so on Weibo and nobody paid any attention, and as time passed and the interest in Li Lan died down, fewer people said anything at all, so by pure accident it had gone unnoticed until now. It couldn't hold for long, though. Chen Ying's old short videos alone had plenty of the three of them in frame, and now that the programme was airing, some of Li Jingyu's fans were following her too, because she posted videos of him whenever he was home, and a bit of scrolling back would turn up Li Lan.

Li Jingyu and Li Cheng were left blinking. So they'd been flattering themselves? Li Lan gave them a sidelong look of contempt. "One of you's a star and the other's a big name online, and neither of you thought of that. What a chance to hype yourselves with."

They nearly choked on it. We were being this careful for your sake, and we get looked down on for it.

Li Jingyu held on to the last of his pride. "I don't hype myself."

Li Cheng lifted her chin too. "Nor me."

And then that evening she sidled up to her sister, ready to ride on her fame openly from now on. "So in future, when I ask you to film a video with me, you can't say no."

Li Lan pushed her head away. "No time."

The cameraman was very happy indeed. Thinking about it, she was right. Even if they blurred her and kept it quiet for now, there were a lot of people on the crew, and Li Jingyu couldn't seal every mouth among them. Better to put it in the programme and get a wave of interest out of it.

Everybody was satisfied. Only Li Jingyu and Li Cheng were hurt.

The director heard from the cameraman and punched the air. If he'd known, he'd have sent him in from the start. What had half an hour of wrangling with Li Jingyu been for?

With that settled, the episode's stars became the three of them, and Li Jingyu went from being scorned by Li Cheng alone to being sat on by Li Lan and Li Cheng together. The Qixi shoot happened to fall on the day his new drama came out, so after Li Lan's birthday the whole family gathered in front of the television to watch the first drama he'd led. He sat there cringing hard enough to claw a hole through the floor, and the two of them would not let him leave. They held him there and made him watch his own drama, and they picked it apart the whole way through.

Before the episode aired, the crew blurred Li Lan in the trailer, and used their editing skills to make everyone who watched it think something was going on. Watching the blurred woman being that affectionate with Li Jingyu, his fans nearly burst. They knew it was an editing trick and it didn't help. Editing is editing, but you can't fake the way somebody moves, and look at the doting (respectful) look in his eyes. His fans cursed the crew ten thousand times over in their heads, and couldn't help making sour guesses at who she was, and in that state of anxious waiting, the new episode finally went up.

His fans opened the video the second it appeared, wanting to see which little witch had earned this special treatment. They skipped past the first pair and got to his section, and by the end all that righteous fury had turned into blank faces. One of the big fan accounts posted: What a magical world.

The fan groups for both of them had already gone up in flames.

I was ready to swear myself hoarse telling that woman to keep away from Little Fish. Thank goodness I didn't. This is the highest goddess in my heart!

What kind of magical combination is this? When the thing about Little Fish and Big Orange came out I could follow that. How have we got to a research heavyweight now?

I heard the agency wanted to give Little Fish a brainy-student image, since he passed the university exam after all those years as a trainee, and he refused point blank and kept saying he was a terrible student. No wonder he said that. Never mind Big Orange. In front of this woman, who'd dare say they weren't a terrible student?

I said Li Lan's photo looked familiar. Now I look at them, their clothes and styling are nothing alike, but you can see they're half the same face. How did nobody spot it?

People probably spotted it and didn't dare say. Plenty of people look alike, and the two of them are in such different worlds that saying it would get you laughed at.

No wonder Orange is the only one who keeps getting Cerulean adverts. People said she was Cerulean's favourite daughter. Favourite daughter nothing, she's the boss's sister.

Li Jingyu too. He's one of the faces for Cerulean's products now, isn't he, and he isn't really big enough to qualify.

Their section took up nearly half the episode. The other pairs had opinions about that and all quietly kept them to themselves, because with news that size they'd have done the same, and look at how the episode had gone. The episode was top of the trending list, and the director was beaming.

Everyone who watched it was stunned by how the three of them were related, and started looking things up online, and once they did, the traces had been there all along. One of Li Cheng's videos had been filmed at Cambridge. Another mentioned that her sister had grown roses in high school and made rose hydrosol at home. Li Jingyu had said in an interview that the person he admired most was his sister, and everybody had assumed he meant Li Cheng, and at the time some fans couldn't make it add up, because Li Cheng was impressive but surely not enough for that much reverence. Now it was clear he'd meant Li Lan.

Somebody even managed to dig up the interview Li Lan gave after winning the Olympiad years ago. The two children in it were young and unformed, but one look and you could see they were Li Cheng and Li Jingyu as kids.

Just as everyone was looking forward to the next episode, the crew announced with regret that Li Lan's appearance had been an accident, and that after filming she'd stayed home a few days and then gone to Cerulean Pharmaceuticals. It would be Li Cheng and Li Jingyu again from now on. The audience could only sigh.

After that Li Lan went back to being out of the public eye as before, at most showing her face in one of Li Cheng's videos. Li Cheng and Li Jingyu rarely brought her up in public either, mainly because they didn't know what she was researching, only that she was busy every day. Then in 2022 a piece of news put her back in front of everyone.

Just after the 2022 Spring Festival, Peking University's official site announced that Professor Li Lan and her team had, after four years of work, found a targeted drug for lung cancer, and that a cure for lung cancer could be expected within two years. The news shook everybody. It spread faster than the announcement that hydroxy insulin could cure diabetes, and it hit harder.

Because cancer brings people nothing but despair. A miracle is called a miracle because it doesn't happen over and over, and most people facing cancer have nothing they can do. Yes, as science advances there will be a day when cancer can be cured, but nobody knows when that day arrives.

And now somebody was telling them lung cancer had been beaten, and that they could hope to be cured.

Everyone went hunting for information. Li Cheng and Li Jingyu were met with smiles wherever they went, and even though they kept saying they didn't know much themselves, it made no difference. Strangers warmed to them at a rate neither of them had earned, all because of their sister.

Li Lan gave an interview to the state broadcaster around then, which rescued the pair from all that enthusiasm. It was a formal interview and she answered the questions everyone was curious about. Asked when the drug would be on the market, she looked into the camera and said within three years. A great many people living with the illness cried at that. Since their diagnosis it was the first light they'd seen in all that darkness.

In mid-October the Nobel lists came out, and there on the list for medicine was Li Lan's name. As the second Chinese person to win the Nobel Prize in medicine, she also broke the record set by Frederick Banting, who won in 1923 at thirty-two, and became the youngest winner of the prize.

The domestic press wasn't surprised. In the year hydroxy insulin launched there had already been people saying she deserved to be in the running, and the reason she hadn't won was that she was too young. Now she'd proved herself again, and stood on the Nobel stage in a way nobody could argue with.

The year after the Nobel she became the youngest academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her research didn't stop there. It kept going. First she crossed fields and spent three years producing a drug for Alzheimer's, then kept changing direction, and within ten years had developed no fewer than five drugs for difficult diseases, liver cancer and kidney cancer among them, and cured a great many people.

Because of that, Cerulean became one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world on the strength of one person, and she went to the top of the global list of the richest women, worth eighty billion dollars. As somebody who had truly started with nothing, Li Lan became a legend in a great many minds.

At forty-five she won the Nobel Prize in medicine for the third time, the most of any woman, and the same year she received the Medal of the Republic, the highest honour there is. At the ceremony she took the medal and looked out at the people sitting below. Chen Ying and Li Quan were near the front, close to eighty now, and Li Cheng and Li Jingyu were further back. Li Lan broke into an enormous smile, and a camera caught the moment exactly. The photograph of her smiling ran on the front pages, and people called it the most beautiful smile.