Teacher Bei is a buxom, depressive, sixty-three-year-old retired elementary school teacher, who lives in a prefabricated apartment in the east side of Beijing. I call her "Teacher Bei," instead of "Aunt Bei" as Chinese normally call somebody her age, because of what a friend who introduced us warned me before our visit. It was very important, he said, to make her feel she belonged to the educated class and was somebody with culture. Teacher Bei was so pleased by our visit and got to talking so much that she skipped her nap and made a big pot of tea. She gave us a delicious lunch in her spotless, drab living room, but she herself only nibbled. "I haven't had such a good time since 'Yearning,'" she admitted. She says she has always been depressed. She has a history of breakdowns--the first one when she was twenty-five and married off against her will--and maybe this is why she always finds the gloom of Beijing's harsh winters so difficult. Last year, though, she didn't mind the winter because "Yearning" was on television just about every night. Two stations were showing it on different evenings, and she watched them both. "A good show gets better the second time," she says. She would shop, clean, wash, cook and do what she could for a household of two, which was not that much at all, and get ready for the evening. She has two sons, both married, living away. They only drop by once in a while. "They are good children, as filial and respectful as anybody's, but they're always busy and have their own families to worry about now," Teacher Bei tells me stoically, not wanting to complain about what is obvious in her old age: the boredom, the emptiness, the marriage which never would have lasted except for the children. Her husband, Old Tang, is a railway engineer, half deaf from an accident, but still working part-time. They have long lived in separate rooms; nowadays they hardly talk to each other. But in the months when "Yearning" was on, their household was almost conjugal. Every evening at six-thirty, Old Tang would arrive from work and find dinner ready on a tray and his wife settled in a puffy lounge chair in front of the television, ready for "Yearning." He would join her, sitting doggedly through the show, his eyes fixed on the screen even though half of the dialogue was lost on him. "It was bliss," Teacher Bei admits, sounding wistful, "Why can't they make a show like that more often? I guess it must be hard to come up with a story so complicated and gripping."

"Yearning" is a fifty part Chinese television serial, in a genre that the Chinese television people call "in-door drama" because it is mostly shot with studio-made in-door scenes. Literally, the Chinese title for "Yearning," Kewang, means "a desire like thirst." Desire is a central theme of the show which covers the years of the Cultural Revolution and the 1980s reform in the life of two Beijing families.

Click here to order a copy from the author.