Series re-creates nostalgia for 1990s Beijing

At 72, Zheng Xiaolong, one of the most celebrated directors in Chinese television, still finds himself longing for the 1990s — a golden era when domestic TV brimmed with creative energy and possibilities.

"That was when my career took off," he says, seated in a cinema in downtown Beijing, his voice tinged with memory.

"We talked about freeing our minds, about looking ahead and daring to take risks. It felt like anything was possible, like the future would surely be bright," he recalls. "That sense of hope was tangible. Everyone was pushing forward, chasing their own ideals and dreams. Even relationships between people felt warmer."

In 1993, Zheng made his directorial debut, codirecting with Feng Xiaogang the television series A Native of Beijing in New York, a popular drama depicting the struggle of a cellist, portrayed by actor Jiang Wen, as an immigrant in the United States. It became a sensation, capturing the raw curiosity and complicated longing many Chinese felt toward the West in the early 1990s.

Since then, Zheng has embarked on a prolific creative journey, studded with both acclaim and awards, ascending to the peak with a steady output of phenomenal hits — TV series from Gold Marriage (2007) to Empresses in the Palace (2011) and Red Sorghum (2014), adapted from Nobel laureate Mo Yan's novel of the same name.

For Zheng, the period of the 1990s was more than a professional breakthrough; it was also a state of mind — one he has often thought of, and recently revisited in the TV drama Live Up to Your Youth, co-written by scriptwriters Gao Mantang and Li Zhou.

Concluding its first run on China Central Television's CCTV-8 TV drama channel earlier this month, the 32-episode series gained a strong following, with its ratings continuing to grow since its premiere in late March. It has shattered multiple records, including being watched by 5 percent of the population across 71 cities, in a survey conducted by the industry information tracker CSM Media Research.

In addition, topics related to the series have been viewed over 3.15 billion times on Weibo and Douyin, two major social platforms, according to the producers.

Beginning in 1994, the drama opens with a scene of fishing boats dotting a vast blue sea off the coast of Yantai in Shandong province. Xu Shengli, a 20-something worker played by actor Bai Yu, joins his fellow workers at a local state-owned seafood processing factory to load frozen fish into plastic boxes. Despite the hard daily grind, the young man, ambitiously nurturing a writer's dream, uses whatever break time he can find to pen tales, even on a floating ship.

However, when his literary passion meets humiliation from his superior, Xu angrily quits the job — a brave decision at the time, as most people regarded a position in a state-owned company as a stable guarantee of livelihood. With meager savings, he heads to Beijing and moves into a small hotel nestled deep in a hutong (alleyway), paying six yuan (88 cents) a night for a basement room he shares with three other men, each striving for their own artistic dreams. Among them are a painter who earns a living by painting roofs, a musician who plays the saxophone on the street, and an actor who takes on odd jobs, such as cleaning range hoods and unclogging drains, to help make ends meet.