Review of Love’s Ambition / 许我耀眼

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

My fun fact is that I got into Asian dramas all the way back in 2013. I was in middle school and had decided to take Mandarin Chinese as my language of choice, as for some reason my middle school offered it, and that was where I was exposed to East Asian culture for the first time. It was on DramaFever (RIP, even though they stole my money a month before they shut down for an annual subscription) and it was The Heirs.

Ever since then I almost minored in Mandarin in college, lived in Korea twice on competitive scholarships to study the language, and even did my master’s thesis on colonial Korean women’s literature. A lot of what I’ve covered on this blog has been pan-Asian diaspora literature, film, and television shows, which has been a wild ride of learning more throughout my journey of life.

However, I’ve always found Chinese dramas difficult to get into. I like Korean ones because I use them the most for language study, as spoken Korean is always so hard for me, and Japanese shows tend to be shorter and more of my speed because of how they cut out the filler. The Chinese shows are always so long, which has been a key reason why I find them harder to get into.

But when I get into a Chinese show, I really get into it. This time I was starting Love’s Ambition on Viki and found myself hooked on it. It was still when episodes were trickling out by release date, so I was eagerly waiting each week to find out what happened next.

And I watched all of it without getting bored! Let’s get into the review before I start rambling though, as I can see this introduction is getting a little long.

A girl from the Chinese countryside looks to start over with a new identity, but when she marries into a wealthy family, her lies start falling apart.

Our main character in this series is Xu Yan, which isn’t her real name, but it’s something of a persona she’s now built her life around. Despite living in the city now and having a successful career as a broadcaster, her life didn’t always look like this. Compared to her sister, she was mistreated by her parents, with them even forgetting her birthday and leaving her alone.

The only person that she felt really cared for her was her grandmother, and we see throughout the series that Xu Yan’s grandmother is someone she deeply cares about in return. But when Xu Yan grows up and becomes independent, she leaves her family behind and changes her name, forging a new path where she hides completely where she came from.

It’s through her lies and conniving (in that sense) that she lands Shen Haoming, someone who was born and raised in the city and considered a part of the local elite. He comes from money and the exact opposite kind of world compared to Xu Yan. However, he falls in love with her not knowing where exactly she came from, or that she’s not been truthful about who she is.

There are people who want Xu Yan to fail, and when they start digging into her past they uncover things she has been wanting to hide this entire time. Xu Yan and Shen Haoming do end up marrying and his influence helps her career further. But things start to unravel when her sister shows up from the countryside looking to connect with her sister, forcing Xu Yan to realize some important things about her life and marriage.

For the first part of the show, a good chunk of it are these characters dancing around the fact that not everything is what it seems. Despite how she got to where she is today, I can’t help but to feel for Xu Yan in the sense that she was a broken girl who wanted to create something new for herself. She deserved nice things, but she should have come clean to Haoming before this moment.

She’s also a talented businesswoman and salesperson, which is something else we see in the series. Haoming doesn’t really deserve her after a certain point, as he treats her poorly over certain circumstances, but we do see how he is quite smitten with her even when he denies it.

Overall Thoughts

As I mentioned before, I was hooked on this drama. Up until around the 23rd episode or so I found myself wanting more and more from this show, and although I began to fall off of the high from it towards the end, I felt like this was such a unique show. Granted, I haven’t watched a ton of Chinese shows, but I felt like that this was a show that felt unique compared to other mainland shows I’ve seen recently.

Both of the leads do a great job in this complicated dance I described earlier as well. I wasn’t impressed with what I last watched Zhao Lusi in, but I felt like she’s grown as an actress since and did a great job in this role. I would watch something with her in the future, as well as the male lead’s actor.

All in all, I recommend this show if you haven’t seen it already! It’s pretty solid and I finished it slowly because of the episode releases, but I think normally it would take two or three weeks to get throughe ach episode at a healthy pace. Go watch it if you have some free time and want a show that keeps you on the edge.

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