Chapter 192

After the smash-hit show “Retracing the Path of Poverty Alleviation” on J Province TV Station cooled off, all the local stations, seeing that the popularity of this genre had already passed its peak, wasted no time axing similar variety programs and started jumping on the bandwagon with “Housewives Leaving Home.”

But who could have guessed that just as everyone gave up on poverty alleviation programs, with a thunderous crack, Y Province TV Station decided to overhaul one of its long-running but nearly obsolete variety shows that had been airing for almost a decade. They would make it a spin-off —and even gave it a bold new name: “The Rebirth of Housewives.”

When Guagua Video saw that the new show was being filed for approval, they probably felt a stab in their hearts. They would have loved to run with such a great spin-off idea themselves!

In truth, ever since Huihui divorced with her children and joined their entrepreneurial team, Wei Sheng had wanted to plan a show with divorced women starting businesses with their kids. But at the time, he was caught up with endless paperwork for the pharmaceutical factory and hadn’t gotten around to it.

Not long ago, Yuanxi Biotech held the groundbreaking ceremony for its new plant in the outskirts of Nine Streams County. Over the meal and casual chat, TV Station Director Yang was also present, and Wei Sheng mentioned the idea to him in passing. Who knew Director Yang would be so efficient, getting back to him soon with good news—

Though the approval process for new shows is usually complicated, they came up with a shortcut: revamping an outdated variety show from the station with a complete overhaul!

As for the direction of the revamp, of course, they wanted “Teacher Wei’s guidance.”

It wasn’t their first time working together, and there was mutual understanding. Wei Sheng gave Director Yang full respect—not only did he agree readily to help plan the show, he even had Yuanxi Biotech invest ten million in advertising for it.

At first glance, “The Rebirth of Housewives” sounded a bit like the melodramatic family soap “The Temptation to Go Home.” When it came time to settle on this new title, there was a heated debate within the station, but in the end, wasn’t it still Teacher Wei who convinced everyone?

Wei Sheng’s take was: the more melodramatic, the better! Don’t overestimate your audience—at heart, people are just nosy. The more over-the-top the title, the greater the urge to click and watch.

How does that saying go? In the dead of night, even if my eyelids are drooping, you start telling me juicy gossip and suddenly I’m wide awake!

We’re all curious by nature, so why pretend otherwise? Who really wouldn’t stick their head out the window if they heard their neighbors involved in a cheating scandal right next door? Not only would you peek, you’d probably film a short clip and post it to your friend circle, too.

As unrefined as Wei Sheng’s reasoning might sound, it made way too much sense! The station leadership glanced at each other, unwilling to admit they too were just regular folks, but compared with other names proposed by the planning team—like “Her Power on the Alleviation Road” or “Poverty Alleviation Warriors: Our Women in Action”—none carried the irresistible appeal of “The Rebirth of Housewives.”

However, what truly floored the Y Province TV Station leadership was that rascal Wei Sheng! He lured in the gossip-hungry audience with a title holding all the melodramatic, eight o’clock soap flavor, only to deliver a program filled with empowering, uplifting stories of women overcoming adversity.

Aren’t those trolls always yelling for “Housewives Leaving Home” to be banned, accusing the show of “stoking gender conflicts” and “breaking up families”? They even parade around those housewives who divorced after being on the show, pretending to “sympathize” online: “They’re divorced with no job, some even raising kids alone—how will they survive? This show is just ruining lives!”

Oh, absolutely! Wei Sheng also thinks these trolls have a point. We can’t just break up families, we must help these women who left home to find new direction in their work and lives.

To put it bluntly, who says a divorced woman can’t remarry? So many women trapped in unhappy marriages or relationships are stuck only because they’ve boxed themselves in, thinking there’s only this one man before them.

When actually, the world’s a big place—there are so many men out there!

If this one doesn’t work, why not pick someone better suited?

If you insist on tying yourself to someone who isn’t right for you, neither side finds happiness. Often it’s best to part ways and let everyone find their own joy.

Just so happens that, due to the broader economic downturn of the past years, Y Province has several impoverished townships like Yuan Stream Township, where the lack of follow-up support has led to signs of poverty slipping back in. If these places that finally shook off poverty end up sliding back, not only would the provincial leaders lose face, it would hurt the local people, too.

So, Wei Sheng proposed combining the two themes—recruiting a group of housewives, like Huihui, who had divorced after participating in “Housewives Leaving Home,” and involving them in Y Province’s projects for poverty alleviation and agricultural support.

That way, the program could promote Y Province’s poverty alleviation work and, at the same time, secure jobs for those stay-at-home moms struggling to find work after divorce, allowing them to realize their value in society and earn a living for themselves and their children.

It was a flawless way to slap those trolls in the face—left, right, one after the other!

Didn’t you say these stay-at-home moms have been out of the workforce for years, and that the program was forcing them into a corner by encouraging divorce—left to struggle alone with children and no job prospects?

What a joke! Do you really think these ladies, if they didn’t have kids holding them back, wouldn’t leave you miles behind in the workplace?

The program Y Province TV Station picked for revamp this time was an emotional talk show that had run for nine years. When it was first launched, it was a time of rapid economic growth and soaring divorce rates in China.

Back then, the show’s original aim was to use dialogue and interviews to get couples on the brink of divorce to recall the happiness when they first held hands, hoping to save these marriages teetering on the edge.

Back when this show first aired, its ratings soared to astonishing heights. Countless housewives facing similar crises tuned in with real, heartfelt emotion, moved to tears by the reunions of estranged couples, and hurling insults at those scummy men willing to throw away their wives for a mistress!

You could say it was a smash hit that never lacked for buzz or heated discussion, holding the crown as the flagship show of Y Province TV Station for several consecutive years.

But in recent years, emotional shows like this, which always push for reconciliation over separation, seemed to have suddenly lost their audience.

It even reached the point where well-meaning netizens took clips of the hosts and “peacemakers” desperately trying to persuade couples not to divorce, remixed them into parodies, and uploaded them online for ridicule.

For a moment, this brought a burst of renewed attention to the show, but most of the online discussion was overwhelmingly negative.

Take, for example, one particular episode. The wife was a well-known local fitness coach. After marrying, she planned to return to work once their child turned three and started kindergarten. With her flexible schedule, she could look after the child and still pursue her career. By all rights, her husband should have supported this.

But this scheming man deliberately got her pregnant again soon after.

Given their modest means, the woman wasn’t keen on having another child, worried that both the younger and older child would have to endure a reduced quality of life.

But her mother-in-law promised that once the baby was born, she would take over. The daughter-in-law only needed to nurse the baby, then return to work so both parents could earn money, easing their financial burden.

Unexpectedly, right after the second child’s first month, the mother-in-law packed her bags and left!

The husband only complained that his mother had it hard and his father wasn’t in good health. Since their older daughter was in kindergarten and didn’t need tending, looking after just the younger son wouldn’t be too much pressure for his wife.

In the end, it was all just an excuse to keep her from going back to work.

The woman wasn’t stupid. It didn’t take much for her to figure out what her husband was really thinking.

Ultimately, he feared that her job at the gym—her looks, her figure, the exposure to wealthy men—would tempt her into cheating on him.

But if she really wanted to have an affair, did he think she’d need a job at the gym for that? Her phonebook was filled with hundreds of friends, wealthy women and rich men alike. Yet she willingly chose to stick it out with him through tough times, while he never trusted her for even a single day!

With her heart completely broken, the woman insisted on divorce. Even if it meant leaving with nothing but the two kids, she refused to spend a lifetime with such a paranoid man.

By this point, viewers’ fists were clenched with rage, and yet the production team, determined to “stick to their principles,” kept stubbornly trying to talk her out of divorce.

If they weren’t urging her to “think of the children and maintain a complete family,” they were brushing things off with lines like, “Once men get older, things will improve.”

What a joke! She already finds this man insufferable while he’s still young and decent-looking. Wait until he’s old, bald, and stinking of age—by then, just thinking about him might be enough to make her sick. What kind of happiness would she have left?

Under siege from her husband’s family and the program’s “mediators,” the woman was finally pushed to the edge, hysterically screaming and threatening to jump from the ninth floor if her husband refused to grant her a divorce.

Even then, her husband had the gall to say, “Even if you die, you’ll be our family’s ghost. Dead or alive, you’ll be buried with me…”

At that point, not just the women viewers, but even the more clear-headed male viewers felt utterly suffocated.

They honestly couldn’t understand: what was the point of a show that was this toxic? Did they really intend to push all these unlucky stay-at-home moms to the edge?

Even without Wei Sheng’s creative input, this family mediation show called “Family Harmony, All Is Well” would have been hounded off the air by netizens sooner or later.

But now, these soon-to-be-unemployed production staff finally saw a ray of hope for reemployment!

Heaven knows! Did they really think they could turn a blind eye to all the criticism from netizens? If it weren’t for making a living, who on earth would want to do such a shameless job—always urging couples to stay together, no matter what?

A few years ago, you could say it was for the women’s good. Back then, most housewives really did have a hard time finding work after leaving their husbands, and even if they managed, life was far from what it had been. Urging reconciliation, in those days, was sometimes genuinely for their benefit.

At the time, too, many stay-at-home moms actively reached out to the production team for help in winning back wayward husbands and broken marriages.

But now, things have changed. Many women are educated and have careers before marriage, and even those who divorce with kids can often pick up their careers again and live just as well, if not better, than they did during marriage.

Take the fitness coach from before: she almost lost her life fighting for a divorce. But after it was finalized, she not only returned to her career, she partnered with others to open a private training studio.

The kind of people who can afford private fitness sessions are all affluent, and within a few years, word was that a powerful investor supported her to open a postnatal recovery center for new mothers.

Her fortunes were clearly aligned: in those years, the country relaxed its two-child policy, and the demand for such recovery centers exploded. In just a short few years, she made more money than her ex-husband could ever dream of earning in two lifetimes.

This hit the production crew hard. Even though they still needed the job to get by, they no longer wanted to suppress their consciences and keep forcing unhappy couples to make up.

Luckily, the God of Wealth came to their rescue!

Wei Sheng had actually been worried at first that the original crew wouldn’t be able to adapt to the new format after relaunch. Unexpectedly, they were even more desperate than him to bury the old version of the show.

Looks like those old mediators and peacemakers have no place in this era anymore.

So, exactly one year after leaving the poverty alleviation variety show, Wei Sheng returned to his familiar battleground with a brand-new, revamped program.

Other TV Stations: “…”

Wait a minute! Weren’t poverty alleviation shows already out of fashion?

(End of this chapter)

#### Translator’s Notes

• groundbreaking ceremony: A ceremony or event held to mark the beginning of construction for a new building or project.

• The Temptation to Go Home: A famously over-the-top 2011 Chinese TV drama whose Chinese title 回家的诱惑 (literally ‘The Temptation of Coming Home’) became shorthand for sensationalist, late-night soap-opera fare.

• eight o’clock soap: Refers to the prime-time family melodramas broadcast at 8 p.m. on China’s major provincial channels, known for exaggerated plots and cliff-hangers.