Ru Yi: The drama that brought Hawick Lau and Yang Mi together

I'm sure many of you have heard the surprised announcement on January 8th about Yang Mi and Hawick Lau admitting to their romantic relationship on Sina weibo.  Personally, I always wanted Yang Mi to hook up with her Gong co-star, Feng Shaofeng, but that's wishful thinking. Real life is totally different from onscreen pairing.

Trivia: Yang Mi was actually the producers' first choice to play Tong Xue in Sealed with a Kiss. I think she was offered the role, but she turned it down to accept another project, Beijing Love Story. I remember during the casting phase, the casting decision for Tong Xue was announced last while it was publicized pretty early that Hawick Lau would play Mo Shaoqian. Thus, many fans speculated for a long time that Yang Mi was cast as Tong Xue. Before Sealed with a Kiss ever started shooting, fans actually created a MV with Hawick as Mo Shaoqian and Yang Mi as Tong Xue, using previous existing materials from their individual series. Now I come to think of it, what a weird twist of fate! I wonder how Tong Xue would turn out if Yang Mi played her? Would she and Hawick still hook up together in real life? [思考]


Anyway, this revelation definitely fueled my interest in their upcoming Hunan TV series, Ru Yi, a drama which I initially found to be typical and lackluster. I'm really curious how their real life chemistry will translate on-screen. If their onscreen chemistry can beat the power of FengMi (Yang Mi/Feng Shaofeng Pairing), then I'll have another good drama to add on my list .  Visually, Hawick Lau and Yang Mi look very attractive together in this series. 

The premise of Ru Yi definitely reminds me of an old Qiong Yao's TV series starring "lion-roar" Steven Ma Jingtao and Chen Derong called Plum Blossom Trilogy: Plum Blossom Branding (Mei Hua San Nong: Mei Hua Luo) back in the early 1990s.

In Ru Yi, Hawick Lau and Yang Mi play a pair of babies who get switched at birth and later grow up to fall in love with each other. Madam Tan, the principal wife of a wealthy merchant,feels the intense pressure to bear a male heir for the Tan clan. Otherwise, her status in the Tan household will be severely undermined by a concubine and her son. When she gives birth to a daughter, she orders her personal maid to bring back a baby boy to switch with her daughter and raise as her own. Her biological daughter gets adopted by a impoverished tea farmer and is named Ru Yi. To her dismay, Madam Tan's surrogate son falls in love with this "lowly tea girl."



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