Chinese Dramas Helped Me Through Heartbreak — How Melodrama Taught Me to Feel (Exclusive) (2025)

The summer I was 8, I discovered Chinese dramas for the first time. I was at my grandmother’s house in Cincinnati, where my brother and I often spent part of our break. When my grandmother wasn’t doing housework, she often watched taped Chinese shows a relative mailed her, and one mid-morning, taking a break from playing with my brother, I decided to join her.

I was entering the drama, Xue Ke (written by the popular Taiwanese novelist Chiung Yao), towards the end, though my grandmother did her best to catch me up. The story involved a late Qing Dynasty princess, Xue Ke, married against her will to a wealthy man. In her past was a poorer man she loved and a child they’d conceived — a child she was told had died at childbirth but had been secretly given to her lover’s mother to raise. Eight years later, the dying grandmother sold the little girl into Xue Ke’s husband’s household as a maid, in hopes that daughter and mother would reunite. Xue Ke does indeed discover the little maid she’s grown fond of is her daughter, and after several more episodes, this secret is found out by everyone in her household, causing an uproar.

By the time I began watching the show, the girl had been sent to live with Xue Ke’s parents, on condition that Xue Ke would stay in her marriage; she would never be allowed to see her daughter again. I watched as Xue Ke entered the now empty maid’s quarters, her fingers skimming the table where her daughter had once eaten, her cheek pressing the pallet her daughter had once slept on. In anguish, the woman wept, asking the heavens why mother and daughter were fated to be separated.

As I watched the woman’s despair, a pit formed in my throat. I held myself very still, my arms wrapped around my knees. From the kitchen, my mother announced lunch was ready. When my grandmother turned off the television, I flopped down on the floor. “I’m not hungry!” I wailed, breaking down into sobs. I couldn’t stop myself: the scene had left me with a mess of emotions so large that I felt I would burst.

If you had asked me then what it was I was reacting to, I couldn’t have told you —of course I had never experienced loss as a mother. But I did fear being separated from my parents, the way any child does, and it was around this age that death became real for me — a year earlier, I had seen my father cry for the first time at my grandfather’s funeral. For months, perhaps years, afterwards, I would lie awake at night, seized by terror at the thought of my own parents dying. Even if I could not have related to Xue Ke’s anguish, what I saw on screen showed me what it would feel like to lose your entire world.

When we returned to New Jersey, my mother rented Xue Ke from the Taiwanese supermarket we went to every weekend, bringing home a bulging, triple-layered bag of VHS tapes. I blew through those first episodes in a few days, then waited impatiently for the weekend to come. After I finished Xue Ke, my mother rented Mei Hua Lao, another Chiung Yao story involving lost babies, this time a daughter exchanged for a son a wife desperately needed to bear to ensure her status.

For the rest of the summer, I consumed Chinese dramas, my mother sometimes joining me, translating the more advanced dialogue. While normally she was strict with our TV time, she let me watch episode after episode nearly unchecked. Much later, I realized this was because it was one of the only ways I willingly consumed Chinese language media. To this day, my mother credits my drama addiction (and her encouragement of it) for the reason my Mandarin is better than my little brother’s — he would run away the moment I popped a tape into the VCR, allergic to the melodrama.

But I loved the over-the-top acting, the way sometimes the actors’ noses got snotty, the way tears artfully fell from the corner of the actress’s eyes. I loved the intricate plots that relied upon secrets and coincidences. I loved the dramatic irony, the period costumes, the weirdly formal language I’d never heard my parents use in daily life, the insight into a historical era I knew nothing about.

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Most of all, I loved the way the shows made me feel. I was only a child, so while the situations the characters found themselves in were beyond me, it was perhaps because of the melodrama that I could empathize. The same way adults exaggerate sad and angry faces for toddlers to demonstrate emotions, the characters’ highly dramatized reactions helped me understand their grief, torment, joy, love. And feeling those emotions along with them felt cathartic.

For many summers after that, I spent hours lost in Chinese period dramas, sometimes alone, but often with my parents, who enjoyed them too. Towards the end of high school, K-dramas came onto the scene (at least in Hong Kong, where I moved when I was 16. They wouldn’t become popular in America for at least another decade), and I became addicted to those as well, watching them with Mandarin dubbing because I couldn’t read Chinese subtitles fast enough. When I had my heart broken for the first time, I wallowed by immersing myself in the lives of couples separated by dramatic and unlikely plot elements, crying with them, my heartbreak mingling with theirs.

As I got older, I began to favor period dramas with complex political plots, rife with intrigue and heavy historical timelines and clever machinations that I couldn’t have appreciated when I was younger. Seasons sometimes spanned upwards of 50 episodes and I looked forward to evenings after work when I could catch the next one alone on my couch. When I first moved to Taiwan, with no friends, no places to be, and mean jetlag, I binged that year’s popular drama, Nirvana in Fire, over four sleepless nights. I’ve since watched this drama three more times, the last time with my now-husband during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it always brings me comfort.

Despite my taste evolving over the years, one thing never changed: I still loved a good cry. Once in a while, out of nostalgia, I’d revisit the old Chiung Yao dramas. Through my adult lens, some of the acting now felt painfully cartoonish, and yet I found myself weeping at all the most heightened moments.

Two years ago, I had a baby. It was a traumatic childbirth, one in which both my son and I almost lost our lives. In the aftermath, at a postpartum center in Taiwan, my husband and I tried to put ourselves back together. For a month, between trying to nurse and learning to swaddle and taking videos of our tiny newborn, we tried to move past what had happened to us — what had almost happened to us, through Chinese period dramas. Day after day, hour after hour, we played 80-episode-long dramas on my laptop as we burped our baby or washed his bottles, welcoming the reprieve from our anxious thoughts.

Then one day, several weeks into our stay, a scene involving a miscarriage played across the screen. The mother, a concubine, having just woken up and been informed of her lost pregnancy, cried out for her lost child with animal anguish. I felt my husband’s eyes slide toward me, and he placed a gentle hand on my leg. I began to cry.

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Perhaps the way she expressed her grief was melodramatic, but now I could see it wasn’t inaccurate. It was what I imagined I’d have done had the worst come to pass. In a society where we’re often expected to endure our feelings quietly and with composure, I was grateful for this on-screen world, where people made plain the sense of outrage and helplessness they felt when met with circumstances outside of their control.

I didn’t wail that day. I let the tears slide down my face quietly. But watching someone else do it made me feel less alone. I covered my husband’s hand with mine, and, as we watched the melodrama play out, felt something inside me loosen.

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