Focus on: Jiajia prevents her grandfather's ultimatum to Shen Wei from ep. 17

[trickytricky]

Location of scene: Episode 17, 37:03-39:35

Following Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan’s return from Dixing, Shen Wei is confronted by the Chancellor of Dragon City University and told that he must choose between his position as a professor or his role as a consultant with the SID; he cannot keep both. Just as Shen Wei is beginning to tender his resignation, Jiajia bursts in to interrupt, revealing her relationship as the granddaughter of the Chancellor. She convinces her grandfather to withdraw his ultimatum, who ends up leaving the decision of whether he can truly balance both roles up to Shen Wei, while Jiajia later tries to encourage Shen Wei to remain with the university.

Our scene begins with the standard DCU location/orientation sign zoom-in (I’m including this picture deliberately… someone pointed out to me today that whoever made this sign forgot to capitalize ‘city’ in it, and now I CANNOT UNSEE IT. So. Y’all can enjoy that with me, I suppose).

 The Chancellor of the university has summoned Shen Wei to a very civilized meeting over tea. He gets a delightfully ambiguous answer when he inquires about whether there have been any new developments in Shen Wei’s life recently (apparently, his teaching is ‘even more energetic’ than usual lately).


(Oh, Shen Wei. I love you very, very much. Never Stop Being a Delightful Matryoshka Doll of Mysteries.)

The Chancellor cuts to the chase pretty quickly, pulling out a folder he got from ‘above’ (presumably official government channels), and sounding pretty frustrated about learning of Shen Wei’s decision to join a ‘classified department’ through this report (Shen Wei's position as a consultant for the SID is definitely official and on the books if it’s being routed around like this).

 

Shen Wei tries to reassure him that his classified consultancy work for the government is only ‘casual’, and won’t interfere with his university responsibilities… but the Chancellor doesn’t want a half-committed professor. His going-in inflexibility here is actually pretty reasonable when one considers the context that (1) He apparently had to find out about one of his professor's moonlighting with another major employment gig via government reports rather than from the employee himself, and (2) Apparently Professor Zhou and Professor Ouyang just recently decided to entirely jump ship from the university to do the same. It must have been a pretty significant blow to the department to lose those two already, and now he’s seeing Shen Wei attempting to slide one foot out the door as well… on the face of it, not a good look at all!

 

When it comes down to it, when forced to choose, Shen Wei is beginning to speak up to respond to the Chancellor’s ultimatum of choosing only one position to commit his full effort towards, when our stalwart hero, Jiajia, charges onto the scene!


She’s so distraught and distracted by what she heard Professor Shen begin to say that she blurts out ‘Grandfather!’ when interrupting the conversation. Shen Wei’s literal double-take as he registers the unexpected revelation of a blood-relationship between the two of them is absolutely precious.


Seriously, just look at that adorable surprised face! PRECIOUS!

Jiajia metaphorically rakes her grandfather over the coals for what she overheard, pointing out what everyone apparently knows… that Professor Shen is one of the most skilled teachers on campus and is universally loved by his students. The Chancellor almost immediately relents in the face of her fervent protests. At this point, my personal take is that he’s seizing on this as an excuse to save a little face while backing down from his previous demand. When he presented the choice, he probably expected that Shen Wei would have agreed to drop the consultancy gig, but once it became clear that it was either take Shen Wei with divided attention and multiple commitments, or lose him entirely, he realized he’d rather keep him despite divided loyalties than lose him from the university entirely.


This little conversation between Jiajia and Shen Wei in the immediate wake of the office scene slays me every time.


Shen Wei can be so unbearably soft and fond with his students (even though I tend to think he’s also probably pretty firm when it comes to his expectations for academic effort and performance), and that genuine care he feels is on full display here.

I do find it interesting, and think it was probably a deliberate choice by the writers, that Jiajia frames her argument that Shen Wei should continue both consulting for the SID and teaching at the university as a ‘win-win’ for all involved. It’s a bit of a rhyme/echo to Zhao Yunlan’s common refrain of always trying to find a path that all good-faith parties can find some benefit from, rather than approaching a situation with only one’s personal benefit in mind.

At the end of this scene, and even overlapping immediately into the next…

...Shen Wei is pensive, distracted, clearly troubled by the increasingly difficult balancing act his life has become with all of the plates he’s working so hard to keep spinning at once, even after he's left the university and arrived at the SID. He shakes it off when prompted, but these interactions were clearly significant ones for Shen Wei, even if on the face of it they just resulted in him remaining in his previous status quo.

Zooming out (admittedly by a lot) from this small, almost-insignificant-in-the-larger-scheme-of-things scene, but I see Shen Wei’s hesitation here, the long, troubled pauses his character takes when considering his choices, his priorities, even this relatively early in the show, as being precursors for the audience’s understanding of one of the show’s strongest overall themes: Why bother choosing to strive to do Good things?

Why bother trying to do the right thing; why bother prioritizing kindness, compassion, respect for others despite differences; why bother striving for forgiveness and understanding over actively embracing spite and cruelty in the face of suffering and setbacks life will throw in your path; why bother risking your own comfort and safety to defend those too weak to fight back against those who use violent oppression to impose their will? 

Why bother with those things when the small differences and little amounts of progress you can make so often seem futile in the face of an indifferent universe, when your efforts are often scorned or misunderstood, when doing the right thing and taking a stand against oppression results in no tangible benefits or rewards… in fact, often results in the opposite. Why bother choosing Good, with prioritizing others over yourself, when sometimes you will get nothing out of it but pain and loss?

In this scene, Shen Wei is clearly suffering a pretty significant hurt at the thought of losing his position at the university, his place as a teacher and his connection to the students he cares so deeply about… he doesn’t want to lose those things. He wants to hold onto them, to keep pursuing this aspect of his life that has brought him a great deal of personal happiness. When it was a straight-forward choice presented to him, that almost made it easier; his priority was clear and he paused for a moment to gather his thoughts, but never hesitated in starting to resign from his position in favor of his work with the SID. 

When Jiajia interjected and put the choice back in his hands, that’s when the conflict becomes clear; can he truly do justice to all of his roles and responsibilities if his focus is divided? If yes, if there’s truly a ‘win-win’ to be found and he can keep it all exquisitely balanced… well and good. But if not… if things go off the rails, which events more and more seem careening towards even by this point in the show… he has enough self-knowledge to understand already that he’ll choose to give this part of his life up that has brought him joy in a moment, if it means he’ll be there to stand in front of someone who needs protecting from someone who intends them harm.

When push comes to shove, Shen Wei will always choose the good of others over entrenching his own interests (above everything else, I feel that it’s this aspect of his character that makes him and Zhao Yunlan true soul-matches).

This handful of scenes embody the kind of foreshadowing this show really excels at. Shen Wei knows there are going to be hard choices ahead. Unavoidable ones. Difficult choices that might not have a ‘good’ option to choose between. That will require sacrifices to be made. As much as one might hope for it, strive for it, sometimes a ‘win-win’ just isn’t possible. If he gets that call, he already knows how he’s going to answer, as painful as it might end up being.

This is why I truly, deeply love this show. Because Guardian says that making the right choice despite hardship and difficulty is still worth it.

That choosing goodness despite scorn and adversity is its own reward.

Even when it only leads to personal suffering or results in failure in what we were trying to accomplish, it still intrinsically matters how we choose to live our lives. 

The effort matters. The choice matters. And it is a choice. One that often in life, as in this show, is the harder, less rewarding one.

Shen Wei will always make the choice of selflessness over selfishness, and it wouldn’t be such a meaningful thing if we never saw him struggle over it. The fact that it’s hard, that it hurts, but that he still musters the willpower to choose the right thing over and over again, is what makes his story such a powerful one.

Related Fanworks and Recs
I’m not aware of any fanworks that really center on this scene in particular, but I will happily rec the delightful fic: The unofficial newsletter of Dragon City University (BioEng Dept) by frith_in_thorns, a series of short stories featuring Jiajia-related hijinks at the University!

A few questions to ponder and/or spark discussion… if you have alternate questions of your own or just think of something worth calling out in the scene that I glossed over, please chime in!

• Do you think the Chancellor would have followed through on his ultimatum if Jiajia hadn’t interrupted? Or would he have compromised his stance after all once Shen Wei made his determination to keep working for the SID absolutely clear and allowed him to keep on teaching?
• I know I babbled a whole diatribe up there about how I think these scenes connect to one of the show’s overall thematic messages, but what are your thoughts about what was going through Shen Wei’s mind when he’s looking troubled and lost in thought at the end of his conversation with Jiajia and later in Zhao Yunlan’s office?
• Not so much directly related to the scene directly, but does anyone have any fun conjecture/head-canons to share about how/why Shen Wei ended up affiliated with the University to begin with? His power of ‘learning’ is an obvious tie-in, but there were infinite paths he could have chosen to learn about and integrate into Haixing society when he first came up… why do you think he ended up going with this one?
  

So, come and have your say! Share links to meta, picspams, and related fanworks, new or old! Self-recs are wholeheartedly encouraged. Basically, this is the place for anything you want to say or link to about this scene.