As much as I hate to see it playing out I do really love the way they're handling Yu Qianqian and Qi Min's story. It's the kind of thing that could very easily just become a damsel in distress story and flatten the female character, but Chasing Jade has so far managed very well to straddle the line of taking away her agency in-story without robbing her of narrative agency. And I think there are a lot of things that go into this, including stuff like how well the show has handled female characters in general, making us put more faith in the fact that Yu Qianqian will get a satisfying resolution, or the fact that its a secondary story arc so they don't get as much screen time so the story can be dragged out over several episodes without turning into gratuitous suffering of the female character. But I think the main part of it has to do with how much Yu Qianqian and her choices are centered in this narrative, making us feel like she is still important and still has agency even as in-story it is systematically stripped away from her.
Like, the narrative does not care at all about Qi Min. Every scene that he is in is focused on another character and how he affects their life, whether it's the fear he inspires in Nanny Lan or Yu Qianqian, or the fear he doesn't inspire in his younger brother that somehow leaves you utterly terrified for a man who gleefuly tried to kidnap the female lead. More than once. Qi Min's presence in the story is entirely centered around the effect he has on the characters and the world around him, especially the female characters. We're over halfway through the show and we haven't even gotten a proper backstory reveal yet. There's enough there that you can sort of piece it together, but the point is that the only things we know so far are what is necessary to contextualize his relationships with Nanny Lan and Yu Qianqian. The narrative is so far utterly uninterested in him and whatever justifications he has for his actions. (I'm sure we'll still get a proper backstory reveal eventually though, because this show wants nothing if not to show that all its characters are human)
Contrast this to Yu Qianqian. By the time her relationship with Qi Min is revealed to us, we already know so much about her character. She already feels like a full person. She has goals, aspirations, friends, professional relationships. She owns a restaurant, wants to support Fan Changyu and get a good business deal out of it, has a friendly relationship with her maid, has the butcher beat up within her property for making a scene. Even Bao'er is only introduced later on, so that once we do get to know him, her relationship to him and her role as a mother feel like only a facet of her character. An important facet, for sure. Not denying that she loves her son and a large part of her motivations are to protect him. But it's not the entirety of her character.
And then once Qi Min gets his hands on her, the show continues to center her decisions and her resilience in the face of an impossible situation. Even as Qi Min takes away all of her options, the narrative continues to allow her to make choices, to rebel against him in whatever small ways she can come up with. In her first scene in Qi Min's mansion, she chooses to reject all his gifts, she chooses to pretend not to care about Bao'er, she chooses to give in at the last moment to save her son. All of these are choices that the narrative allows her to make that inform her characterization. She also chooses to pretend to accept Qi Min to get her son out, and chooses to accept the maid's food when he imprisons her in the shed. She is constantly making choices, and, narratively, these are what is driving their relationship. Not his choices, but hers.
This is a story that intimately understands that it doesn't just matter where it ends up, narratively, but also how it gets there. The end result is the same for Yu Qianqian: she is stuck in the clutches of a madman who likes to beat people to death for even slightly displeasing him, who almost killed her son just for her to fall in line and then proceeded to emotionally abuse him so hard that he ate ink. But it matters that she fights back, and it matters that the narrative allows her to make choices, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant they are. It's the difference between her feeling like a hopeless victim and a real person.
Somebody said that this is a show that really loves women and it does. It really really does, even when it's torturing them endlessly.
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