Chapter Thirty-One: Holy Crap!

The three-day project was wrapped up in two and a half. As several vehicles ferried the cast, crew, and equipment back into the city, the team scattered in every direction.

Lin Jianlu felt a profound sense of relief. Ever since he woke up on the train and realized he had transmigrated, the strings in his heart had been pulled taut. He had to make money; it was a rare era with rare opportunities!

By the time his album became a hit, selling well in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and the demand grew for three more music videos, he honestly felt like loosening those strings. It was only because his two agents kept manually tightening them that he mustered the remaining energy to run promotions and film the videos. Now that the music video for "Flower Field Mistake" was finished, he felt that his obligations were truly complete.

Why earn so much money? To enjoy life! And how do you enjoy life? By spending it!

He invited Yu Qian, whom he knew to be a man of taste, to visit the flower and bird market together. He spent over three hundred yuan to buy a fine hwamei bird for Old Lin, and another eight hundred on a set of what were supposedly high-quality cages and accessories.

Old Lin actually loved this hobby. He had kept birds in his youth, but during the turbulent years, fearing trouble, he had tearfully released his hwamei and smashed the cage, keeping only a small feeding bowl as a memento. He hadn't bought another bird since, and later, with the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, it was out of the question.

When he brought it home and presented it to his father, the result was exactly as expected: Old Lin’s eyes turned red at the sight of the bird, and he nearly wept. Even Mother Lin, who had started to quip, "Hey, you two are really something, acting like pampered young masters," fell silent when she saw the look on her husband’s face.

***

After being on the market for over nine weeks across East and Southeast Asia, sales figures from Taiwan and Hong Kong were always tallied quickly. Finally, after the May Day holiday, Xinhua Bookstore in the mainland provided its first accurate data: as of April 5th—roughly the first five weeks of release—"Cold to the End" had sold a combined 2.85 million cassette tapes and 114,000 CDs at Xinhua locations.

The total recorded sales exceeded 35.38 million yuan, as Xinhua Bookstore did not offer discounts. It was a cause for universal celebration!

In reality, however, there was no need to dwell on the specifics. The distribution channels of Rock Records could only provide a rough estimate of the two-month sales—"rough" because they could only calculate the difference between the number of units shipped and those returned within a certain period. There was no real accuracy to be found there.

Still, it was clear that confirmed sales of cassettes and CDs had exceeded 3.5 million units—a figure they could confidently inflate to 4 million for external publicity!

Needless to say, it was an explosive level of sales. In the eighties, when piracy was virtually non-existent, there were super-hits that moved over ten million tapes. But by the nineties, those figures had vanished; a legitimate hit barely sold over 100,000 tapes. As for CDs, it was a miracle if anyone bought them at all; selling over 10,000 was newsworthy.

Thus, just after May Day, newspapers and radio stations across the country were flooded with reports of "Cold to the End" selling over 4 million legitimate copies—hailed as a historic sales feat in an era plagued by piracy.

By comparison, the news caused an even greater stir in the Hong Kong and Taiwan music industries. Especially in Hong Kong, with the handover approaching, records published there could be registered and approved for mainland distribution in advance, bypassing the old "import" channels. That represented a massive market! No matter how low the price, the volume of millions of sales was impossible to ignore.

Of course, before the handover, this wasn't possible yet. "Overseas import" distribution was a completely different matter from being "domestic," which only required prior registration and a partnership with a mainland audio-visual publisher.

At least until the handover, a sales figure of 4 million in the mainland was something everyone in Hong Kong and Taiwan dared not even imagine. Conversely, for mainlanders trying to make a living in Hong Kong—whether as actors, models, or signing with labels—it was incredibly difficult.

Jet Li had the advantage; his early success with "Shaolin Temple" in Hong Kong left a lasting impression, and his subsequent films performed well, securing his foothold. But aside from him, no one from the mainland had achieved such success in any industry, until the sudden rise of Lin Jianlu.

Faye Wong didn't count; first, she had already settled there with her family, and second, she was a true Beijing girl who had been releasing Cantonese albums for seven years since her debut, earning the recognition of the Hong Kong public.

Lin Jianlu was undoubtedly the first mainland singer to achieve massive sales in Hong Kong and Taiwan. And he hadn't just gone there to scrape by; while dominating the mainland, he had reached the very pinnacle of the profession in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Newspapers and magazines there were already discussing him as the new generation's "Heavenly King" following the Four Heavenly Kings! Though many papers still refused to acknowledge his mainland status, insisting he was merely a powerful "dragon crossing the river."

But for Lin Jianlu, currently holed up in Beijing, none of that mattered.

***

On May 8th, Gu Changwei returned and invited him for drinks. So, they drank.

It was a motley crew. There were singers like Liu Huan and Jin Xuefeng; songwriters like San Bao and Zhao Jiping; and directors like Zhang Zien, Zhang Yang, Zhang Yibai, Zhang Jizhong, and "Little Steel Cannon" Feng Xiaogang—it seemed the Zhang family produced quite a few directors.

Then there were the actresses, though they were mostly "family members": Jiang Wenli and Xu Fan. Jiang Wenli also brought along her two best friends, Chen Xiaoyi and Jiang Shan. Later, Zhang Guoli and his wife joined, followed by Liu Bei.

The relationships were impossibly complex. One person brought another, and many just caught wind of the gathering and came to mooch a drink.

As mentioned before, the mainland arts scene of this era felt truly unpretentious to Lin Jianlu. There was a strong sense of camaraderie; everyone was a grassroots talent, with no distinction between "A-list" and "B-list" status. Of course, it was also possible that because Lin Jianlu was the biggest star there, he simply didn't feel the hierarchy.

Seeing the number of women, Lin Jianlu simply made a call and invited Jiang Qinqin over. Since Old Gu was hosting, he was paying, so why not? Lin Jianlu had lost track of how many times he had been the one being "mooched" off of. You could never eat your way back to even!

The conversation ranged far and wide.

Zhang Jizhong was obsessed with transferring to CCTV, though it didn't seem possible yet. However, the production of "Water Margin," which he was supervising, had been in preparation for over a year and was about to start filming. He felt that if this project succeeded, his future would be secured.

Feng Xiaogang’s frustration was self-evident. He had tied himself too closely to Wang Shuo, and with Wang Shuo now under fire and nearing a downfall, Feng had been dragged down with him. His glory days gone, he drank gloomily and didn't even brag anymore.

Zhao Jiping, normally a man of few words, seemed to have some psychological barrier toward a "Hong Kong/Taiwan celebrity" like Lin Jianlu, compounded by their significant age gap. But after a few drinks, perhaps realizing the young man wasn't so bad, he started chatting and asked if Lin Jianlu would like to join the Musicians Association, offering to sponsor him. The old man was the head of the Shaanxi Provincial Song and Dance Theater, a proper state-official, and was only in Beijing for a business trip, catching up with the Xi'an Film Studio crowd like Gu Changwei and Zhang Zien.

Of course, by the end of the night, the topic everyone was most interested in was the glitz and glamour of the Hong Kong and Taiwan entertainment scenes. They were all curious, envious, and filled with yearning.

It was no exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the Hong Kong and Taiwan entertainment industry, especially Hong Kong's, remained the most fashionable, cutting-edge, and prestigious sanctuary of pop culture in all of Asia.

The key was that everyone knew Hong Kong and Taiwan stars made serious money!

Even though Na Ying was just starting out in Hong Kong, a single album selling 30,000 to 40,000 copies—with one even crossing the platinum threshold—was enough to make everyone in the mainland green with envy.

The concept of earning hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong dollars from a single album was unfathomable! Mainland actors like Chen Xiaoyi and Jiang Shan, despite being famous, were lucky to get two or three thousand yuan per episode, and even then, they had so little work that they had the time to gather for these drinking sessions.

Of course, actors always earned less than singers of the same level; that was standard. A song like "Big Flower Sedan" was a huge hit, and the legitimate album reportedly sold 200,000 copies, earning the singer only a hundred or two hundred thousand yuan. It was far more profitable to take commercial gigs and "run the circuit"!

Yet even for someone like Huo Feng, "Big Flower Sedan" was his only real hit. He had released several other albums, but selling over 30,000 copies was considered decent. It couldn't compare to Na Ying’s steady 30,000 to 50,000 copies in Hong Kong, earning her hundreds of thousands of dollars per album!

Liu Huan himself admitted that his commercial gigs paid between 15,000 and 30,000 yuan each, but opportunities were scarce. He only toured twice a year, and that was the extent of his earnings. A CCTV gala appearance only paid 500 yuan, and after all the rehearsals and taping, it was almost a losing proposition! As for his own albums, they hadn't even sold 50,000 copies.

So, naturally, they envied Hong Kong and Taiwan!

So... they started bragging!

"Hong Kong and Taiwan are nothing special. Jackie Chan is clever and has high emotional intelligence. Sammo Hung is indeed fat, but it's mostly his belly; he's not that big otherwise. Brigitte Lin is beautiful... oh, oh, oh, I kissed her! At the Hong Kong Film Awards, they insisted I go up to sing, and I put my arms around Brigitte Lin and Sylvia Chang and kissed them each on the cheek..."

"Holy crap!"

Even the women joined in with a collective "Holy crap!"

Brigitte Lin, Sylvia Chang...