1
The first time I met Liang Yue was at the freshman style competition of the university class of 2012.
That day, in the middle of the competition, a beam of orange light suddenly hit the dark stage, and a girl with a high slanting ponytail stood in the middle of the stage. She was wearing a super short skirt and candy-colored knee-high socks, with one arm crossed and her white, full face slightly raised, looking confidently at the audience on stage.
The music started and the girl sang a powerful song in Korean. Although we did not understand the lyrics, her voice was clear and she was singing and dancing, and her energy instantly ignited the whole scene. It didn’t take long before I heard someone next to me exclaim, “Wow, this schoolgirl is awesome.”
There were 18 programs in the competition, and this girl choreographed three of them – two group dances and one solo. On the pink printed program sheet, her name was marked in bold letters: Liang Yue.
There is no doubt that Liang Yue won the first prize of that style competition, and all kinds of past about her gradually spread. A girl who claimed to be Liang Yue’s high school classmate said that for three years in high school, Liang Yue was one of the “top ten singers” on campus, and “we all knew that she wanted to go to Korea to become an idol”.
After that game, the college would ask Liang Yue to open the event with a song, and other departments would ask her to be a special guest at events.
Later on, Liang Yue was often seen going out with a trolley stereo, sometimes singing in the playground, sometimes as a street singer in the city center, accumulating some fans. Everyone envied Liang Yue, and when girls discussed who looked good in private, they all thought Liang Yue looked good and was the “flower of the department”.
Although we were both preschool students, it was not until a few months after school started that I had my first contact with Liang Yue.
One day at noon, Liang Yue suddenly came to our dormitory, and for the first time, I saw her appearance clearly at close range. She is not tall, about 1 meter 6, her skin is very white, her eyes are big, her eyelashes are long, and she is sweet and lovely.
Seeing that I was the only one in the dormitory, she had no freshman’s shyness, and with a smile on her face, she bowed deeply to me first, and then greeted me in Korean.
I was a bit flattered, and Liang Yue flashed her big eyes and asked, “Sister, when did our major start learning dance?”
She spoke Mandarin with a little Taiwanese accent, which was very sweet.
In the preschool education program, dance is a mandatory course. I told her that in sophomore year the teacher would lead the class to start with basic skills such as leg press and stretching.
“Basic skills?” Once Liang Yue heard me say this, somehow, became a little anxious and impatient, “Then, that will learn street dance jazz?”
After getting a negative answer, she bit her nails and muttered, “It’s too late.”
At that time I was also a bit Korean, like a lot of Korean stars, so and Liang Yue have a lot of common topics, the two quite chat. This meeting allowed me to get acquainted with Liang Yue, and I also learned about her plan to go to Korea as a trainee.
It wasn’t long before I heard that Liang Yue had enrolled in voice and dance classes outside of school, and that she only attended morning classes every day and took off or skipped all of her afternoon classes in order to attend her special classes.
This rebellious behavior was a huge contrast to her fame in the department, and the teachers were surprised and displeased. I couldn’t help but ask her once when we met, “You’ve been studying dance since your sophomore year, so you don’t have to rush to become a trainee, right?”
When I finished speaking, Liang Yue jerked off her black sweatshirt hat that covered her forehead and showed a surprised expression, “Ohni (Korean, sister), do you know how hard it is to be a trainee in Korea?”
Liang Yue said, in Korea, most of the children who want to take this path began to be a trainee at the age of 8 or 9, and she is now 17 years old, “Although the particularly good can be relaxed age, but when the trainee also have to practice a few years, a little older will be completely hopeless debut, I have to hurry.
I reassured Liang Yue that she could sing quite well. But her voice became a little lower, saying, “That’s all self-taught, self-taught is never able to beat the professional.
In order to participate in the audition as early as possible, Liang Yue continued to do what she wanted, so much so that her reputation in the department dropped drastically. She was absent for a long time and was criticized by the teacher by name in every class, and her classmates were also talking about her. Some said she had poor grades and was not interested in learning, and she pretended to be a good girl at first, but she couldn’t hide her footsteps after a long time.
In order to prepare for Grade 4 and 6, everyone often went to the school garden to read, and Liang Yue also went. But while everyone was struggling to read English, she was reading Korean, and she never hid her ambition: “If I want to be a trainee in Korea, I must be fluent in Korean.”
No matter how everyone talked about it, the following spring, Liang Yue’s circle of friends suddenly sent out a dynamic – in the middle of two selfies, a screenshot of an email stood out, with the text: “Passed the online audition, here comes the interview!
2
In early 2013, Liang Yue sent her singing and dancing video to a Guangdong entertainment company and passed the screening. They said that as long as she passed the audition, she would be able to go to Korea to train and get one step closer to her dream.
With excitement and thrill, Liang Yue decided to go to Guangdong alone. Although her leave of absence was not approved by her teacher, she didn’t care, “When I become a trainee anyway, I won’t be able to go to school anymore.
Liang Yue told me that she was actually interested in the famous Korean entertainment company behind the Guangdong company, which has produced many popular singers and actors.
Liang Yue has been dreaming of stardom since she was a child and has participated in many provincial and municipal competitions to “exercise her guts”. She thought this audition was similar to those she had experienced in the past, but after going there, she realized that it was not.
The audition was divided into several parts, such as singing and dancing, and creative writing. Liang Yue had no other talent, so she had to choose singing and dancing. When they arrived at the audition site, they entered the waiting area in groups of 10 and then entered the audition room one by one to perform.
In a quiet room with only one judge and one interpreter, Liang Yue completed her “talent show” in front of these two expressionless people and was then asked to leave her contact information outside the room. After waiting for a while, she was told she could leave on her own. The whole process took less than five minutes, and Liang Yue thought that the judges might not even remember her face.
After that, it was a long wait. Usually, qualified contestants would be notified of the retest, but Liang Yue never received it.
The news of Liang Yue’s failure spread, and some people around her started to say, “She wanted to be a phoenix but didn’t fly, so it seems that she can only be an ordinary college student”.
Liang Yue did not go around complaining, but she didn’t come down honestly either. The time she spent at school was shorter than before. Now she even skips her morning classes, often rushing out early in the morning and coming back at night, her whereabouts mysterious.
Since she came back from Guangdong, Liang Yue has become a different person. She used to be enthusiastic and active, with an open personality, but now she is much quieter, and every time she meets someone she knows, she brushes past them with no expression, without looking at them. Her temper also became irritable, and once she threw her roommate’s clothes downstairs in a fit of anger because of friction with her roommate, and the two of them quarreled.
Liang Yue’s change also caught the attention of the department head. She was warned that if she didn’t pay attention to her studies, she might be expelled from school. Who knew that she would not be moved, but even applied to withdraw from school.
The whole department was shocked when the news spread. The teachers interviewed Liang Yue and advised her that she was only a freshman, so she should not give up her future just because of one failure; even the secretary, who had scared the students, slowed down her tone and counted the disadvantages of withdrawing from school. Liang Yue was not moved at all and said clearly: “I don’t like this major at all, I enrolled because I want to learn vocal dance. Now it does not meet my needs, so I naturally do not have the need to read it again.”
Later, Liang Yue simply did not even cope with the interview and let the dean go several times.
When Liang Yue’s parents found out about this, they didn’t object, thinking that their children had their own ideas when they were older, as long as they didn’t do anything bad.
I heard that Liang Yue’s mother works in a TV station and has been training her daughter to perform on stage since she was a child. When she came to visit Liang Yue at the university, she would hold her daughter and let her sit on her lap, doting on her extraordinarily.
In the end, the teachers at the institution were disappointed and approved Liang Yue’s application to withdraw from school.
In the summer of her freshman year, Liang Yue officially moved out of school, and when I helped her carry her luggage, I asked her about her future plans. Liang Yue looked as usual and said that she would continue her training, of course. I realized that she hadn’t given up on her dream of debuting as a Korean trainee, and that the days she had skipped school were all spent in special classes.
“That’s not so bad as dropping out of school.” I said.
“I’m already too late for others to waste time!” Liang Yue said sharply. In the past, she thought it was too late to prepare for her debut in high school, but the talent show showed her the gap – others had been learning to dance and play various instruments since they were young, while she wasn’t even a singing professional.
“But then there’s no way back, right?” I said.
“I don’t want to regret my youth.” Liang Yue said stubbornly.
3
Liang Yue, who had dropped out of school, soon became the “negative example” of the school. In class, teachers repeatedly took her case and seriously cautioned everyone: “Nowadays, many students want to be stars all day long, want to take shortcuts to success, and do not want to study and work in a practical manner. But you should know that if you play with life, life will also play with you in the future.”
She didn’t end up as a trainee
But Liang Yue had already gone, ignorant of these criticisms, and she changed her WeChat signature to, “Work so hard that you move yourself, that’s how big your ambition is.”
In our department, professional classes to learn to sing, many girls will drag the stereo to the street to sing in residence. But she was the only one who had a clear goal like Liang Yue and dropped out of school for her dream. Therefore, I kept an eye on her later development.
During that audition in Guangdong, Liang Yue met two like-minded girls who also lost in the audition, and the two decided to form a group and continue to sprint towards the goal of becoming a trainee.
This time, Liang Yue set her sights on a domestic entertainment company. She told me that she realized after understanding the situation that the competition for Korean trainees is fierce and it is very difficult to be selected for the audition directly in China. This is why many entertainment companies with Chinese and Korean partners have emerged – Chinese companies first select young people who are interested, then provide targeted training for those selected, and then send them to Korea to “practice” after they reach the standard, and then choose the opportunity to debut.
Having found a way to “save the country”, Liang Yue and her trio also started training. During that time, I looked at Liang Yue’s circle of friends, and she seemed to be working very hard, going to the practice room in the morning to practice dance, learning vocal or musical instruments in the afternoon, and at night, she would also send a few links to sing bar, inviting everyone to listen. Many students said, “I can’t believe that Liang Yue is really working hard.”
But gradually, I found out that Liang Yue’s hard work didn’t seem to be so.
At the end of 2013, Liang Yue begged me to take her into the school’s dance studio to practice on the pretext that her dance class was closed. Six months after leaving school, Liang Yue had washed away her student boyishness, dyed her hair, and become much more fashionable. She seemed to have come out of the shadow of her failure and her sweet smile was back on her face.
Liang Yue entered the school’s dance studio with me, but was in no hurry to warm up and practice. She first found an angle to take pictures in front of the mirror, and then sat on the floor to play with her phone and chat with her friends. I glanced at them, and it seemed that they were talking about “Korean paparazzi are very powerful, but the company should teach us how to deal with them in the future”, or “this company likes to hang pure, I see that the ones who passed the interview before are all dressed up in plain clothes”.
Seeing that it was getting late, I couldn’t help but remind her, “As long as you’re good enough, you can pass no matter what, so you might as well practice more.”
Liang Yue glanced at me from the mirror, face unknown, and chatted for a while, before dancing to the music.
I thought that Liang Yue’s jazz dance, which she had been practicing for half a year, should be in good shape, after all, some of her classmates were already on stage. But who knows, she moves loosely, doing the good moves to repeat, do not do the bad moves to bring over, rather than dancing, it is better to say that she is admiring herself in the mirror.
“I thought there was a lot of competition, it’s not okay to be so lax.” I have something to say.
Liang Yue beamed and muttered, “It’s not like I’m slacking off, as long as I enter the domestic company first, it’s not okay to relax?”
I wanted to say that before success, it is better to work harder and have less fantasy. But seeing Liang Yue’s bad face, I didn’t say it after all, and then I didn’t take her to the school dance studio to practice.
In 2014, Liang Yue and her trio started a new journey. This time, the target was a company in Beijing. The video they sent was quickly reviewed, but before the interview, something went wrong.
The other two girls in the group, one called Chen Lu, in vocational college, and one called Xiaohua, dropped out of high school halfway through the school year.
In order to be brave, the three girls who are not yet involved in the world had planned to show in the form of a combination, but unexpectedly Chen Lu temporarily changed her mind, saying that the level of the three people are not the same, the combination of the show is too big contrast, proposed to perform alone.
Liang Yue is very dissatisfied with this: “After all, is not afraid of being dragged down, the three of us she dances the best.”
As expected, on the day of the audition, Chen Lu was the best among the three of them. But even so, it still did not meet the standard.
When the three of them were lost, the company offered a tempting program. The person in charge said that although they were not capable enough, they still had great potential, and if they were willing, they could first become internal trainees, or “trainees”. The trainee can not only receive the company’s special training, but also not subject to the trainee “weekly and monthly assessment and elimination” system, less pressure. In addition, you can also go to Korea to practice for a few months, when the Korean company will come to select people – but, because the trainees have not reached the level of trainee, so not only do they have to take care of their own food and accommodation, but also pay a “training fee” to the company.
This program is very attractive, Liang Yue and the girls are very tempted, but the monthly cost of 50,000 is beyond their budget. After much hesitation, Liang Yue and Xiao Hua finally gave up the program, and only Chen Lu was willing to stay.
4
The three girls went their separate ways, with Chen Lu taking the lead on the right track to debut, while Liang Yue and Xiao Hua had emotions, but also a lot more confidence – after checking the Internet, the Beijing company claimed to have “a huge scale of artists, dedicated to creating international-level trendy stars”, and the evaluation was still credible.
“We still have hope, because the company says we still have potential.” Liang Yue said optimistically.
Liang Yue also has her own plans: “Each company has different requirements, and if we can’t meet the standards of this company, maybe another company will see the bright spots and be willing to take us as trainees? And it’s more formal to be a trainee without fees.”
She and Xiaohua were determined to find such a unique company.
In the era of the entertainment industry boom, the path to trainee auditions has long since ceased to be limited to regular auditions. As long as you can contact the company, you can attend an interview at any time, and some companies even hold monthly or weekly auditions. Whenever Liang Yue sees a company she likes, she will actively contact it to apply. Nine times out of ten, she receives a response to her resume, and people claiming to be talent scouts come to her door. So, Liang Yue’s confidence increased, and she ran through Chongqing, Chengdu, Zhengzhou …… for interviews.
As the number of interviews increased, Liang Yue found that these companies say much the same thing. So much so that later on, when the person in charge of the company said one sentence, she could already pick up the next sentence – every time she and Xiaohua finished their talent show, almost all the companies said frankly that they could not reach the standard of trainee, but acknowledged their potential, so they had asked them to consider entering the company as trainees. There is no elimination system for all the trainees, as long as the Korean company they work with comes over for the audition, they can go straight to the audition. But the price for enjoying these benefits is a large training fee, ranging from $30,000 to $100,000 per month.
Finally, Xiaohua got fed up with these schemes and told Liang Yue: “Don’t you see it yet? The company just wants us to spend money as trainees, so they let us come over for interviews and say we have potential. Who knows how long the trainee will be a trainee, but it’s just using our dreams to make money?”
Xiaohua’s withdrawal brought a small blow to Liang Yue. The two of them ran around together for the interview, looked out for each other, and developed a revolutionary friendship with one setback after another. Today, Liang Yue is the only one who is still holding on.
Knowing this news, I couldn’t help but advise Liang Yue on WeChat: “Learn to accept the reality and stop in time, there are still many choices in life.” But Liang Yue simply did not listen: “I have fought so hard until now, sacrificed so much, but in the end did not even touch the hair of the dream, is not it very ridiculous? And there are so many companies that I haven’t tried yet.”
She continued to run on the road, sometimes casting in one city this week and flying to another city for interviews without a few days’ rest.
During those days, Liang Yue changed her signature to, “Cows and sheep flock together, but fierce beasts walk alone.”
5
When Liang Yue was running around alone for the interview, her former companion Chen Lu had already paid to become a trainee of that Beijing company. Although there was no need to go through weekly and monthly examinations, the company divided the trainees into ABCD classes, and only the top-performing A-class students could participate in the quarterly public performances, and the most outstanding 15 of them would have the possibility to train in Korea.
There were 4 classes, each with dozens of people, and Chen Lu was in class D. It seemed that there was still some hope of “getting in”, but in reality, it was basically the same as a dead end.
Liang Yue is envious of Chen Lu’s current situation, but she is also anxious about her own life, which is uncertain. She always felt that there was not much time left for her on the road to becoming a Korean trainee. She has a “Korean trainee group” in her phone, and new people are joining it every day. Those girls are getting younger and younger, and there are even some post-00s. During the interview, she found that there were constantly younger girls participating, their faces were full of collagen, and a simple ponytail could exude youthfulness. All this was a reminder to Liang Yue – she had been pushed to the edge of the red line of debut age.
Unable to resist the overwhelming anxiety, Liang Yue retreated again and again, and finally decided to start as a trainee within the company, even if it was a small one. It didn’t take long for her to choose a small, unknown company located in Chengdu. Not how attractive the conditions offered by the other side, but this one wants the least training fees.
Who knew that the plan would be dealt a blow again, this time by her parents, who had always supported Liang Yue in her dream. In order to become a Korean trainee, Liang Yue had spent a lot of money over the years, but nothing had been achieved. Liang Yue’s father gradually lost his patience, he had an ordinary job and an ordinary income, and no longer wanted to fill this bottomless pit.
Her father said: “You are not yet a star, but you have learned a bunch of spending problems. I should have known to let you continue your studies, at least at the end can still get a diploma. Let’s be realistic, if you don’t have the ability, don’t think about eating this meal all day long.”
Liang Yue yelled, “How can I not have the ability, ability is not cultivated ah? How to cultivate without spending money?”
At this end, she couldn’t get the training fee from her family, and at the other end, Xiaohua also came to persuade her. She told Liang Yue that Chen Lu had been a trainee for a few months and had voluntarily quit: the trainee is actually a replacement, and only if any trainee goes wrong and can’t make the debut, the trainee will have the chance to step up.
But the trainee has worked so hard for so many years, how can they seize the opportunity and let go? To put it bluntly, the trainee is his own money to accompany the run.
“And I have asked clearly, the age of the line, even if sent to Korea, the company will not accept.” Xiaohua said.
Liang Yue retorted anxiously, “Didn’t you say that if you are good enough, you can be relaxed in age?”
Xiaohua coldly asked her, “Are we good enough? On the day of the first audition, so many people who grew up practicing dance and learning musical instruments were not selected, what makes us good enough?”
Hearing Xiaohua say this, Liang Yue hesitated. On one hand, she was eager to make her debut, and on the other hand, she was afraid of being cheated out of money. These emotions were like fire and ice, constantly tormenting her heart. She began to have trouble sleeping at night, tossing and turning and calculating – if she became a trainee now, how much time would she have left to practice before debuting.
After a few months of tossing and turning like this, Liang Yue lost several turns and became increasingly dull. She often held her cell phone and looked at the computer in a daze.
One day, I received a WeChat from her: “I’m going to try all the companies once, if no company wants me at the end, I’ll give up.”
However, this never-ending effort seems to have unknowingly drained Liang Yue’s patience. She stopped training her skills and spent her days lying at home casting resumes and sending videos, without any hope. During the period, she also received invitations to interviews, but she never went because she could predict the outcome of the interview and what the other party would say.
The year 2016 came, and Liang Yue turned 22. 22 is said to be the age limit for Korean companies to recruit trainees.
I don’t know what day it was, but Liang Yue’s circle of friends never posted anything related to trainee. I can more or less realize that her dream of becoming a star has ended here, silently and completely.
6
In the summer of 2016, most of the 2012 students in the preschool education program graduated successfully, and the campus was filled with the smell of parting. Some of the younger students took the editorial exam, some took the graduate school, but only Liang Yue was nowhere to be seen.
One day, another student who was close to Liang Yue told me that she happened to see a poster of a star-making company on the Internet: “It’s so beautiful, ‘Let you become the brightest star’, which is the dream of many girls, I’m afraid. But in reality, there are more people who have dreams, but can’t even touch the shore.”
Among these people, there is Liang Yue, right?
She dropped out of freshman year, and now she still has a high school degree, so she can’t find a job she wants. She then really indulged for a while, working as a resident singer in a bar, meeting online friends, smoking and drinking, dyeing hair and tattoos. I heard that she had a boyfriend who was the lead singer of some underground group.
One day in 2017, Liang Yue suddenly called me and said she wanted to get a correspondence undergraduate degree from our school, and asked if our graduate degree was available by correspondence.
After hearing my answer, she asked rhetorically, “If undergraduate degree is available, why not graduate degree?”
I didn’t know why not.
“Okay, okay.” Liang Yue was a little impatient, muttered a few words, and hung up the phone before me. After that, we never contacted each other again.
Until the middle of 2019, my little sister graduated from middle school and also made a fuss about going to Korea as a trainee. She said the same thing as Liang Yue did back then: “Make an effort, do not let youth leave regrets.”
Because of this, I contacted Liang Yue again and asked for her advice as a person who came through. Liang Yue seriously told me that if my little sister was willing, it wouldn’t hurt to try, but to be careful of the pitfalls, “If you are good enough, domestic companies will be the first to keep you and won’t let a good seed go abroad. So those who are both taking your money and guaranteeing to send you outside are not taking your dreams seriously.”
Finally, Liang Yue instructed, “Don’t be too naive, sometimes it’s better to leave some regrets to your youth than to waste it.”
I relayed these words to my little sister, and finally let her stay on campus to study.
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