He seems to be only one step away from becoming an “idol”.
Editor’s note: This article from the public micro-channel number ” Esquire “(ID: esquirecn ) , author: Li Yingdi.
Interview and writing: Li Yingdi
Contributing Editor: Conlukai
At the beginning of this year, it wasIn the new crown epidemic, a mask fraud case has been on the hot search. The person involved, Huang Zhibo, was a trainee who had participated in the men’s team talent show “In the Name of the League”, and the amount involved was 117,000 yuan. The reaction of the victim Lu Qi is the same as most people: celebrities will cheat money too!
Huang Zhibo was sentenced to three years and three months in prison for fraud. Due to the epidemic, he was delayed in being sent to prison and spent half a year in the detention center. The reporter communicated four letters with Huang Zhibo, who was in the detention center.
“I live well inside. I read and study every day, I live a full life, eat well, and I am in good health. I will exercise after dinner every day.” Huang Zhibo wrote, but he I rarely see the sun, “Eat and sleep every day, and then the eyelids disappear.”
At the same time, the reporter went to Shenzhen, Lufeng, Chengdu, Changsha, Shanghai and Beijing to interview Huang Zhibo’s family, hair school, trainee friends, industry agents, fans, and victims of the case.
One
February 5, 2020, 9 am, Jieshi Town, Lufeng City, Guangdong. Huang Zhibo was lying on the bed when the police came. The police lifted the quilt and dragged him out. Huang Zhibo got up, as if he hadn’t woken up yet, instinctively pulled the quilt and lowered his head. He wears a black pullover with messy yellow hair. He looks just like an ordinary young man who loves fashion.
The camera of the law enforcement recorder shook. He slept on a bare wooden bed. A thin quilt barely served as a mattress. The khaki quilt adorned with safflower was pushed aside. There are two unthreaded bear dolls beside the bed, a few clothes, a snakeskin woven bag, and a summer mat. The room is not big, the walls are painted and there is no decoration.
Two policemen one after the other handcuffed Huang Zhibo and got stuck in the middle, and escorted him out of a gray building. A couplet of “Congratulations to the New Year” was posted on the door behind it. It was the twelfth day of the first lunar month and it was less than two weeks since Huang Zhibo returned home.
As soon as he was escorted into a police car, Huang Zhibo’s father hurriedly brought a black jacket and put it on him. ——It is through this jacket that people have confirmed Huang Zhibo’s identity. Someone discovered that he had recorded anti-epidemic slogans and Chinese New Year greeting videos while wearing the same clothes. There are also Huang Zhibo’s ID card, bank card, some Korean won and a payment in the jacket pocket 通卡< /a>. After the police announced these “tools for committing crimes,” someone wrote down the bank card number and tentatively transferred a penny to confirm that the transfer object was Huang Zhibo.
The news spread quickly. Before being arrested, Huang Zhibo was Lehua Entertainment trainee, one has participated in the men’s team audition, It can be said that a small well-known trainee. He is 22 years old. In his three years as a trainee, his biggest goal is to make his debut, from a reserve to a real star.
Huang Zhibo has indeed become a “star”, but in this way: he was on hot search, and thousands of comments were calling him “fraudster” and “getting money out of the country.”
The case will be announced soon. During the Spring Festival, he was in Baidu posted information on the sale of masks. After contacting a customer in Shanghai, he received a deposit of 117,000 yuan, but he blocked the other party.
The police asked him why he thought of selling masks to deceive people?
“In the beginning, I wanted to (sell masks) myself, but later it was too expensive to get the goods, and then the goods did not arrive.” He was sitting in the interrogation chair, wearing a mask, a few strands of bangs drooping down, talkingThere is no objection to the evidence presented. In the end, he was sentenced to three years and three months in prison for fraud.
Second
Jieshi Town is located to the south of Lufeng City, surrounded by the sea on three sides, and the residents mostly live by fishing. The streets are full of all kinds of locomotives, and the roads are filled with the sound of horns, horns and tires rubbing against the ground. It is not far from the well-known “drug manufacturing village”. People say that the town’s public security is not good, and there are frequent incidents of escape from the port and robbery on the fly. A lot of stability is now stabilized, and the real estate brand Country Garden has just entered, and a brand new real estate is standing by the sea.
Huang Zhibo’s home is on the edge of the town, a humble two-story building with lime cement walls on the outside and a weedy pool next to it. When I went, his parents were busy moving, and there was not much furniture left. There was a set of yellow wooden chairs and a coffee table in the living room, and an old-fashioned fan hummed.
The only special place is A room on the second floor. After being a trainee, Huang Zhibo told his father that he hoped to make a place for dancing at home. Father spent seven or eight hundred yuan to install a floor mirror and two stereos in the room. Huang Zhibo also posted a few black rapper posters on the surrounding walls, but after a long time, the four corners of the posters were rolled up. His other belongings have been removed and the room is empty.
Huang Zhibo’s family has rented this house for seven or eight years. They once had a house in the country. After his father had a heart attack, he sold the house to heal the illness. Right now, the move is because the lease is up. Secondly, his father said that Huang Zhibo’s news was on the local official account, “I know it everywhere.” They decided to leave the town and move to the city.
Huang Zhibo’s father was a farmer, and later worked as a carpenter in Shenzhen for a while. After he fell ill, he couldn’t do heavy work and returned home to wholesale clothing. He was thin and dark, with white hair and deeply carved wrinkles on his face. He didn’t have much expression, and he couldn’t see too strong sadness. His voice was small, and he was often overwhelmed by the sound of fans. My mother is a traditional housewife, perhaps because she can’t speak Mandarin and she doesn’t speak much. With red eyes, she brought up a plastic bag, which contained father’s thick medical records, electrocardiograms, medical certificates, and some medicine boxes.
Guangdong is rainy in summer. Father looked at the water-stained ceiling and said, “Water is leaking here.” When we talked about other topics, my father murmured again that there was a leak here, all leaking.
My father’s greatest hope was that Huang Zhibo and his sister could work stably and save some money so that the family could buy a new house, “you don’t need to buy Country Garden”. Now, this wish seems even more distant.
Sister Huang Jingmin is the actual pillar of the family. She was 26 years old. After dropping out of junior high school, she went out to work. She always saved half of her income to the family to support her younger brother’s career as a trainee.
She was also running around after the brother’s accident. A girl sent a private message to her on Weibo, saying that she was a fan of Huang Zhibo and could help reduce her sentence. The other party told her to go to Shanghai, and she believed it too, and bought 600 yuan of dried cuttlefish and dried squid, six Furong kings-because the other party said that there were six officials who wanted to manage. When she arrived in Shanghai, she only waited for the loss of contact in the cold wind. When she got home, she quit the cigarettes and gave her parents the seafood.
Huang Jingmin always cries when he mentions her brother. When we first met in Shenzhen, she cried four times during a meal. She has long waist-length hair, a face with melon seeds, and long eyelashes, which is the kind of walkingOn the streetA beautiful girl who will be regarded as a student. Every time she finished crying, she would habitually take out the small mirror to see if she was wearing makeup.
She manages the warehousing in a sports brand store and earns 4,000 yuan a month. In order to hire a lawyer for Huang Zhibo, she went around looking for people to borrow money and collected one hundred thousand. Later, she became a makeup artist again, hoping to earn more money to pay off her debts. But this job has to be robbed, she said, young colleagues quarreled with her, threw her bowl, and called her an “old woman”. Whenever I contacted her on WeChat, she always had time to reply the next day. Her high-frequency words are “tired”: “tired alive”, “tired, I want to cry myself”.
On the Internet, she is said to be a willing “helping brother demon”. But for Huang Jingmin, this is more like a choice with no choice. Occasionally, she complains bluntly, “I was messed up by Zhibo.”
She and her parents still don’t know the origin of the Huang Zhibo case. Years ago, Huang Zhibo received a notice from the company to participate in the second season of “In the Name of the League”. On the night of New Year’s Eve, he had just returned home from South Korea in Guangdong and was arrested 12 days later. But the sister said that because of the new show, the younger brother urgently needs a sum of money. Last year he participated in “In the Name of the League” and he had already spent 50,000 to 60,000 yuan, which was the largest expenditure he had made since he was a trainee. This year, the family was going to send the sum of money saved to buy a house to Huang Zhibo, first to spend it, but Huang Zhibo didn’t want it.
“I don’t think I can give my parents any more money. And I haven’t made my debut yet, I really can’t do anything…At that time I really felt like I was a waste.” Huang Zhibo wrote in his reply. Unlike some domestic companies that give subsidies to trainees, Lehua refers to the Korean trainee training system, and he has no income.
At that time, Huang Zhibo received a form from the program team, which marked the clothes he needed to bring. The clothes were not allowed to have large logos, and many of them needed to be bought again. He recorded another song for the competition and spent several thousand yuan to find an arrangement.
He recalled that afterwards, he saw a friend selling masks in his Moments, bought some for home use, and chatted with his friends about his situation. A friend asked him if he would like to sell them together, saying that he would be allocated “a few points” for each order, and that he sold masks at a conscience price, only a few cents.
“At that time, I struggled for a long time before agreeing. We made several orders together. One of the orders was very large. I didn’t know whether he sent the goods or not. He didn’t contact me again. I didn’t know myself. I broke the law, and then one day I was suddenly taken away while sleeping…”
He doesn’t want to mention more things related to the case.
“To put it plainly is to give birth to the wrong family, really”, my sister couldn’t help saying, “I
Three
The small town is far away from the world of entertainment circles, and part-time work is the way out for most young people in small towns. In 2013, Huang Zhibo graduated from junior high school and went to work in Shenzhen. He operated the screen press in the LCD TV factory run by his uncle, earning three to four thousand yuan a month. He was 15 years old then.
His three hairdressers, Atao, Ajie, and Along, dropped out of school in the first year of junior high. Now, A Tao works at home, he specializes in playing games and selling equipment. He is also the fattest, and he will sink into the ground when he gets on the locomotive. Ajie dyed his yellow hair. He is a “post-90s stylist”. When Huang Zhibo returns home, he will Find He does hair. The dentist Aaron is dressed in white. They are as old as Huang Zhibo, 22 years old, but A Tao and A Long are already married and will have a second child soon.
They don’t chase stars, don’t watch boy group shows, and Huang Zhibo hasn’t finished watching the show. “I don’t like those trainees.” A Tao made no secret of his prejudice against this profession. “They are gay when they talk gay.”
So, They always joked with trainee Huang Zhibo. When we went out to play together, Huang Zhibo put a base cream on her face-A Tao will ask, if you put on makeup, “Would you like to buy a lipstick for you!” For example, trainees are not allowed In love, Huang Zhibo hasn’t been in love for a long time-“Abo, are you gay?”
To be fair, before the accident, A Tao admired Huang Zhibo. Hair kids have never been out of Guangdong, only Huang Zhibo has gone farther and farther. When working in Shenzhen, Huang Zhibo liked dancing. In other words, he first liked the Korean idol Quan Zhilong, searched all the information about Quan Zhilong, and bought the same clothes. Since then, he has a dream of becoming an idol.
For a factory boy, it is not easy to find a trainee. Huang Zhibo has experienced at least “four stops”.
In June 2016, he resigned, and went to Changsha OLDDOG dance studio for the first time. He spent more than 3,000 yuan on 15 days of summer training. At the second stop, he went to the Guangzhou TOUCH dance studio and reported the monthly pass. In Friend’s house. At the third stop, he went to the Chengdu Wubang Dance Studio. This was the first time he took a plane and reported a six-thousand-yuan card for six months. The remaining money was used to live in six hundred yuan a month.Youth Hostel. On the fourth stop, he went to the Beijing Devil Training Camp. Two months later, he returned to Guangzhou to apply for a dance teacher.
Even though it has been so long, he remembers every node clearly.
At the same time, he began to participate in the draft. The first was the draft held by the Korean entertainment company FNC and Suning. He moved from Chengdu to Shanghai. Among those who went with him that time was Zhou Zhennan, who is now the captain of the R1SE men’s team. After being unsuccessful, he went to the WOD International Dance Competition, and then took part in an event organized by Chengdu Trainee Company etm dynamic era A draft held.
This time, he was taken a fancy by the ETM vitality era. In September 2017, Huang Zhibo signed a contract with ETM and truly became a trainee. ETM exempted him from training fees of more than 100,000 yuan, took care of himself, and trained Huang Zhibo and four other boys to be a boy team.
“Efforts are proportional, and you will pay back as much as you put in it!”-The opportunity came suddenly, and he wrote in a warm tone-“At that time, I was thinking one step further from my dream!” In Chengdu, five The boys rented an apartment together, the room number is 1508, so they gave themselves the slogan: 1508, if you want it, you have to send it!
ETM Vitality Times is in a commercial building on Chunxi Road in Chengdu, opposite the landmark IFS International Financial Center. Tourists come and go, often taking photos with giant panda sculptures climbing on the wall. The 22nd floor of the building is the training room where Huang Zhibo used to be. When I went there, I had locked the door and it was full of debris.
The boy who brought me led me up to the 27th floor, and greeted a door with a code lock. The boy probed, hesitated in front of the doorbell. He said that he was just a “preparatory trainee.” He participated in ETM training courses at his own expense and did not sign a contract. If a trainee is a preparation for idols, he is a preparation for preparations. In the past, only trainees who signed a contract could enter the 27th floor. He still did not ring the doorbell and left.
When he first came to ETM as a trainee, Huang Zhibo was also very nervous. He recalled in the letter that the first thing he did when he came to the college every day was to weigh his weight. In addition to singing and dancing, the college will also give makeup lessons and language lessons. For him, this is “really difficult.” Because I have been livingGuangdong, he couldn’t tell the flat tongue, the college teacher assigned the task, as long as he made a mistake, he would slap him.
But ETM’s boy group plan soon failed. Huang Zhibo’s trainee friends describe ETM as a “training center”. Compared with the brokerage company that runs trainee debuts and future acting careers, it focuses more on the training of trainees’ singing and dancing skills.
On November 11, 2017, South Korean company Big Hit came to Chengdu to select candidates. Big Hit is commonly known in the industry as “Big Black”, and its group BTS has appeared on the cover of “Times” magazine in the United States and is known as the “First International Day Group”. Soon, his father received a call from Huang Zhibo. Huang Zhibo said that he had been selected by Lu Han’s company. ——My father remembered BTS as Lu Han, but obviously, he didn’t know these stars.
He asked Huang Zhibo, are you deceived? He also persuaded his son to dispel his thoughts, “Do that? Where is it possible for us, impossible, you can just learn to dance.”
Father finally agreed and prepared to apply for a visa for him. But when he arrived in the town, his father learned that a Korean visa requires a proof of assets. My father borrowed 50,000 yuan from his relatives as a temporary running water, and he also found a scalper to transfer a Toyota car owned by his relative to Huang Zhibo. But the visa was still not approved because there is no house. No one is willing to transfer the property to Huang Zhibo’s name.
“My dad came to me, anyway, it’s all in the countryside. I think it’s impossible to be a star.” My father shook his head.
Huang Zhibo was frustrated when he learned that his visa was refused. His trainee friends said that Big Hit values Huang Zhibo very much, and only selected him in the same period. After waiting for more than two months, he finally gave up.
Huang Zhibo did not tell his friends the real reason why he could not go to Dahei. Some people have speculated that visas in Guangdong are very strict? Others asked wonderingly, how could Huang Zhibo’s visa fail? “How can I get the Korean visa right after I apply for it?”
Half a year later, the staff of Lehua Entertainment contacted Huang Zhibo. In the trainee industry in China, Lehua Entertainment is a name that cannot be bypassed. Its artists include Wang Yibo, Huang Minghao, Fan Chengcheng, etc. The boss Du Hua just made a wave of popularity in the variety show “Sister Riding the Wind and Waves”. A trainee made an analogy. If the three major entertainment companies in South Korea are regarded as their Tsinghua University and Peking University, then Lehua is 985 and 211, while all other domestic companies, he emphasized that “everything” is two or three. Colleges, or colleges.
This time, Lehua promised to send Huang Zhibo to Korea for trainingAt the time of TM, he had his 17th birthday, and the people who came to the party were Zhou Zhennan, Ma Boqian, Liu Renyu, and Su Ruiqi. ——”The appearance fee is more than one million now.” The hottest among them is Zhou Zhennan, who made his debut as the number one in “Creation Camp 2019”. Now, most of the famous trainee friends have deleted Liu Dong’s WeChat account.
Liu Dong is willing to talk about his highlight moments. A company he had signed before allowed him to experience the taste of a celebrity, “I hired a makeup artist, a stylist, and dyed one of the most expensive hair in my life, in Sanlitun, four thousand yuan.”
Next, he talked about a more exciting detail, “(The company) assigned me four agents.” Every day, four assistants took turns to carry his bags, and it seemed that there was nothing more to do. But in fact, his bag is not heavy at all, “I installed a lyrics book, BB Cream, and I installed these two things.”
The more glorious moment happened when he was 17 years old. That year, he was selected by Lehua and came to Beijing for training. He has a pure black student head, is 1.8 meters tall, and weighs 123 kg easily. He recalled enthusiastically that Lehua positioned him as “the first love of a young girl.”
But two months later, he left Lehua. He explained that because the agent who took him leapfrogged him, he became a victim of the personnel struggle and missed the “Idol Trainee”. Later, the three companies also had various problems.
The partner who trained together is already at the top of attention. Liu Dong suffered from persistent insomnia, and he had to drink a dozen beer at night to fall asleep. He spent a fewEvery pass night, I wrote a seven or eighty thousand words about my experience as a trainee “Autobiography”, during which he angrily wrote:
“You are not worthy, this world is not worthy, this society is not worthy, and is not worthy of my best side. Even if I say that, you will only say something contemptuously, no need.”
After the termination of the contract with the last company, Liu Dong returned to his hometown in Chengdu and lived a life of playing games and drinking. It seemed that he was about to give up being a trainee. The time we met for the first time had to be postponed because he participated in a wine bureau last night. After we met the next day, he went to a wine bureau again. That time I went there together, and at three o’clock in the morning, five or six young people were still punching round after round., Throw the dice and eat the devil’s spicy barbecue. That’s how Liu Dong gained weight. Due to long-term drinking, he has grown from 120 jin to 150 jin now.
But he was still unwilling. When we last met, Liu Dong proposed to go for a run. He once again signed up for a boy group show next year, determined to lose weight. When we arrived at a lake in the south of Chengdu, he stood on the side of the road and wanted to retching after not taking a few steps, and then said he wanted to go to the toilet. Finally he let me go first and couldn’t help but vomit. After he caught up, he explained that he had taken diet pills and L-volatility before going out, which could induce vomiting. Before, he had tried the enzyme recommended by his friends, and he had a stomachache eight times a day, and he never dared to eat it again.
But compared to Huang Zhibo, even if he did not make his debut, Liu Dong would not be under financial pressure. Liu Dong lives in a well-off family in Chengdu. His parents are civil servants and the family is in business. A British short-silver gradation cat is jumping lively in his 200 square meter home. His parents are planning to buy him another car and house.
In an interview, the CEO of an idol company predicted that after Huang Zhibo’s accident, “afterwards, he will only avoid poor artists, and even the entire industry will not dare to choose the poor easily, and his attitude will be more conservative than before.” The media wrote that at the moment, in the entertainment industry, the class itself is the ticket.
The trainees who trained with Liu Dong are in very good family conditions. Liu Dong will still say in an enviable tone, “It turns out that we have said that there is such a rumor that Zhou Zhennan’s house, walking from the living room to his bedroom is 20 Minutes.” The media once called Zhou Zhennan “rich and young in Sichuan and Chongqing”. Liu Dong said that he and Zhou Zhennan went to Beijing to interview the South Korean company SM. Zhou Zhennan asked him what hotel he wanted to stay in. He said that it would be fine to stay. As a result, Zhou Zhennan settled on a Marriott hotel for RMB 8,900 per night. “Living in a hotel gives me class differences.” (Recently, there were news reports that Zhou Zhennan’s parents, as real estate businessmen, were listed as dishonest and executed in 2016. The list of people involved is nearly 1.23 billion yuan.)
There is also Ma Boqian, who participated in “Son of Tomorrow”, whose father is the University of Southern CaliforniaSchool of Architecture Dean. Liu Dong said, “His dad has more entries on Baidu than Ma Boqian.”
Sometimes they told Liu Dong to go out to play, but he didn’t dare to agree, “No strengthSomeone’s family is good, and then I feel inferior in every respect.” He guessed that it was just like Huang Zhibo’s in Lehua. ——In Lehua, almost all of the trainees with Huang Zhibo are rich children, and there is also a second-generation star.
I asked Huang Zhibo about his family background in the letter. At first, he said, “Family background doesn’t have much influence on being a trainee.” But if he doesn’t make his debut for a long time, “it may have an impact on the family.”
The cost is getting bigger and bigger. Huang Zhibo mentioned in his letter several times that after he was on the show, he needed to pay more attention to dressing up and buy more expensive clothes. “After you have a reputation, you can’t do whatever you want. There will be people at airports, events, and commutes. Follow you.” After participating in “Famous with the Mission”, he flew from Wuxi to Shenzhen, and a sister at the station followed suit at the airport. After the picture was released, some people directly said he was poor and soiled.
Later, another trainee gave Huang Zhibo a Gucci jacket for 20,000 yuan. This is Huang Zhibo’s most expensive dress.
Last year, Huang Zhibo participated in Lehua’s 10th Anniversary Celebration in Macau, with Han Geng and Wang Yibo performing together. After the performance, he returned to Shenzhen and lived for two days in a house his sister rented for 600 yuan a month. Even on such a small thing as supper, he would quarrel with his sister over a 70-80 yuan crayfish.
He wants to eat crayfish, but my sister disagrees, saying that the crayfish is not clean. My sister didn’t say anything. In order to go to Macau to watch Huang Zhibo’s performance, she spent hundreds of yuan to save some money.
At that time, Huang Zhibo was worried and felt that he was “going back to his original life again.” His sister urged him and asked him when he could make his debut and when he could make money. He didn’t know either. Two months before being arrested, he often locked himself in a karaoke room. Sometimes emotionally unstable, he and his teammates go to a restaurant near the company to drink. After drinking and returning to the dormitory, he took the clothes and went to the laundry room, where he vomited and cried for three hours.
“I know very well that the family can’t support it for long, and the family can’t wait for me for that long.” Huang Zhibo wrote that he regarded the upcoming “Youth Name” as his “last fight.”
Five
In July of this year, I got a chance to watch the performance of “The Name of a Boy”.
Summer in Changsha is very hot. Standing on the street for a while, you can feel the heat in your body. But this did not affect the enthusiasm of the girls. At two o’clock in the afternoon, the surrounding roads had already been invaded by aid materials. Fans waved flags and presented passers-by with homemade milk tea, fruit boxes, and posters, flags and banners with trainees’ heads lined up:
“There is something in Chaowen’s eyes, my sister is dizzy!”
A view of participating in two consecutive performancesPeople say, the streets were empty a month ago, when the show was still Not broadcast. The popularity of this street was quickly accumulated within a month.
The performance begins. Zhang Yixing, Cheng Xiao, Guo Jingming, and Hu Yanbin were seated as tutors. This day is a knockout match, and only half of more than fifty trainees will remain. The boys wear pumpkin-colored eye makeup, with shiny patches on the corners of their eyes. Accompanied by the fast music rhythm, they danced, lifted their clothes, exposed their eight-pack abdominal muscles, blinked and blew kisses.
The girls in the audience screamed, “So handsome!” “So handsome too!”
In order to compete for the chance to stay, the trainees wept, bowed, and acted like a baby again and again, “We really need this opportunity, I don’t want to go.”
The girls shouted again, “We love you!” “Don’t cry!”
At first, I always reminded myself that when I was working, I should seize the time to interview the girls around me, and didn’t pay much attention to who was on the scene again, until these two trainees appeared:
Ten people, every day someone counts down the days when Huang Zhibo came out:
“There are still one thousand and twenty-five days, we will wait! Three years and three months, one thousand and eighty-five days, very soon.”
“It’s a three-digit countdown.”
“999 days left.”
Six
It is hard to imagine how many trainees in China have not made their debut. According to media estimates, this number is at least 15,000. It is also hard to imagine how many young people in China want to be trainees. Whenever I search on Weibo for the recruitment of trainees from various entertainment companies, I can always see countless young people leaving behind their photos and contact information. Many of them are still junior high school students or even elementary school students. A 12-year-old girl has already decided on her stage name to be “Fan Xixi”. A 14-year-old girl will note “130 (I can lose)” in the weight column. Another 14-year-old girl’s dream is straightforward, “Debut, fire.”
I met Jiang Yun in a Japanese food store in Beijing. His nickname is “Human Trafficker in Entertainment Industry”-he specializes in mining amateurs and recommending them to various brokerage companies. For this reason, he registered 8 WeChat accounts, each Every WeChat is filled with people.
He raised his phone and said, “I will show you some of the recent ones.”
The first chat interface is a sixteen-year-old boy. In the video, his face is a bit dry and thin, and there is an obvious mole on the corner of his mouth. He introduced himself and said: “I want to be a trainee…” Before he could finish listening, Jiang Yun quickly passed, “Look, his mouth is crooked and his head is crooked.”
The second one was a boy from Tianjin. Jiang Yun said, “Look like this”-the boy is quite fat, with small eyes, a round face and an inch. The people present laughed. He said in a helpless tone, “I don’t laugh anymore, they don’t have self-awareness.”
He also said that sometimes when he met a girl who wanted to be a trainee, she felt that the conditions were inappropriate, but did not dare to reply, “She is going to commit suicide.” He also said that once he went to Wuhan to help a company for recruitment, and he received one halfway through. On the call in Inner Mongolia, a woman came up and scolded him, saying that the child who was in the second year of the middle school was gone, and you abducted our child. The woman was also preparing to call the police. He persuaded her, but the next day she found that the girl had really come to Wuhan alone. The parents flew over that day and picked up the girl.
“This generation of young people is really ruined because of these trainee programs,” Jiang Yun kept sighing.
Of course heKnow what is behind it. In the past two years, iQiyi, Tencent, and Youku have launched eight similar programs. Brokerage companies entered the arena, and one of them wrote in the trainee recruitment copy: “We do not recruit players or trainees, only the next super idol.”
Jiang Yun described, “The most terrible thing is that” the company’s top artist went off to grab trainees and called children who had not signed the company. “Yang Mi said, I am your sister Mi, are you free tonight? Go have a meal.” The owner of the other new company is Shang Wenjie. He takes people to the interview, and Shang Wenjie sits in the office.
Everyone is waiting for the next “super idol” to emerge. There was also Koizumi, the agent of a film and television company. When I first met with her, I talked about Cai Xukun, who became the top performer in “Idol Trainee”. When I called Cai Xukun’s name directly, Koizumi lowered her voice, “Hush, be careful that the wall has ears.” She called Cai Xukun “Cai Cai”. This is the “famous taboo” in the broker circle-only the top will have such treatment-“The first person you can respond to is him.”
There is also chaos. Koizumi mentioned that a company headquartered in Sanlitun, Beijing, expanded its recruitment uncontrollably in order to charge high training fees. When she went to visit, she walked into the office and she saw a long round table like “The Last Supper” with people next to people inside. She asked who these people were. The other party said they were all brokers. They also said that brokers didn’t need a work place because they “go to Sanlitun every day to get business.”
A boy who graduated from Peking University signed this company. I asked him how the company charges, and he replied, “I can’t disclose this.” During the phone call, he had a pleasant memory of this trainee’s life, saying that the company had organized a group for internal trainees and was still Beijing 798 set up a stage performance. When leaving, he posted a Weibo, “I really enjoy this time.”
“Just to create this illusion for them!” Koizumi said. What puzzles her is that even the trainees recommended by this company will be accepted on the platform.
In fact, none of the three platforms have more talents to tap. This year’s only men’s group show “The Name of the Youth” made “tweeted meat” (referring to trainees who did not debut and participated in the variety show continuously)As a promotional point. The guest Zhang Yixing even said that he felt that he should not do this show this year, “I have finished so many waves before, how can we produce good seed?”
After the trainee system that originated in South Korea was transplanted to China, everything accelerated. In South Korea, it takes three to four years for a men’s team and two to three years for a women’s team. However, a domestic company trains a trainee, and sometimes puts on the show after two months of practice. Everything revolves around the show. Some trainees even complained to Koizumi that the former club paid too much attention to “hardware strength” and too much attention to singing and dancing—”(But) it was Yang Chaoyue who was so popular.”
“There are no standards for choosing trainees in China from the beginning,” said Jiang Yun.
But in just two years, the trainee industry is no longer the most popular choice. The rise of short videos has had a strong impact on the idol industry. The media began to report that “capital has abandoned this industry.” An entertainment reporter said that a trainee company she interviewed had confidently set up a trainee echelon. By this year, all trainees were disbanded and publicity brokers were transformed. Xiaohongshu took a short video.
It turned out that Jiang Yun felt that “Internet celebrities are very low.” Now he is also thinking about whether to sign the artist and do MCN by himself.
On this day, Jiang Yun and Koizumi discussed a popular girl. In two days, he took the girl to interview with eight entertainment companies, and all wanted to sign her. Koizumi’s company is one of them.
The girl has enough confidence to choose a company. She is 19 years old and is an internet celebrity with more than one million Douyin fans. According to Jiang Yun, she has bought a three-million-dollar house in Chengdu and now has a stable income of six figures every month.
I opened her Douyin interface, and the short video with the most likes exceeded one million. It only took a few seconds to click on it. It was her smiling back at the beach. The girl is indeed very beautiful, with a ponytail, a tall nose and wearing a student uniform. The other few high praise short videos are her smiling faces from selfies and the smiling faces in the sunset.
Relying on “face value”, she got these.
Seven
Huang Zhibo and I have exchanged four letters in total.
Talking about the past,”Effort” and “diligence” are the most frequently mentioned words. “Those who work hard may not be rewarded, but those who do not work hard will never be rewarded.”
Speaking of the current life, he wrote down some pain, “If it weren’t for my family to bring me motivation, I might have died long ago.” But more often, he uses a reassuring tone, “The elder brothers inside are very nice, and they told me a lot of life principles.”
After entering the detention center, he was still thinking about singing and dancing. He asked his sister to send Korean scripts, books made by pop music, menswear matching magazines, autobiography of musicians or dancers, named “Yang Wenhao, rap musician Jony J and Yu Jiayun”, and also asked to print an English song The lyrics of “I love you 3000” say he wants to “learn”.
He asked his sister to print two stage photos, choosing two “handsome”, he explained: “Because there is no mirror, I haven’t seen myself in a long time.”
He also wanted to read recipes and special forces books. The reason was: “Nowadays all men must be able to cook a good table”, and, “When I was a child, I especially liked watching special forces TV series. I used to watch “Special Forces “I just fell in love with it. I thought it was really cool at the time.”
Sometimes, when I open his letter, I can’t help laughing after reading it for a while. In the letter, he was still a little immature, even a little naive young man.
Speaking of plans for the future, Huang Zhibo also said that at the beginning, he spent every day by imagination and wanted to do business in the past. He asked his sister to send city maps of Beijing and Hangzhou, “it has something to do with my future career planning.” He feels that these two cities are very suitable for starting a company, and he has to choose the address of the future company according to the map.
But more often, he emphasized that if he wants to understand, he will still do dance and music in the future. “The deepest one in my heart, I told me that music and dance are part of your life. Don’t be afraid of Perfect corner, we must not forget the original intention.”
His tone is high-“I will get back all I have when I go out, and I will not be overwhelmed by difficulties!”
He also agreed with me—”I’ll be myself when I go out. I can’t do it as an idol. I’ll just do my music. If I can’t do it, I will go behind the scenes. Then I will start a national tour and invite you. Be sure to come by then!”
At the end of August, “The Name of the Youth” ended, and a new boy group was born again. Huang Zhibo also pays attention to “The Name of the Youth”. He asked his sister to print him a program ranking, and then asked me in the letter:Is the show “Name of the Year” popular? Is the song “Attention” for the first stage song of Xiao Su and Xiao Hu this time? I also heard my lawyer say, “The Name of a Boy” was postponed because of me?
I told him that one of his teammates made a successful debut, but I couldn’t bear to mention that among the trainees, he had already been removed. In the name of the group, his face was smeared with a thick mosaic early, and even in one shot, a trainee just called Huang Zhibo’s name and his mouth was also smeared.
At the end of a letter, he rarely did not “positive” and “sunshine”, but asked me a series of questions:
“If you were who you are now, how would you think of yourself and the future? Would you feel uncomfortable because you missed the opportunity and ruined yourself? Would you be unwilling? Will it be what you live after Shadow? What do you think about all this? Time is really fast, and suddenly I saw on TV that my company’s junior sister XXX also came out to record a show, and sometimes I saw some friends I know on TV or in magazines. I will be thinking wildly in my heart, especially uncomfortable, watching others on the stage and seeing my current situation, I especially want to cry.”
(Thanks to Zeng Ming for his guidance and help in this article.)
(At the request of interviewees, Lu Qi, Liu Dong, Jiang Yun, and Koizumi are pseudonyms in the article)
Picture source: Huang Zhibo’s personal Weibo, official Weibo in the name of the group, and official Weibo in the name of Juvenile