Pei Kesong

Pei Kesong is Shen Tang’s agent and one of the clearest forces pushing her from a scandal-defined celebrity image toward a more disciplined acting career. Her importance lies less in dramatic confrontation than in sustained professional attention: she studies Shen Tang’s work, protects her opportunities, monitors her physical readiness, and treats even a struggling actress as someone whose career can still be rebuilt.

Identity and Professional Function

Pei Kesong operates within the entertainment industry as Shen Tang’s representative, handling both reputation management and role acquisition. Shen Tang is introduced as a low-ranking celebrity surrounded by relentless online rumors and a company public-relations strategy that pairs her indiscriminately with male co-stars to exploit her notoriety. Against that background, Pei Kesong’s work is unusually purposeful. She does not merely capitalize on Shen Tang’s visibility; she tries to convert that visibility into employability and better material.

Her professional judgment also contrasts with Shen Tang’s initial desire to abandon the industry. Shen Tang believes she is not destined to succeed and considers quitting, while her manager argues that even negative publicity is still publicity and that being noticed is a necessary condition of advancement. The argument connects fame to material responsibility: Shen Tang had previously wanted to earn enough money to buy a house and improve her siblings’ living conditions. Pei Kesong therefore frames celebrity not simply as vanity or humiliation, but as a difficult source of income and leverage.

Care Expressed Through Work

Pei Kesong’s concern becomes concrete after Shen Tang is injured and undergoes surgery. She arrives with a large fruit basket and an appropriately measured expression of concern, then reproaches Shen Tang for failing to tell her about the operation. Her visit is not only social courtesy. She immediately explains that an opportunity she obtained may now have to be refused because of Shen Tang’s recovery, making the connection between bodily vulnerability and professional loss explicit.

The opportunity is a third female lead in Director Zhou’s film. The role has limited screen time but a striking character design, and many people have competed fiercely for it. Pei Kesong’s disappointment shows that she has already been working on Shen Tang’s behalf before the actress could benefit from the result. Her intervention also gives Shen Tang a reason to reconsider her position: the agent’s efforts reveal that her career is not being left entirely to the company’s opportunistic publicity machinery.

Reputation Repair and Emotional Labor

Pei Kesong participates in the company’s attempt to clear Shen Tang’s image after the actress’s recent behavior attracts criticism. The company mobilizes paid commenters and marketing accounts, producing an almost one-sided wave of responses that recasts Shen Tang as funny rather than malicious. This campaign does not erase the larger pattern of scandal attached to her, but it marks a tactical change in how her public persona is managed. Instead of presenting her only as a target of condemnation or a sensational pairing device, the publicity effort makes her apparent foolishness commercially usable.

Shen Tang’s own conduct during livestreaming depends on the same division between public display and private calculation. She maintains a constant professional smile while viewers insult her, knowing that the stream will still generate money through her company’s revenue split. The stream sells agricultural products intended to help remote mountainous regions with overstocked fruit, and its popularity rises as black fans enter the room. In this environment, Pei Kesong’s reputation work and Shen Tang’s emotional performance belong to the same economy: visibility, even hostile visibility, can be converted into income and future opportunities when managed correctly.

Career Development and the Female General Role

After Shen Tang enjoys time away from work, Pei Kesong calls and the actress almost momentarily forgets who her agent is, because the days off have been so pleasant. The joke emphasizes the pressure of the profession, but Pei Kesong quickly restores the practical rhythm of employment. At the company, she walks around Shen Tang with knitted brows and asks whether she has gained weight. When Shen Tang claims that drinking more water has merely made her look bloated, Pei Kesong rejects the excuse, orders her to lose weight, and promises to send a strict schedule.

The demand is tied to a specific audition rather than to appearance for its own sake. Pei Kesong presents Shen Tang with a supporting No. 3 female role in a major intellectual-property production. The character comes from a prominent military family, is skilled in martial arts, and is cherished by her relatives, but becomes an orphan after her father and brothers die in battle and her mother dies from depression. Shen Tang immediately responds to the role because it represents a woman striving for achievement within a patriarchal society. Pei Kesong, however, reminds her that wanting the part is not enough: she must prepare physically and audition the following week.

This exchange captures Pei Kesong’s combination of encouragement and pressure. She recognizes a role capable of changing how Shen Tang is seen, yet she insists that the actress meet the production’s demands. Shen Tang agrees to lose weight properly because a female general cannot be played convincingly if she lacks the required physical presentation. Pei Kesong thus becomes a demanding gatekeeper to a more serious stage of Shen Tang’s career, translating artistic possibility into schedules, preparation, and professional accountability.

Relationship with Shen Tang and Narrative Role

Shen Tang’s feelings toward Pei Kesong are mixed but increasingly appreciative. After receiving a detailed Word document analyzing both the strengths and weaknesses of her variety-show performance, Shen Tang is surprised by the seriousness of the review. The program is only a variety show, yet Pei Kesong has examined it closely enough to provide a structured assessment. Shen Tang feels a tinge of regret, thinking that someone as diligent as Pei Kesong could easily have guided an Oscar-winning actor or actress instead.

That regret reveals the central tension in their relationship. Pei Kesong treats Shen Tang as a professional project worth investing in, while Shen Tang often sees herself as an unlikely success, a scandal-ridden celebrity whose career may not deserve such effort. The agent’s persistence gradually challenges that self-assessment. Her fruit basket, her reputation strategy, her performance review, her weight-loss demands, and her repeated attempts to secure strong roles all turn care into action rather than sentiment.

Pei Kesong is consequently a relatively steady supporting figure rather than a character defined by a single spectacular reversal. Her actions are practical, sometimes intrusive, and consistently tied to the material realities of acting: publicity, income, injury, body discipline, auditions, and the scarcity of desirable roles. Through her, the narrative presents career recovery as collaborative labor. Shen Tang supplies the talent, resilience, public smile, and willingness to accept difficult opportunities; Pei Kesong supplies scrutiny, advocacy, and the professional structure that makes those qualities usable.