It Started With a Kiss (Taiwanese romance-comedy)
It’s been a while since we’ve added an entry. It could have something to do with our latest watch of “It Started With a Kiss (2005)”—a Taiwanese adaptation of the popular Japanese manga “Itazura na Kiss”.
The series stars a high school girl, Yuan Xiang Qin (Lin Yi Chen, a.k.a. Ariel Lin), who is academically challenged. On the academic ladder, she is right at the bottom, belonging to a class known to the school as Class-F. During a school assembly in her first year, she falls for a fellow schoolmate, Jiang Zhi Shu (Zheng Yuan Chang, a.k.a. Joe Cheng), who is not only tall, handsome and admired by all girls (and possibly guys alike), but he is smart—extremely smart, having the IQ of 200 and is Taiwan’s smartest student; he belonging to Class-A. Clearly, these two belong to two different worlds: Xiang Qin belongs to the world of the stupid (to put it bluntly) and is looked down upon by her peers, while the Zhi Shu is exceptionally bright and admired and respected by all around him.
Despite this difference, Xiang Qin builds up the courage to confess her feelings to the seemingly unattainable Zhi Shu through a hand-written letter. But with Zhi Shu shoving past her during her attempt, she is very much rejected and fails, becoming the laughing stock of the school. Although she failed, fate seemingly was on her side as a devasting earthquake levels her apartment, leading her to take temporary residence at no other than the one belonging to Zhi Shu and his family. And thus begins the hardwork she must do to win his affections.
At first, we thought it was going to be a very unbelievable, ‘fanficky’ type of series. During the first few episodes, that was what we saw: ’fanficky’—by that, we mean it seemed like certain events (such as the earthquake which only levelled Xiang Qin’s apartment) were created simply to achieve the meeting of the two main characters in the story just like those in fanfiction. But quickly such thoughts were dismissed and we really got into the series. We found it not only addictive, watching episode after episode hours on end, but that there was a few good old morals in there too. Amongst the romance, there was a major moral in this drama; and that is, in order to get what you want, you must work hard for it. In this case, Xiang Qin worked and fought hard not only academically, but for the person she loves. As a result she got what she put in.
Although we still standby our belief that the drama did have some (somewhat) cliché elements, they were used well. There were a few episodes near the middle that was a drag, but after about episodes 14, 15, and 16, it returns to the great series we think it is. If you like romance-comedies, enjoy seeing an under-dog’s attempt to rise, and don’t mind the few cliché moments, then definitely give this one a go. Joe Cheng is very cool in this one! He is not at all like the goofy-self in some of the clips we’ve seen of him in real life!
Resources to visit:
“It Started With a Kiss” is already released on DVD and so is its sequel, “They Kiss Again”. Although, you can probably get the both in most online stores selling asian DVDs, we like YesAsia just for its free shipping world wide. Sensasian sells the DVDs in both Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese, so it’s a great place to get the series in the different dialects. The original Taiwanese version has English subtitles (at least it did on our copy), and although it was a very poor translation, it was better than no English subtitles.
A few places to watch online is on Veoh, YouTube, Crunchyroll, and mysoju.com. TKA Subbers is a great resource on the sequel “They Kiss Again” and has a link to the group that does “It Started With a Kiss”. Currently TKA Subbers have the complete series online and are currently in the process of fansubbing all twenty episodes of the sequel with English subtitles.
Go grab yourself a copy!