As someone who moves through the world of the jianghu, Master Chi once told a woman who came seeking life guidance: A woman must ultimately find a powerful man to lean on — even if she doesn’t need to.
At the time, the young woman didn’t believe a word of it. As one of Shanghai’s most celebrated socialites, she commanded a network of hundreds of women and had carved out serious power and presence in virtually every top-tier establishment across the city.
In her own words: “What’s a ‘small target’? I hit one every quarter. I don’t need to lean on any man.”
She wasn’t wrong. You could see it in every detail — the way she dressed, the way she carried herself. This was a woman fed well by wealth, a woman who had clawed her way to the top of a man’s world by sheer force of will.
In an era where digital payments have become second nature, someone who routinely carries thirty thousand in cash inside a Kelly bag is unusual — but not unheard of. With her, it was a different kind of statement. When she went out, she always preferred peeling off a stack of bills. When that wasn’t enough, she’d send one of her lackeys to pull more from the card. Some days, the amount she burned through in “dining expenses” alone reached forty or fifty thousand — which sounds like a lot, until you realize it barely touched ten percent of what her corps of women brought in that same day.
Her most iconic flourish, though, was wearing two watches on one wrist — a Patek Philippe and a Vacheron Constantin. Her explanation: one for the day life, one for the night life.
Which made Master Chi fairly certain she’d heard the Castro story: The old man wore two watches — one set to Cuban time, one set to American time.
People of the demimonde are nothing like those in business or politics. They demand to be seen, to shine, to overflow — especially a socialite like this one.
Seeing that persuasion was pointless, Master Chi stopped pressing. Some people simply have to walk into the wall themselves before they’ll turn around.
Fair enough. Getting burned and growing wiser — that’s the shared instinct of every sharp mind.
Sure enough, a year later, a message arrived from the socialite. It contained a man’s BaZi (Four Pillars of Destiny) and a string of transfer numbers that took a moment to read.
Take the fee, do the work. Master Chi had barely finished laying out the destiny chart when a photo of the man came through — and it mapped perfectly onto the Tai Yin pattern sitting in the life palace. Of course. A pretty boy.
For someone so clearly wrong for her, Master Chi said so plainly.
But that’s the delightful irony of this world — it operates exactly like nature, governed by its own food chain:
Naive girls get ensnared by sleazy older men. Sleazy older men get conquered by powerful women. Powerful women get captured by pretty boys.
The outcome? You already know. It played out like almost every story of a woman of the world — robbed by the pretty boy, then cast aside like yesterday’s news.
But in a way, it was inevitable. When a woman can no longer win love from a man stronger than herself, she will always choose a man who has nothing to offer except love. I don’t need your money. I just need your devotion, your warmth.
And the trouble with a pretty boy is that devotion is all he has.
Take Little Wu Mei (小武媚) as another example. The world’s opinion of her took a sharp nosedive after the 2018 incident — but from a purely personal standpoint, that wasn’t even the worst blow.
The worst blow was watching her man cower in silence when she was at the center of the storm.
Women like Little Wu Mei don’t flinch at a head-on fight. The network of influence standing behind her was not something any television host could simply outmaneuver.
That’s precisely why, after all those twists, it was the one standing in the righteous corner who ended up quietly swallowing pills in the end.
As for that so-called lover — he knew they could weather it. And yet he chose to protect himself, to stay unmoved and silent. That is what truly chills the bone.
(That single act of cowardice was enough that even in the entertainment world — notoriously cold and transactional — barely anyone wanted to be seen with this man afterward.)
The first incident came when the well-known national playboy had a very public sparring match with Little Wu Mei. His words went straight for the jugular — implying she had slept her way through the big names, the big bosses, and the big brothers. (There was more he didn’t dare say. If he had, he’d have caused real trouble for himself.)
Think of it this way: imagine someone picks a fight with your girlfriend and starts digging up the ugly chapters of her past. The person doing the digging may be loose-lipped, but they’re not technically lying. The woman firing back isn’t wrong either — two sides exchanging blows, blow for blow. But the question is: where is her man?
Standing silently in a corner, watching with cold eyes. Truly pathetic.
The second incident came when Little Wu Mei became the scapegoat for an entire power structure, shoved out front to face the full force of the storm. Again, this man said nothing and retreated into himself.
Other powerful figures in the industry keeping their distance — that’s understandable. She wasn’t their woman, and they weren’t about to let someone else’s fire burn them. But you, as her man — what exactly were you doing? It’s something Master Chi has never been able to make sense of.
Because this woman, when he was just beginning to rise and needed the most support, stepped forward without hesitation to lend her name and presence to his air-combat film. Right there, in front of everyone, she reached over, seized the cup of wine meant to humiliate him, and downed it in one go.
And this woman, even as her own star was beginning to fade, pushed to channel every resource and every connection to him first — and in doing so, cost herself the best window to reinvent herself in the age of variety entertainment.
As a public figure and artist, she had her flaws and her wrongs. But as a woman, she gave everything she had.
The tragedy is that women like this are everywhere. She is not the exception. Strip away the details, and every so-called bad man (渣男) in the world is ultimately the same thing: a person with no accountability, no backbone, no 担当.
This holds true not just in love but in work. Master Chi has traveled far and wide through this world, and has never once seen a man without accountability build anything of lasting worth.
Put plainly: a man without backbone is worth less than a dog in this world.