A friend recommended I watch Sexy Beijing, but since I’d heard the whole show was basically a knockoff of Sex and the City, I put off actually watching it for quite a long time.

The director and writer, Su Fei — whose name happens to match a certain Chinese sanitary napkin brand — documents ordinary Chinese people episode by episode, armed with her wonderfully witty takes. Although it resembles Sex and the City in form, its ability to see through the lives of ordinary Chinese people is every bit as sharp. I watched a few episodes this evening, and they were all quite good. Take the episode “Finding a Partner,” for instance — it clearly reflects the absence of real marriage and sexual fulfillment among Chinese people, whether among the older generation’s arranged, parent-dictated unions, or the younger generation’s seemingly unrestrained yet still hollow sex lives. There’s also a bit where a foreign guy reveals that Chinese women outperform American girls in bed. At the end, Su Fei compares village chicken to village-style simple love, and finds that both are things people want but don’t actually want to put in the work for.

In my view, for any audience on the Chinese mainland, Sexy Beijing is a light, easy introduction to sex — letting the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, caught between merely living and truly being alive, pause for a moment to think about love and sex.

Watch online: https://www.sexybeijing.tv/