At the edge of the stage, four Laughter Representatives applauded, awaiting the final performer of the round.
Su Xinyi’s smile had long reached the corners of her eyes. Her arms were slightly raised, and her clapping was the most enthusiastic. Luo Qin and Qi Junhan were equally full of anticipation, their eyes fixed intently on the person stepping onto the stage.
Lu Yi’s applause, however, was half a beat slower than everyone else’s—one clap after another, always out of sync.
As the dazzling stage lights faded, Chu Duxiu walked to the center of the stage, picked up the microphone, and bowed deeply. “Hello everyone, I’m Chu Duxiu.”
After the applause subsided, she spoke with a hint of self-deprecation, “The final round’s theme is Where the Laughter Begins. When I first saw it, I panicked—Where the Laughter Begins?”
“It almost feels like the production team is subtly criticizing us, suggesting that none of us were funny until the finals. Like after all this time, the laughter is only just beginning.”
The audience in the front rows burst into crescent-eyed laughter, while the other contestants clapped their knees in amusement.
Scallion joked, “The production team is throwing shade—”
Cheng Junhua deadpanned. “…I don’t even know which aspect to address.”
Bei He chimed in, “Exactly, they’re making it hard for us!”
“Or, think about it from another angle—maybe the production team meant it this way. The directors probably thought, ‘It’s the finals, the recording is almost over, the audience can’t laugh anymore, but finally, we can laugh.'”
She sighed helplessly. “So, this is where the staff’s laughter begins. Just seven words, yet they speak volumes about the struggles of every working person.”
On the other side of the screen, Shang Xiaomei chuckled but quickly composed herself, nodding in agreement. “Makes sense.”
“I’ve noticed that sometimes, especially on important occasions, people love using inspirational phrases to define all sorts of things. For example, ‘where the laughter begins,’ or ‘it is both the end and the beginning—the race of life never truly ends.’ I’m not entirely sure what they mean, but they certainly sound profound.”
Chu Duxiu paced leisurely across the stage as she spoke. “When I was in middle school, at the start of a new semester, there was a bulletin board at the school entrance meant to motivate us to study hard and pursue our dreams. The title was ‘Where Dreams Begin.'”
“But unfortunately, our first class that day was math.”
She came to a halt and said with feigned regret, “So for me, ‘where dreams begin’ wasn’t where ambitions took flight—it was literally where dream began.”
Laughter rippled through the audience.
“Another example is how some parents obsess over the saying, ‘Don’t let your child fall behind at the starting line.’ I’ve never believed in that. I have a twin sister, and she was born heavier than me. Honestly, you didn’t even have to wait until birth—you could tell during prenatal checkups that one of us was bigger than the other.”
“Don’t let your child fall behind at the starting line?”
She said with mock seriousness, “Well, some kids haven’t even learned to run yet, and they’ve already ‘fallen behind’ in the womb. They didn’t even need to wait for the starting line.”
Boom—
Qi Junhan burst out laughing and slammed his hand on the buzzer, lighting up a vote of approval!
Chu Duxiu shrugged and said lightly, “Of course, some families might encounter this situation and sigh, ‘Wow, what a pity—both are girls.'”
The next second, she held the microphone with one hand and mimed feeding soup with the other, “Then, during the postpartum month, they’d keep serving the mother more ‘inspirational broth,’ saying, ‘Start preparing for the next pregnancy—it’s both the end and the beginning. The race of life never ends.'”
Beneath the humor lay a sharpness, like a fine silver needle, piercing through the atmosphere in an instant!
A mix of gasps, laughter, and applause erupted throughout the venue, swirling together like storm clouds gathering before a downpour.
Su Xinyi slammed her hand on the buzzer, lighting up the second vote of approval!
Wang Nali exclaimed, “Wow—”
Lu Fan commented, “She’s on a roll.”
“Just kidding—so I’ve never really bought into those abstract concepts people fixate on, those so-called critical points or standard lines they draw. Take ‘where the laughter begins,’ for example. It almost implies that there was no joy before? That happiness only starts now?”
“It reminds me of the lies teachers and parents tell us. They always say, ‘You’ll be happy once you get to middle school,’ ‘You’ll be happy once you’re in college,’ ‘You’ll be happy once you start working’…”
Chu Duxiu spoke with utmost sincerity, “I’ve been fooled too many times. Even when my mom says, ‘If you win the championship, I’ll never bother you again—you can be as happy as you want,’ I still can’t bring myself to believe it.”
“Because I know there’s always a catch. After ‘you’ll be happy once you start working,’ there’s inevitably going to be ‘you’ll be happy once you get married,’ ‘you’ll be happy once you have kids,’ ‘you’ll be happy once you retire’…” She paused briefly, then added, “…and then ‘you’ll be happy once you’re six feet under.'”
The audience burst into laughter, some covering their mouths in amusement.
Chu Duxiu lamented with mock indignation, “There are just too many tricks. This isn’t even the story of the boy who cried wolf—it’s the story of the wolf pack coming, and worse, they’re intellectual wolves, getting more and more international. Everything they say is either empty promises or ‘wolf culture’ motivational talk.”
“Take a bite of that ‘promise,'” she raised her hand and mimed taking a bite of an imaginary pie, chewing thoughtfully as if savoring the taste. “Savor it, mhm, just savor it. Ah, what clever Chinese wolves, what eloquent Chinese rhetoric!”
The melodic delivery, the vivid performance, and the unexpectedly witty punchline sent the entire audience into roaring laughter.
On stage, the lights brightened as Luo Qin hit the buzzer, activating the third approval light.
The other contestants burst out laughing, some doubling over in amusement while others cheered and stirred up the atmosphere.
Scallion exclaimed in awe, “Level and oblique, rising and falling—what a clever rookie champion, what hilarious Chinese wordplay!”
Nie Feng shook his head, both amused and exasperated. “Where did she even learn these comedy skills…”
Chu Duxiu continued, “And when I finally get down there, Meng Po is waiting with her soup. Before she even opens her mouth, I’ve already learned to cut to the chase: ‘Don’t tell me—you’re going to say I’ll be happy once I drink this and get reincarnated?'”[1]
She quickly turned her back, waving a hand dismissively. “Don’t even try to serve me that soup. I’ve had too many empty promises—my digestion is ruined. I can’t take anymore.”
“Then Meng Po forces the soup toward my mouth and says, ‘How could that be? This is where laughter begins—and also where jokes begin.'”
“Heh. Rookie Queen? The gag is good, and the gut is good too.”
“At that point, I couldn’t tell if she was chuckling—or just urging me to start chugging.”
Playful laughter spread through the live final like colorful bubbles.
Lu Yi reached for the buzzer.
Chu Duxiu, with the cadence of a poet reciting verse, drew out her words slowly, “Who would have thought that where the laughter begins—if it truly exists—is actually my bed, paired with a fully charged phone, letting me roam freely online.”
“The moment I lie down, the laughter sets sail. No wonder they say short-form videos are so down-to-earth.”
She continued, her tone almost lyrical:
“And who would’ve thought that where the laughter begins… is often just me typing ‘haha’ into a screen. But those ‘hahas’? They’re rarely real.”
“Sometimes it’s just an awkward pause-filler—a verbal shrug for when I have no idea what to say. It’s socially encrypted code for ‘I hope this doesn’t start a fight’. You see a string of ‘hahahaha’… but what it really decodes to is: ‘You absolute moron.’”
Wave after wave of laughter swept through the audience, with people raising their hands in agreement, as if deeply resonating with her words.
“Who would have thought that where the laughter begins… Why do we even set standards for joy?” Chu Duxiu mused, her tone brimming with genuine curiosity. “Life shouldn’t be like a race track—forcing you to sprint straight ahead. And laughter? It especially shouldn’t be. It should be more like figure skating.”
“After all, humans are the measure of all things. I don’t care about start or finish lines, societal rules, or success and failure. I just want to glide freely—skate as I please, without purpose, even recklessly…”
“From Shicha Lake all the way to the Arctic Ocean, from East Asia to North America, from the South Pole to the North Pole, from the solar system to the Milky Way! I’ll skate until butterflies take flight, skate with flair and imagination, skate beyond the boundaries of convention!”
“The world never had roads—only when many skated did paths emerge!”
“No need to wait for ice. If there’s no ice left in the future, the joy in my heart will become the ice itself!”
With passionate delivery, and vivid, inspiring gestures, she ignited a storm of excitement across the venue.
The emotions bottled up through the first two rounds now exploded without restraint, pouring out in a cathartic release—like a hurricane of euphoria that swept through every corner of the room, leaving no one untouched, not even those in the very back rows.
On screen, Shang Xiaomei remarked with admiration, “This is even better than her open mic performances at the theater. I’m surprised the energy hasn’t dropped despite the bigger venue.”
When the space expands, the back rows often end up disconnected—only the front rows usually get swept up in the excitement. Especially for performers with a more subdued style, if the opening doesn’t land well, the atmosphere can easily fizzle, failing to reach those farther back.
But Chu Duxiu, no matter the setting, had a way of pulling everyone in—every single audience member.
Xie Shenci didn’t respond. His gaze remained fixed on the screen, completely absorbed in her performance.
The other contestants couldn’t help but rise to their feet in applause.
Scallion, swept up in the electric atmosphere, ran his hands through his hair, overwhelmed. “Wow—”
Cheng Junhua smiled wryly. “Youth truly is something.”
Nie Feng clapped. “Now that’s talent!”
Wang Nali applauded. “She has such a gift for using her imagination to blow the roof off the place!”
The roaring cheers gradually subsided, allowing Chu Duxiu to seamlessly resume her performance.
She said calmly, “I once discussed this with a friend—how life shouldn’t be a track with a fixed finish line, but more like ice skating, where you savor the glide. You don’t care about external definitions. My laughter doesn’t need a starting point—it’s always there. Sounds pretty inspiring, right?”
“But then, out of nowhere, they got dead serious and hit me with this question.”
Chu Duxiu paused, her expression shifting as if deep in thought, dangling a rhetorical hook that instantly captured the audience’s attention.
“‘So, like certain philosophies… you think you’re the center of the universe?’”
The audience, still wiping tears of laughter from earlier, leaned in, eagerly awaiting her response.
Chu Duxiu hissed softly, feigning confusion. “You mean… idealism? Anthropocentrism? Protagoras?”
“No,” she replied, dropping the punchline with a straight face: “I mean the Ice-Competitivism of a certain nation’s athletes. Massimida.”
Sound of silent disbelief…
A few seconds later, waves of laughter erupted once more—like echoes bouncing recklessly between mountain peaks—crashing through the studio again and again, lingering long after the initial swell.
As the finals drew to a close, the live audience buzzed with exhilaration, while online viewers flooded the stream with frantic, flying comments.
The live viewership count peaked, with everyone heatedly discussing Chu Duxiu’s performance.
[Mind-blowing!]
[What pacing—she’s a master of rhythm!]
[Her energy breaks through the screen—absolutely terrifying!]
On stage, Chu Duxiu’s eyes glowed with a soft light. No longer raising her voice to hype the crowd, she spoke with a clean, gentle clarity.
“Perhaps the more we search for where laughter begins, the more it eludes us.”
“Don’t set standards for happiness or success. Just glide freely across the ice of life—and when you realize everything is already within you, that’s when the laughter truly begins.”
“Thank you, everyone. I’m Chu Duxiu.”
Under the dazzling stagelights, she faced the applauding audience and bowed deeply.
Translator’s Notes:
[1] In Chinese mythology, Meng Po (孟婆) is a figure associated with the afterlife. She is known as the “Lady of Forgetfulness” or the “Benevolent Goddess of Forgetfulness” who serves in the Underworld. Her role is to prepare and offer a special tea or soup to souls before they are reincarnated. This brew erases all memories of their past lives, ensuring they enter their next life with a blank slate—free from attachments, regrets, or knowledge of previous existences.
