# All About Secrets (秘果)
**All About Secrets** (秘果) is a Chinese youth novel by Rao Xueman (饶雪漫), first published in December 2009, that continues the story of her earlier novel *The Left Ear* (《左耳》) as its official spin-off. It follows seventeen-year-old Duan Bowen, who secretly falls for his unconventional teacher Li Er, known as "Little Ear," while his childhood friend Yu Chizi secretly loves him. The novel was adapted in 2017 into both a 24-episode web series on iQIYI and a theatrical film.[1](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original novel | By Rao Xueman; first published December 2009 by Contemporary World Press; about 113,000 characters in 31 chapters including an afterword[1](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink) |
| Relation to *The Left Ear* | Official spin-off (番外篇) continuing the character Li Er ("Little Ear"), now a teacher and the object of Duan Bowen's crush[1](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink) |
| Web series | 24 episodes, directed by Lian Yiqi (连奕琦), written by Rao Xueman, starring Chen Zheyuan and Li Landi; premiered April 10, 2017 on iQIYI[2](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink) |
| Web series viewership | Over 50 million views within 24 hours of premiere and over 100 million within 3 days; past 400 million by May 22, 2017[2](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink) • [3](https://m.mnw.cn/tv/guonei/1716104.html) |
| Film | Released July 7, 2017, starring Chen Feiyu and Ouyang Nana, both born in 2000; directed by Lian Yiqi[4](https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2017/0613/c404003-29335551.html) • [5](https://scdnews.com/images/paper/170315/170315C.pdf) |
| Film reception | Box office below 10 million yuan and a Douban rating of 5.0[6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0720/c40606-29416194.html) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
#### Season one
A Chinese high school in the late 2010s, a world of exam desks, bicycle rides home, and group chats about BIGBANG concerts. In the first scene, Yu Chizi (Li Landi), a loud, stubborn, warm-hearted girl, has been in love with Duan Bowen ([Chen Zheyuan](https://www.edgepedia.org/chen-zheyuan)) for as long as she can remember. They are neighbors and childhood friends, the kind of pair whose whole class assumes they are already together, which is exactly the assumption Yu Chizi wants to make true. Duan Bowen is quiet, guarded, and good at fencing off questions with half-smiles, and Yu Chizi reads his distance as shyness rather than as what it is.
Everyone in the show is hiding something. Yu Chizi hides the depth of her feelings behind teasing. Her friend Scarlett hides her own family troubles behind a fashionable, confident front. Duan Bowen hides the central secret: he has fallen for Li Er, the young teacher at their school, the same Li Er, nicknamed Xiao Er or Little Ear, who carried the story of *The Left Ear*.
The early episodes run on Yu Chizi's campaign to convert friendship into romance. She engineers situations where the two of them are alone. She interrogates him about his type. She recruits Scarlett as a spy and strategist. Scarlett, cool-headed and observant, keeps telling her that Duan Bowen is not what she thinks, and Yu Chizi keeps not listening, because wanting something for that long makes you a poor detective about it.
**The scene the series is remembered for is the birthday wish card in episode 5.** Yu Chizi gets hold of a wish card, writes her wish on it, and then uses it as a trap with teeth: in front of Sanshui, she makes Duan Bowen read her wish and say, on the record, that he is her boyfriend. It is staged like a small public execution, classmates watching, the card held up like evidence, Yu Chizi grinning while her heart hammers. Duan Bowen is cornered into playing along, and for one episode Yu Chizi gets everything she has wished for. Then Teacher Li Er walks in and interrupts the moment, and the whole fragile construction collapses, because Yu Chizi sees on Duan Bowen's face the one expression she never planned for: relief that someone saved him from her.
From there the show flips into its sadder, better half. Yu Chizi starts to piece together that Duan Bowen's distraction has a name, and she guesses wrong. She convinces herself that the person he secretly loves is Scarlett, which poisons her closest friendship at the exact moment she can least afford to lose it. The irony the series builds is that Scarlett is the one person actually telling her the truth, and Scarlett is the one who ends up discovering Duan Bowen's real secret, that the girl he writes about and watches from a distance is their teacher.
The back stretch deals with the fallout. Duan Bowen's crush on Li Er is treated less as a scandal than as a boy's misplaced idea of love, an attachment to someone kind who represents everything his own home life does not. Li Er handles it like an adult: she does not return the feeling and she does not humiliate him with it. Yu Chizi has to decide whether loving someone means exposing his secret or keeping it, and the show's answer, that she chooses to protect him even after he has broken her heart, is the emotional payoff the wish card was always pointing toward. The final episodes close the triangle without a fairy-tale ending: the secret comes out among the three of them, Duan Bowen lets the crush go, and Yu Chizi and Duan Bowen end the series changed, older, and not quite the couple she wrote on the card.
### Characters
Yu Chizi (Li Landi) is the show's beating heart, a girl who says everything loudly except the one thing that matters, and whose persistence in love is both her charm and her blindness. Duan Bowen (Chen Zheyuan) is the guarded boy at the center of the secret, kind but dishonest by omission, in love with someone he cannot have. Scarlett (played among the supporting cast) is Yu Chizi's best friend, the stylish skeptic who sees the truth first and has to decide what to do with it. Li Er is the young teacher and the object of Duan Bowen's secret, a returning character from *The Left Ear*, gentle and firm. Sanshui is a classmate caught up in the wish-card stunt.
### Interpretations and controversies
The series is inseparable from its source and its sibling. Rao Xueman adapted her own 2009 novel, and the story functions as a sequel to *The Left Ear*, sharing the character Li Er; fans on MyDramaList advise watching *The Left Ear* first, since Li Er's backstory gives Duan Bowen's crush its weight.[12](https://mydramalist.com/22836-all-about-secrets) When a 99-minute film version opened in July 2017 with a different cast (Chen Feiyu and Ouyang Na'na), viewers compared the two versions, and the film fared far worse with critics and audiences, scoring 4.6 on Douban against the web series' warmer reception.[13](https://movie.douban.com/subject/26650037/) Some viewers also note that the story's structure, a girl pursuing a boy who secretly pines for someone else, borrows from the American film *Flipped*.[13](https://movie.douban.com/subject/26650037/)
### Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations
The series adapts Rao Xueman's 2009 novel *Secret Fruit*. A film adaptation of the same novel, also titled *All About Secrets* and also directed by Lian Yiqi, was released in Chinese theaters on July 7, 2017, three months after the web series began airing, with Chen Feiyu, Ouyang Na'na, and Zou Yuanqing.[14](https://sino-cinema.com/2017/10/09/review-all-about-secrets-2017/) The whole universe grows out of *The Left Ear*, adapted from Rao Xueman's earlier novel and a surprise RMB 485 million box-office hit in 2015.[14](https://sino-cinema.com/2017/10/09/review-all-about-secrets-2017/)
## The novel
Rao Xueman, a bestselling writer of what Chinese criticism calls "youth pain" (青春疼痛) fiction, conceived *All About Secrets* as an extension of *The Left Ear*, building on the later story of the character Li Er and viewing the new generation of teenagers through their eyes.[1](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink) The story is organized around secrets as its central narrative thread. Duan Bowen, who lost his mother young and clashes with his stepmother, falls in love with Li Er, the independent-minded teacher, and keeps it hidden. Yu Chizi, his childhood companion, hides her own crush on him. When she discovers that her close friend, the school beauty Scarlett, has been quietly cultivating a special relationship with Duan Bowen, she designs a revenge plan against Scarlett, which rests on a misunderstanding. The novel follows the three through their emotional entanglements, and Duan Bowen finally acknowledges his feelings and pursues Yu Chizi during his university years.[1](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink)
The book appeared in three print editions: the first from Contemporary World Press in December 2009, a new edition from Yilin Press in 2012, and a May 2017 edition from Changjiang Literature & Art Publishing House (ISBN 978-7-5354-9295-1, priced at 28.00 yuan) released alongside an electronic edition on QQ Reading.[1](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink)
## The 2017 web series
The web series adaptation, produced by Bi'an Spring Pictures and Yilin Pictures, premiered on iQIYI on April 10, 2017, with Lian Yiqi directing and Rao Xueman writing the screenplay. It stars Chen Zheyuan as Duan Bowen and Li Landi as Yu Chizi, supported by Yu Zhihui, Liu Jianyu, and others, and runs 24 episodes of about 40 minutes each, filmed in Zhuhai.[2](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink) The series takes the post-2000 generation as its main viewpoint and follows the same core plot: the entanglement among Duan Bowen, Yu Chizi, and Scarlett, resolved with teacher Li Er's help as the students face the college entrance examination.[2](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink) • [7](https://www.tvmao.com/drama/NGQmMiU%3D)
Its opening performance was strong by the platform's standards: more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours and more than 100 million within three days, and by late May 2017 the total had passed 400 million.[2](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink) • [3](https://m.mnw.cn/tv/guonei/1716104.html) Critical commentary was less favorable. A [People's Daily](https://www.edgepedia.org/peoples-daily) media weekly report covering April 8 to 14, 2017 placed it among the week's top-ten new web series but judged its viewership clearly weaker than comparable campus youth dramas, arguing that unlike *With You* (《最好的我们》), which drew on the shared memories of the post-90s generation, *All About Secrets* offered sentiment without recognizable memory for most viewers.[8](https://media.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0418/c14677-29219127-4.html)
## The 2017 film
The film version, also written by Rao Xueman and directed by Lian Yiqi, opened in Chinese theaters on July 7, 2017, distributed as a summer release by Enlight Pictures.[4](https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2017/0613/c404003-29335551.html) • [5](https://scdnews.com/images/paper/170315/170315C.pdf) It stars [Ouyang Nana](https://www.edgepedia.org/ouyang-nana) as Yu Chizi and Chen Feiyu, son of director Chen Kaige, as Duan Bowen; both leads were born in 2000, and it was Chen Feiyu's first screen role.[4](https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2017/0613/c404003-29335551.html) The production deliberately cast young and largely inexperienced actors: Rao Xueman said she again used no big-name stars, and the film's publicity emphasized that its leads averaged only 17 years old.[9](https://ent.sina.com.cn/2016-12-30/doc-ifxzczff3474371.shtml) Filming took place in Dali, announced by Rao Xueman in December 2016.[9](https://ent.sina.com.cn/2016-12-30/doc-ifxzczff3474371.shtml)
**A restrained story.** Rao Xueman described the film as depicting the real life of seventeen-year-olds, with fewer melodramatic elements than *The Left Ear*; she noted that it avoids the stock devices of Chinese youth films, such as abortion and car accidents, which she had used in the earlier work.[4](https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2017/0613/c404003-29335551.html) Director Lian Yiqi, who had also directed the web series a year earlier, said he had always felt the novel suited film better, and that the film locks its characters at age seventeen: no heavy family subplot and no reunion of the characters as adults, only the story of their crushes, told through alternating viewpoints of Yu Chizi and Duan Bowen.[10](https://k.sina.cn/article_5936041758_161d0cf1e019002i49.html)
**Commercial result.** The film underperformed. By late July 2017 its box office had not reached 10 million yuan, and its Douban score stood at 5.0, despite the popularity of the source novel and the publicity value of its cast; industry commentary grouped it with other 2017 youth films that failed commercially as audiences stopped paying for the combination of a known IP and attractive young leads.[6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0720/c40606-29416194.html) A Sina Entertainment review was more positive, calling it the first youth film genuinely led by seventeen-year-old actors telling a story of seventeen-year-old emotional secrets, while noting that some character transitions lacked convincing motivation.[11](https://ent.sina.com.cn/original/filmreport/63/?from=wap)
## Place in Rao Xueman's adaptations
*All About Secrets* is one of several Rao Xueman novels adapted for the screen, following *The Left Ear*, which earned about 500 million yuan at the box office though its Douban score fell below the passing line.[4](https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2017/0613/c404003-29335551.html) The 2017 dual adaptation, web series first and film three months later, followed the same team-building pattern as *The Left Ear*: a promising director, a cast mixing a rising idol with newcomers, and Rao Xueman herself adapting the script and choosing the actors.[11](https://ent.sina.com.cn/original/filmreport/63/?from=wap) The two versions diverged in outcome: the series drew a large audience on iQIYI, while the film became an example of the weakening commercial appeal of the youth-film genre in 2017.[2](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink) • [6](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0720/c40606-29416194.html)
## References
1. [秘果（饶雪漫创作的青春小说）, Baidu Baike](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C/20816897?fromModule=lemma_inlink)
2. [秘果（2017年陈哲远和李兰迪主演的青春校园网络剧）, Baidu Baike](https://bkso.baidu.com/item/%E3%80%8A%E7%A7%98%E6%9E%9C%E3%80%8B/19727900?fromModule=lemma_inlink)
3. [网剧《秘果》播放量破4亿, 闽南网/网易娱乐](https://m.mnw.cn/tv/guonei/1716104.html)
4. [十七岁的真实青春，"没那么多狗血", 中国作家网/新闻晨报](https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2017/0613/c404003-29335551.html)
5. [中国影视 Daily News, 美南日报 (2017-03-15)](https://scdnews.com/images/paper/170315/170315C.pdf)
6. [专家谈国产青春片创作, 人民网/羊城晚报](https://media.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0720/c40606-29416194.html)
7. [秘果剧情介绍（1-24全集）, 电视猫](https://www.tvmao.com/drama/NGQmMiU%3D)
8. [影視輿情周報（2017年4月8日—14日）, 人民网](https://media.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2017/0418/c14677-29219127-4.html)
9. [《左耳》番外篇《秘果》开拍 饶雪漫编剧, 新浪娱乐](https://ent.sina.com.cn/2016-12-30/doc-ifxzczff3474371.shtml)
10. [专访《秘果》导演连奕琦, 新浪新闻/导演帮](https://k.sina.cn/article_5936041758_161d0cf1e019002i49.html)
11. [影片鉴定报告：鉴定《秘果》, 新浪娱乐](https://ent.sina.com.cn/original/filmreport/63/?from=wap)
12. [https://mydramalist.com/22836-all-about-secrets](https://mydramalist.com/22836-all-about-secrets)
13. [https://movie.douban.com/subject/26650037/](https://movie.douban.com/subject/26650037/)
14. [https://sino-cinema.com/2017/10/09/review-all-about-secrets-2017/](https://sino-cinema.com/2017/10/09/review-all-about-secrets-2017/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › East Asian web and streaming serials › Titles symbols to Co*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license