General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Lesson in Love (第9节课)

Lesson in Love (第9節課) is a 2022 Taiwanese romance drama series about a forbidden love affair between a female high-school Chinese-literature teacher and the male student who torments her, produced as an iQIYI original for the Chinese-language market¹. It stars Hsu Wei-ning (許瑋甯) and Edward Chen (陳昊森), with Ivy Yin (尹馨) and Hsueh Shih-ling (薛仕凌) in supporting roles². The series ran 12 episodes and was developed over two years by the team of producer Liao Chien-hsing (廖健行), with a per-episode production budget of about NT$6 million¹.

Key fact	Detail
Original title / English title	第9節課 / Lesson in Love²
Format	12-episode Taiwanese drama, iQIYI original, first released 11 December 2022¹^•³
Budget	About NT$6 million per episode¹
Director	Wang Li-wen (王麗文), a Hong Kong director working across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China⁴
Lead roles	Hsu Wei-ning as teacher Chen Meng-yun; Edward Chen as student Chang Yi-hsiang; the characters differ in age by 12 years²^•⁵
Supporting cast	Ivy Yin as Hsieh Shu-fen, the student's mother and parents' association chairwoman; Hsueh Shih-ling as student-affairs director Li Ta-wei²^•⁶
Audience rating	7.2/10 aggregate from about 14,900 user ratings on the awwrated review aggregator³

Spoilers

Premise

The story follows Chen Meng-yun (陳孟筠), a Chinese-literature teacher who joins Nan-Yi High School (南一高中) and is immediately targeted by Chang Yi-hsiang (張一翔), a top-scoring student with a record of troublemaking¹. The two move from antagonism to mutual attraction, and their relationship becomes a forbidden teacher-student romance that draws social condemnation, family conflict, and hostility from colleagues⁷.

Chang's mother, Hsieh Shu-fen (謝淑芬), is the school's powerful parents' association chairwoman, and her control over the school and her son drives much of the conflict⁶. The student-affairs director Li Ta-wei (李大為), played by Hsueh Shih-ling, initially helps the teacher, but the character later turns out to be a threatening, obsessive figure⁸.

Plot escalation. What begins as a campus romance grows darker as the series progresses: the relationship gives way to revenge plots and a campus stabbing, and around the eighth episode the story introduces the possibility that the two leads are half-siblings, reframing the romance as an incest question¹^•⁹. In the finale, rumors of both the teacher-student and sibling relationships spread through the school and media; Chen Meng-yun resigns, telling the principal, "The only wrong thing we did was fall in love"¹⁰.

Production

The series was produced by Jing Teng Entertainment (京騰娛樂), the company of film director Chen Yu-shan (陳玉珊, known for Our Times), from a script by Li Hsu-min (李旭敏), writer of Before We Get Married¹. It was the debut work of Simple Thinking Entertainment (簡單想娛樂), founded by producer Liao Chien-hsing after his previous company ended operations; Liao had more than 25 years in the industry, with credits including Rock Records in Love and the Q Series¹.

Liao said the team wanted to give youth romance new possibilities by developing a taboo romance rarely seen in the Chinese-language market, and that early discussions compared the premise to the Japanese drama Majo no Jōken (魔女的條件) from more than two decades earlier; the team concluded that changed attitudes toward love required adding human entanglement beyond pure romance¹.

Casting. The team chose Edward Chen before the release of his film Your Name Engraved Herein, valuing his changeable quality for a character described as kind-hearted but prone to trouble¹. Hsu Wei-ning was Liao's first choice for the teacher, on the grounds that her image as an independent woman matched the role and was recognized by audiences and the platform¹.

Direction. Wang Li-wen, a Hong Kong director who graduated from Fu Jen Catholic University's mass communication department in Taiwan, had not directed a Taiwanese drama since 多桑の純萃年代 in 2016⁴^•¹. She received the script while deciding whether to leave Taiwan during COVID-19 quarantine requirements, read all 12 episodes in two days, and accepted⁴. After joining, she held two months of writers' meetings to add detail to plot and characters, reasoning that the teacher-student romance was only the packaging and the story needed multiple elements to hold modern viewers¹.

Approach to the subject

Wang said she took a deliberately non-judgmental stance toward the taboo premise. In her view, teacher-student romances are common in real life and rarely discussed openly, and the drama's purpose was to show the people involved as living human beings rather than to encourage or oppose such relationships⁴. She described the core of the story as a human emotional relationship, with the difference lying only in status and role⁴.

The script includes five intimate scenes between the leads, a level of explicitness that surprised Wang when she read it⁴. The production paired her with an intimacy coordinator to stage the scenes¹.

Themes beyond the romance

Commentators and the broadcaster emphasized that the series embeds the romance in a set of social issues: school bullying, extreme parent-child control, workplace bullying of the teacher by colleagues and by privileged students, an abusive romantic partner, and power oppression rooted in the wealth gap⁸. After rumors of the affair spread, teachers ostracize Chen Meng-yun and remove her club classroom, and students with powerful families bully teachers with words and actions, showing bullying running from the campus into the workplace¹¹.

The first episode itself frames the topic through media coverage, with a news headline describing the teacher-student romance as "perverted love" (畸戀), reflecting how the term and labels such as "immoral" have been attached to such relationships in public discussion¹².

Place in the genre and reception

Taiwanese screen treatments of teacher-student romance had previously centered on a female student and a male teacher, as in Outside the Window (窗外), 18歲的約定, and Detention (返校); Lesson in Love reversed the pairing to a female teacher and a male high-school student¹³. The critic Chueh Chueh (雀雀) noted that despite the leads' 12-year age gap, the two actors read as visually close in age, making the series look at first like a polished youth campus romance accessible to general audiences¹³.

Viewer response was divided. On the awwrated aggregator the series held a 7.2/10 from about 14,900 ratings, with reviewers praising the suspense elements and pacing of the early episodes while criticizing the later plot as melodramatic³. Discussion of Ivy Yin's performance as the controlling chairwoman was also mixed, with Yin herself describing the role as a challenge because the character is loud and domineering while she is quiet by nature¹⁴.

The series reached additional audiences after its iQIYI run: it appeared on Netflix², and TVBS rebroadcast it on its Happy Channel (channel 42) from 26 February 2023⁸.

References

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 › Hong Kong and Taiwanese serial drama

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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