General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Waiting For You In The Future (我在未来等你)

Waiting For You In The Future (我在未来等你) is a 2019 Chinese youth campus drama adapted from Liu Tong's (刘同) novel of the same name, directed by Xue Ling (薛凌) and starring Li Guangjie, Fei Qiming, Sun Qian, Xin Yunlai, Xu Jie, and Zhang Zhilv. The story follows Hao Huigui, a 37-year-old university teacher dissatisfied with his life, who finds himself back in 1998 not living his youth over but serving as the homeroom teacher of his own 17-year-old self, Liu Dazhi.¹

Key fact	Detail
Source	Liu Tong's novel of the same title, published September 2017, 416 pages²
Setting	The story's main body takes place in 1998 in a small town³
Reception	Douban score opened at 7.7 one week after broadcast and rose to 8.0, first among mainland dramas airing at the time⁴
Recognition	Excellent Work award in the National Radio and Television Administration's 2019 selection of outstanding online audiovisual works³

Spoilers

Premise

Hao Huigui is a single, 37-year-old university teacher whose mother, Hao Tiemei, pressures him to marry, at one point feigning a cerebral hemorrhage to force him into matchmaking. After a disastrous fake wedding at which his first crush Wang Weixiao, returned from the United States, is present, he storms into an arcade, where a game screen asks "what age do you want to return to"; he chooses 17, the power cuts, and he wakes up in 1998.¹

He does not get a second life. Instead he becomes the new homeroom teacher of the class that includes his 17-year-old self, then still named Liu Dazhi, at a time when his parents had not yet divorced. Determined to fix the regrets of his youth, he tries to change Liu Dazhi and his friends' lives, but discovers that events that have already happened cannot be altered; what changes is himself, as he is gradually influenced by the group of 17-year-olds.¹

A different kind of time travel. Director Xue Ling drew a line between the series and other works in which a middle-aged protagonist returns to adolescence. Although the story has fantasy elements, the drama does not expect its hero to change history: what matters is the connection he forms with his other self. In Xue Ling's description, Hao Huigui has no cheat codes; he cannot stop the monsters from appearing or change any level, so this 37-year-old failure, stuck with the profession he most disliked, teacher, must fight alongside his academically weak 17-year-old self.⁵ Returning to 1998 lets him mend regrets and uncover secrets he never knew: his dying grandfather's joy at his visit, his mother's feeling that "because I am Liu Dazhi's mother, I have already lost," the fact that Liu Dazhi was the bravest person in Wang Weixiao's heart, and that the friend who took the blame in the principal's car-paint incident was covering for him.⁵

Origin and development

The dual-perspective structure, a 17-year-old living through events and a 37-year-old looking back on them, came from Liu Tong's own diaries. Rereading 谁的青春不迷茫 (My Youth, Whose Confusion), he found that each diary entry ended with words his 30-year-old self had written to his younger self, which suggested the thought experiment of actually meeting one's past self; this became the setup of 37-year-old Hao Huigui meeting 17-year-old Liu Dazhi.³ The drama and the novel were written at the same time. Liu Tong first worked with a different director and screenwriting team, but after the second draft the two sides disagreed sharply on expression and style and parted ways; Xue Ling then joined as director.⁴ Liu Tong served as producer, supervisor, and author of the original work, his first television drama, prepared over more than three years.⁴

A launch ceremony was held in Chenzhou, Hunan, on March 28, 2018, and principal photography there wrapped on August 3, 2018.³ Chenzhou is also Liu Tong's hometown, and the drama held its premiere ceremony there.⁶

Period design and music

The 1998 setting is reconstructed in detail. Costumes follow the style of 1998, with a small-town school rule that uniforms are worn only on Mondays so the frame stays lively. Street sets were filled with period props: 28-inch bicycles, posters of old pop stars outside record shops, video halls, popcorn machines, snack carts, craft stalls, newsstands, and red banners of the 1990s such as "learn Mandarin well and you can go anywhere." For the main characters' homes, the director and art director bought many 1990s interior design references.³^•⁵

Music was a deliberate centerpiece. The team selected 12 original songs matched to the characters' emotions and relationships, licensed 24 old songs, and recorded 48 OST tracks with the principal orchestra of the China Philharmonic. Composer Yang Jionghan, moved by Zhang Zhilv's reading of the character Chen Xiaowu in a clip Liu Tong posted online, told his music company he would write songs for the drama even at no profit.⁴ The confession theme song 《天啊》 was released on August 30, 2019, built around the emotional threads of Chen Xiaowu, Ding Dang, and Chen Tong.⁷

Reception

One week after the premiere the Douban score opened at 7.7, and as the plot developed it climbed to 8.0, first among mainland dramas airing at the same time and the top campus youth drama of 2019 to that date.⁴ The series was later named an Excellent Work in the National Radio and Television Administration's 2019 selection of outstanding online audiovisual works, announced on September 29, 2020.³

Critics noted the show's place in a crowded field: after a wave of campus dramas including With You, A Love So Beautiful, and their sequels, attention to the genre had cooled in 2019, and Waiting For You In The Future stood out with its time-travel element and its "dual-perspective narrative."⁸^•⁹ One review compared its warm, episode-themed structure and narration to the Korean drama Reply 1988, while faulting the vagueness of the 37-year-old protagonist's situation.¹⁰ Casting was defended by the author himself: after finding many candidates unsuitable for Liu Dazhi, Liu Tong said Fei Qiming looked the part at first sight.⁸

The source novel

The drama adapts Liu Tong's novel 我在未来等你, published in September 2017 by Beijing United Publishing under the Motie Books imprint, 416 pages in paperback at a list price of 42.00 yuan. The book held a Douban rating of 7.3 from about 6,800 readers.² Its premise matches the drama's: a 36-year-old university teacher with a life he can see to the end returns to his 17-year-old self, not to live over but as an intern homeroom teacher of the senior class, where he meets the hopeless Liu Dazhi and tries to change him.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026