Having "big" or "small" in a name is common enough, but Big S always gives you a certain feeling: she is what remains of the S she is after you remove the small one, and Small S is what remains of the S that Small S is after you remove the big one.
Readers a hundred years from now won't know what Big S or Small S means — Big S was an actress, Small S was a TV host, they were sisters, and on the whole, they were celebrities, so-called public figures. A few days ago, just days after the Lunar New Year of 2025, Big S traveled to Japan with her extended family (it's unclear how large), and reportedly died of pneumonia at only 48 years old.
These past few days, short video apps have been flooded with clips of Big S and Small S appearing together — every video that comes up shows them side by side, as if to the world they were simply one big S and one small S, only complete when together. Of course, they did appear together frequently — they were both hosts originally, then Small S continued hosting while Big S became an actress, though Big S often appeared on Small S's shows. In one of the clips going around, Big S says, "One became an actress, the other a host — at least one of us can put food on the table." Still that feeling — one big, one small, together making a whole S. Many names contain "big" or "small" — David (Dawei), Xiaoyuan — but David doesn't exist relative to some Small David, and Xiaoyuan doesn't exist relative to some Big Yuan. They are, fundamentally (or at least I hope), themselves — it just happens that "big" or "small" appears in their names, a coincidence of fate written into the characters. They possess a certain relativity: Xiaoyuan is Big Xiaoyuan relative to Little Yu, and Little Xiaoyuan relative to Mom and Dad. But Big S seemed to arrive in the world as something deeply, fundamentally oppositional — fixed against the other side of something. That is to say, even if you took Small S away, Big S would still be the big S. When she appeared beside Small S, she was like the model older sister — the big sister — smiling with a kind of astonishment, a top-down capaciousness, a vast calm. Yet when she wasn't beside Small S, she still smiled that way, still encompassed, still remained calm — at least in public. Her image was so deeply entangled with Small S's that when you thought of Big S, you thought of Small S, because that astonished gaze of hers needed something to be astonished at, that capaciousness and calm needed absurdity and noise for contrast. Without Small S, a solitary Big S staring at you with those eyes was profoundly strange. Big S once starred in a film called Reign of Assassins; the male lead was played by Wang Xueqi, who was about seventy at the time, a rather aged eunuch — and recalling those stills, I get the very strange feeling that even compared to Wang Xueqi, Big S didn't seem small. Big S's ex-husband was named Wang Xiaofei — look at that, she simply had to find someone with "small" in his name. They had two children, an older sister and a younger brother — I call them this because that's how Big S referred to them in the news clips I came across; to her, her two children were first and foremost a sister and a brother. I also heard that when Big S gave birth to her second child, her life was in danger. Her family brought her "eldest daughter" to see her, and this is what she said: "I will always remember the way she looked at me, absorbing my gaze. She received a distress signal I was sending her: 'Yuè'er, you must help Mommy take care of your little brother.' Because at that moment, I wasn't sure I could survive." This is truly astonishing — facing death, the deepest self she projected into the world was this: the older sister who must "help Mommy" take care of the younger sibling. The words were clearly spoken against the crisis of the mother's possible death, meaning she was transferring the full responsibility of caring for her son to her daughter. There was no role for the mother in this — because the mother might die — and no mention of the father; she didn't bring up the father. This was that "she's the one who runs things in the family" older sister, and at the threshold of mortal danger, what she saw in her daughter was a mission: to bear the brother (the family) infinitely upon her own shoulders — this was, without question, her true understanding of her own role in life. To become famous in an era, to become part of an era's memory — for artists who write for and perform for audiences a hundred years hence — is a kind of privileged condition. The Big S that Big S performed will be seen for a long time. Perhaps not a full hundred years, but certainly for a very long time. She will stand as a beautiful statue, enduring, for the audiences of this world to see themselves in. And among those audiences, some will surely raise the same question, asking where the small S that was removed from the S she was has gone.
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