Hidden Love and First Frost Are Set in the Same Universe: The Zhu Yi (竹已) Novels Explained

If you watched Hidden Love on Netflix in 2023 and then watched First Frost in 2025, you may have caught a family name repeating. Sang Zhi's older brother is named Sang Yan. First Frost's male lead is also named Sang Yan. The two characters have the same name because they are the same character.

This is not a fan theory. It is not a coincidence. Author Zhu Yi (竹已) wrote both novels deliberately, with intentionally shared characters, as parallel stories told from opposite ends of the same family. Here is how the Zhu Yi universe actually works — and why, if you've only watched one of the two dramas, you are missing half the story.

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The Author: Who Is Zhu Yi?

Zhu Yi (竹已, literal: "bamboo, already") is the pen name of a Jinjiang Literature City (晋江文学城) author who became one of the most successful contemporary Chinese romance (言情, yánqíng) novelists of the 2020s. Jinjiang is China's dominant female-readership web-fiction platform — the place where Scent of Love's Concern (香蜜沉沉烬如霜), Ashes of Love, and many of the most-adapted C-drama source novels first serialized.

Zhu Yi's signature is a specific kind of romance: emotionally restrained male leads, heroines with interior lives, urban-realist settings (not palace fantasy, not xianxia), and a pacing that prioritizes emotional truth over plot incident. Her male characters do not pursue through grand gestures. They pursue through patient daily presence. Her heroines do not have epiphanies. They do the slow work of healing.

Both 偷偷藏不住 (Hidden Love) and 难哄 (First Frost) come from this authorial approach. So do her other widely-read novels — but Hidden Love and First Frost are specifically linked.

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The Connection: One Family, Two Stories

Sang Zhi (桑稚) and Sang Yan (桑延) are siblings. Younger sister and older brother. Both characters appear, by name, in both novels — but each novel centers one and uses the other as a supporting presence.

Hidden Love is Sang Zhi's story.

She's the protagonist. Fourteen years old when the novel opens, college-aged by its midpoint, adult by its close. Her arc is her decade-long secret crush on her older brother's college best friend, Duan Jiaxu (段嘉许). Her brother Sang Yan appears throughout the novel as a supporting character — he's the reason Duan Jiaxu is at the Sang family home in the first place (they're roommates; Duan Jiaxu stays with the Sangs during a family crisis); he's the one who doesn't realize what's happening right under his nose; he's the protective older-brother archetype Sang Zhi has to work around.

In the Hidden Love drama, Sang Yan is played by Victor Ma (马伯骞). His role is supporting. He is not the emotional focus.

First Frost is Sang Yan's story.

Here Sang Yan is the protagonist. The novel opens when he's about fifteen years old, two years younger than Sang Zhi's own opening timeline — which places First Frost's high-school scenes earlier in the shared chronology than Hidden Love's beginning. In First Frost, Sang Yan meets a classmate named Wen Yifan (温以凡) whom he falls in love with during high school. She abruptly leaves without explanation. They don't see each other for six years. Then she returns to Nanwu — their shared fictional home city — and their second chance begins.

Sang Zhi, his younger sister, is not a major character in First Frost. She's there, in the background of the Sang family. But the POV is her brother's.

In the First Frost drama, Sang Yan is played by Bai Jingting (白敬亭) — not by Victor Ma, who played him in Hidden Love. This recasting was a significant flashpoint in Chinese drama fandom (more on that below).

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The Chronology, Reconstructed

If you want to read the two dramas in in-universe order, here it is:

Phase 1 — Sang Yan's high school years (First Frost Part 1). Sang Yan is 15–17. He meets Wen Yifan in high school. They fall in love. She disappears. He doesn't understand why. He graduates, goes to university in Nanwu.

Phase 2 — Sang Zhi's first meeting with Duan Jiaxu (Hidden Love Part 1). Sang Zhi is 14, Sang Yan is 19. During a university break, Duan Jiaxu — Sang Yan's best friend and roommate — comes to stay with the Sang family because of family troubles at his own home. Sang Zhi meets him. She develops her crush. He leaves abruptly. Years of no contact follow.

Phase 3 — Sang Zhi's university years (Hidden Love Part 2). Sang Zhi deliberately chooses a university in Nanwu specifically because Duan Jiaxu now lives and works there. They reconnect as adults. Slow-burn romance unfolds over the course of her college years.

Phase 4 — Sang Yan's adult years (First Frost). Sang Yan is now a bar owner in Nanwu, running a place called Overtime (加班). Wen Yifan has returned to her hometown after six years away. They accidentally co-rent the same apartment. The delayed second chance plays out.

These four phases overlap and weave. Hidden Love and First Frost are not prequel-and-sequel; they're parallel. The same family, the same city, the same decade — but with the lens swiveled to two different people.

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Why Wen Yifan Never Appears in Hidden Love

This is the question most fans ask after watching both dramas, and the answer is craft-driven: Zhu Yi wrote the novels as dual first-person narratives. Each book stays close to its protagonist's interiority. Sang Zhi, in her own novel, is watching her crush on Duan Jiaxu. She isn't thinking about her brother's ex-girlfriend from high school. Sang Yan's absent love life is present in Hidden Love as a faint shading — there's a sense that he's emotionally unavailable, that something happened before — but never named.

When you read First Frost, that faint shading becomes the entire picture. Hidden Love's absence is First Frost's presence. The two novels complete each other that way.

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The Victor Ma / Bai Jingting Recasting Controversy

When First Frost was announced in 2024, Chinese drama fandom assumed — reasonably — that Victor Ma would reprise Sang Yan. He had played the character two years earlier. He had strong chemistry with the role. He had been part of Hidden Love's success.

Production went with Bai Jingting instead. The decision was commercial: Bai Jingting is a higher-wattage star whose prior hits (New Life Begins, Reset) commanded larger domestic and international viewership, and First Frost was positioned as a tentpole 2025 romance. But the recasting created real fandom friction.

Victor Ma responded publicly with a now-widely-quoted line — paraphrasable as "if I were to act in romantic scenes again..." — which was received as a gracious but unmistakable acknowledgment that he had hoped to return. The moment stayed in fandom memory because it surfaced a tension that C-drama productions usually paper over: that casting continuity across interconnected properties is handled commercially, not artistically, and the people who built a character's early identity don't necessarily get to keep it.

For viewers new to both dramas, the practical effect is that Sang Yan in Hidden Love and Sang Yan in First Frost look like two different men. The character is the same; the performance is different. Treat them as the same character with the understanding that Bai Jingting's version is the "canonical" one the novels point toward (Bai Jingting more closely matches the novel's physical description), while Victor Ma's version is the one the first drama established.

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Other Zhu Yi Novels — and Why They Are Not in This Universe

Zhu Yi has written other novels that have been adapted or are being adapted. Not all of them are in the Hidden Love / First Frost continuity. Confirmed connections:

• In the universe: Hidden Love (偷偷藏不住), First Frost (难哄). Shared Sang family. Shared Nanwu setting.
• NOT in the universe: When I Fly Towards You (向风而行), Cream-Flavored Secret Crush (奶油味暗恋), The Best of You in My Mind — these are standalone novels in the same genre by the same author, but with no character overlap.

If you hear a fan claim that When I Fly Towards You shares a universe with Hidden Love, it's incorrect. The confusion usually comes from the fact that all of Zhu Yi's novels have similar emotional register and urban settings. But the Sang family only appears in Hidden Love and First Frost.

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The Shared City: Nanwu (南武)

Both novels are set in a fictional Chinese city called Nanwu (南武). It is not a real place. Zhu Yi invented it rather than using Beijing, Shanghai, or any other identifiable metropolis — partly to avoid being corrected on bus routes and district names, and partly because a fictional city can carry symbolic weight that a real one can't.

But Nanwu appears differently in each novel:

• In Hidden Love, Nanwu is warm. Cozy. Nostalgic. It's the city where Sang Zhi grew up, where her family is, where she returns to study. The drama treats the city as a visual comfort — wide lawns, open parks, sunny streets.
• In First Frost, Nanwu is severe. The same city, seen through trauma. Wen Yifan has left and returned; she carries what happened to her there. The drama uses mountain mist, night streets, rain, and confined interior spaces to say: this is a city that hurts some people.

Both dramas filmed in Chongqing (for First Frost) and Xiamen (for Hidden Love) — two real Chinese cities that look, on camera, like two different versions of the same fictional Nanwu. The geography of Nanwu changes emotionally because the people walking through it have changed. This is one of the most-praised aspects of Zhu Yi's shared universe among Chinese readers: the same place, experienced twice, in two radically different emotional registers.

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What This Means for the Viewer

If you've watched Hidden Love and not First Frost, you're missing the backstory that explains why Sang Yan is the way he is. The protective-older-brother energy he shows toward Sang Zhi in Hidden Love comes from somewhere specific. He learned it when a girl he loved disappeared without warning. His refusal to interfere with Duan Jiaxu and Sang Zhi later in the novel — letting them figure out their own relationship — is informed by his own unfinished one.

If you've watched First Frost and not Hidden Love, you're missing the softer reference point for who Sang Yan could have been. The Sang family home he goes back to in First Frost is the same home Duan Jiaxu stayed in during Hidden Love's setup. When Sang Yan's fourteen-year-old sister is mentioned in passing, she is the future protagonist of another entire novel.

The two stories fit together as family portraits: one brother, one sister, two romances that play out at different rhythms, set in the same invented city, written by an author who clearly wanted to build a single emotional ecosystem and asked her readers to follow her through it.

Watching one after the other is how Zhu Yi intended the stories to be read. The drama adaptations preserve that design — imperfectly, because of the Victor Ma / Bai Jingting casting break, but substantively. If you loved one, you already know the other is waiting.

Hidden Love (偷偷藏不住) is available on Netflix and Viki. First Frost (难哄) is available on Netflix. Both are produced by Youku and adapted from Zhu Yi (竹已) novels.