Yi Lee

Yi Lee (Chinese: 李易), born Lee Yi-hui (李翊暉) on 27 May 1983, is a Taiwanese actor and television host. He plays Ren-Xiu in Fragrance of the First Flower (第一次遇見花香的那刻), the Girls’ Love series carried by Netflix and GagaOOLala, appearing across all eighteen episodes of its two seasons.

He has worked in Taiwanese television since 2004, beginning with thirteen episodes of 追風少年. His credits include twenty-two episodes of I Want to Become a Hard Persimmon (2007), thirty-seven of Flavor of Life (2013), fifteen of 思慕的人 (2015), Unknown Lovers (2016), Endless Love (2019) and five episodes of The Art of Position (2020). In 2020 he appeared in the music video for Eric Chou’s 一樣美麗.

He is married to a fellow performer, and their official page carries both their names.

The one constant across both seasons

The two seasons of Fragrance of the First Flower were made more than three years apart, in November 2021 and February 2025, and the writing changed between them. His credit runs across all eighteen episodes, which makes him one of the few people attached to the whole property rather than to one commissioning round.

BLGLFlix editorial view. There is a question this catalogue keeps circling, and this page answers a small part of it: what does a Girls’ Love series actually need a man for?

The honest answer, on the evidence, is quite a lot of the running time. Taiwan’s most internationally visible Girls’ Love series carries a male actor through every one of its eighteen episodes, and he is not a passing obstacle in an early episode. Whatever the shape of the story, someone had to be there for the full run, and the production went to a twenty-year television veteran rather than to a newcomer.

Our own read is that this is a mark of how the series was made rather than a comment on the genre. A six episode independent production financed partly by a queer streaming platform cannot carry an unreliable cast. It hires people who have been on Taiwanese sets since 2004 and know how to deliver a scene on a short schedule. The same logic put Hong Kong film veterans into a Cantonese Boys’ Love series elsewhere in this catalogue. Small productions buy experience, because experience is the thing that saves days, and days are the thing they do not have.