If you’ve been paying attention to Kpop news recently, you may have heard about the incident last week wherein Chou Tzuyu, a Taiwanese member of the Kpop group Twice, stirred up some geopolitical drama by waving a Taiwanese flag during an online broadcast. Sensitivity around Taiwanese independence is always a heightened issue around the general election, so she found herself facing cancelled appearances and pulled endorsements until she (possibly with pressure from her label, JYP) apologized publicly in another online video published on Weibo (think Chinese Twitter).
This is already pretty complicated, but the story is just beginning. Like Twitter, Weibo can be a bit mobby, and so many of the responses to Chou’s apology expressed disbelief about the sincerity of the act and demanded more repercussions for JYP. One of the people who joined in on the fun was Lin Gengxin, a Chinese actor, who reposted the video with the comment: “The apology was so sudden that she didn’t even have time to memorize her script,“ a reference to the fact that Chou is reading from a letter.
This is far from the rudest comment on Weibo, but Lin’s high-profile made him a target for Taiwanese people angry about the apology in general. They started taking to his Facebook page—remember, Facebook is blocked in mainland China, but not Taiwan—to shame him for making fun of a 16 year old girl.
When Weibo users caught wind of this, they became outraged as well and issued rallying calls to “vault over the Great Firewall en masse and defend the honor of our fellow countryman”. The result, probably best witnessed in the 58k+ comments on one of Lin’s in-costume Facebook selfies, is an epic flame war riddled with insulting image macros and internet yelling that has been termed “The Great Facebook Expression Bag* War” by the Chinese internet.
(* 表情包, literally “Expression Bag”, refers to one’s collection of image macros gathered from around the internet for use on Weibo and WeChat—like a reaction GIF folder, except GIFs aren’t as big on the Chinese internet.)
According to Chinese bloggers and posters, the whole incident has been an impressive show of strength for Chinese “expression bags”—blog posts and status updates alike marveled that the Taiwanese were so behind on this core internet skill. But this assertion showcases the subtle cultural divides between the two linguistically-compatible countries—the mainland Chinese posters are expecting their Taiwanese counterparts to understand and participate in image macro microtrends developed on platforms like Weibo and WeChat, which Taiwanese users just don’t use.
A macro from Team Taiwan starring new president Tsai Ying-wen: “Quick, look! It’s a dumbass!”
Team China image macro with a “Expression Bag Made for Chinese People” watermark, emphasizing China’s stance that Taiwan is a province.
An exchange between the two sides: top, a Taiwanese poster mocks the low-production-value of Chinese image macros by photoshopping “Made in Taiwan” onto his own selfie; below, a Chinese user photoshops his face into another image macro with the caption “Let dad teach you: expression bags aren’t made like that.”
My favorite story from the war, though, shows that the increased dialogue may be a good thing despite the trollful nature of the exchange. A bunch of Chinese users looking for the Facebook page for Taiwanese media outlet “Sanli News” accidentally stumbled onto a different FB page for “Sanli Entertainment News”. Some of these lost souls fell in love with the Taiwanese social media editor for that page, who helpfully tried to direct and console them.
“First time vaulting over the Firewall and I get lost” “There’s a first time for everyone.”
tl;dr Actor makes fun of Kpop star who waved a flag, Chinese users circumvent a government-imposed firewall by the thousands to perform patriotism via image macros on Facebook.
Editor’s note: While we sympathize with how fun it can be to take part in a massive, meaningless internet fight like this, Multi Entry’s opinion about international politics in general is that 1) all borders are oppressive, 2) colonialism’s legacy on the world is a traumatic one, and 3) war is a garbage way to spend money.
After the fourth person poked me about it on WeChat, I wrote up an English summary of “the Great Facebook Expression Bag War” of 2016 for Multi Entry. January, y’all.
You can now pre-order Issue #6 of The Cleaver Quarterly at our online store. Magazines will ship as soon as they are back from the printer after China’s National Day holidays.
Look how gorgeous the cover of the next Cleaver Quarterly is! One of my favorite discoveries of the year (thanks, Leah!)—it’s a magazine devoted entirely to stories, illustrations, essays, interviews, etc. about Chinese food in all of its glorious forms.
Side note: is there a more universal symbol of childhood for the Chinese diaspora than 大白兔??
This is a few days late, but here’s a happy Mid-Autumn Festival gif from Oamul, an illustrator based in Xiamen! I had so much fun hanging out with him last Friday, I almost missed my train to Fuzhou :O
Ancient Chinese silver tea utensil. Tang dynasty. Fameng Temple museum. via 铜镜大观
Just wanted to add that in the Tang dynasty, people did not brew loose tea leaves like present day Chinese. That only became common in the Ming dynasty.
Back then, tea leaves were made into compressed cakes and the cakes were ground in the silver mortar you see in the third and fourth row with hot water added for consumption.
Also, in the Song dynasty, whipped powdered tea was popular. It’s something like today’s Japanese matcha (powdered tea was introduced together with Zen Buddhism to Japan by a monk). Fujiannese Jian ware which reached its peak during this period is black because light-colored powdered tea shows up best in black tea-bowls. Doesn’t work so well with today’s brewed tea leaves :/
that’s so cool. But fujian is the home of jasmine tea, tie guan yin, and Da Hong Pao etc. These beverages need tea leaves!
Do you know why powdered tea lost popularity in Ming though?
Fujian used to send tea cakes as court tributes but the first Ming emperor felt that they were troublesome to make and hard on the people so he ordered a switch to tea leaves. From that time onwards, both court and common people switched to tea leaves.
In case you haven’t seen it yet: I’ve been running a Kickstarter campaign for Multi Entry, an online zine about what life in China is like for young creative Chinese people. The campaign ends on July 21st, so please help me spread the word! If we hit $20k I’ll get a tattoo, for reals.
The Chinese internet is a magical place, and it’s spawned a ton of slang that can be hard to figure out. I’ve learned a lot of them from my friends and research and they’re too awesome to keep to myself, so I’ll be sharing these lessons periodically. Today’s crop: 5 common slang words that are used a lot online and in texting. Figure out a way to incorporate them into your daily English (or whatever) usage and be a trendsetter!
The formatting below is: Chinese term (followed by the pinyin) - the literal definition.
PK - acronym for Player Kill A loanword from World of Warcraft, PK has gone from meaning “killing another player in-game” to simply any kind of competition. I learned this one when my mom casually told me over the phone: “All my friends are uploading videos of themselves singing karaoke and I want to PK with them.”
萌 (meng1) - cute Kawaii~ but Chinese. Can be used to describe cats, outfits, or even people who are charming you with their childish adorableness (like me when I type the wrong character in Chinese, evidently). Can also be used as a verb, like “That cat picture 萌ed me to death.”
ta - gender neutral 3rd person pronoun The Chinese words for he (他), she (她), and it (它) are written differently, but all pronounced identically—ta1. That’s because until the 20th century, they all actually used to be the same character (他). Online, some young people have decided to avoid the inconvenience of using gendered pronouns by just using pinyin to refer to all 3: the roman characters “ta”.
文艺青年 (wen2 yi4 qing1 nian2) - artistic youth Essentially, the Chinese word for “hipster,” though the connotation is a little more twee. As with “hipster,” there’s sometimes an implication of not pursuing serious occupations, caring too much about appearances, and being a snob about mainstream things.
赞 (zan4) - to praise It refers to hitting “Like” on social media, but is also often used as an exclamation (similar to how the English internet uses “+1″ or “Like!”) and, sometimes, an adjective. Someone who hits “like” on too many social media things is referred to as a member of the “点赞族” (Like Tribe).
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What burning question do you want me to answer about contemporary Chinese culture?
No guarantees that I’ll be able to answer every question, of course, but I want to hear about what you’re curious about and what you’re hoping you’ll learn from Multi Entry. Anyone is welcome to answer, but I’m especially interested in hearing from people in the Chinese diaspora.
Whether it’s “is [your favorite activity] popular in China?” or “What’s the equivalent of Tinder there?”, lay it on me! Reblog with a question on Tumblr, @ me on Twitter, or even send me an email if you’re super shy about it. And pass this along to your friends who are first/second/third-gen Chinese, too!
I stumbled upon Pérez Firmat’s Bilingual Blues, a 1995 book of poems, 10 years after its release. A high school freshman enamored of literature but only beginning to like poetry, I saw myself reflected in his brooding diasporic meditation:
The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you that I
don’t belong to English
though I belong nowhere else
Indeed, I never know what language to use when explaining myself. English is easiest; I swim in it every day. But English is not the language in which I love. Amharic is thick and sweet; it takes its time rolling off my tongue. But I can no longer read or write in Amharic – the alphabet hanging over my bed is more decorative than didactic. Eritrea’s Tigrinya is full and hard to latch onto. Even my mother, whose family hails from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region and the bordering Eritrea, does not speak Tigrinya. So I sit in the gaps and intersections, trying to weave sense across language, time and space.
I feel this piece from Hannah Giorgis so, so much. Like the author of this piece, I can speak but not easily write in my native language, Chinese. And like Amharic, Chinese uses a non-Roman script, which means that I constantly resent having to transliterate it—pinyin is so ugly and stripped—but also recognize the futility of using whole Chinese words.
The first run of our latest program, the Orbital 1K, concluded last week. The program challenges people to launch a project in four weeks that will likely earn them $1,000.
While the tone of the challenge seems transactional in nature, in reality most participants use the framework of the program to determine the viability of their vision, where the first step is to see if they can find an addressable audience.
The four-week time constraint forces the question from “how do I build my full vision” to the much more relevant “where do we start”. The constraint of the $1,000 goal establishes a more meaningful bar of engagement—parting with one’s cash sends a clearer signal than a page view, fave, or retweet.
Our 14 participants have taken very different roads in meeting the constraints of the challenge. Many are independent creators looking for a sustainable way to further their work. Others are launching services for their startups, bringing together existing communities of interest, or creating new events and programs altogether.
It’s been incredibly impressive to see what everyone has accomplished in just four weeks—you can see the amount of iteration and fine-tuning that’s happened in just the 3 weeks since our launch post.
Today we’re very excited to share their launches with you:
Independent Creators
Arborella: The Next Chapter by Ajay Revels, explorations around using performance and art to bring attention to trees in the urban environment.
Hacking Couture Redesign + New Collection by Giana González, a website redesign for Hacking Couture, a project which seeks to open source fashion by decoding its components.
Drinkeasy by Harry Raymond, a secret club for craft spirits from local distilleries dispensed via text messaging.
Communities
Being Dennis by Mike Ma, a documentary about green funerals, conversations about death, and the first man to purchase a funeral suit laced with mushrooms.
Dear Designers by KC Oh, a Slack community for designers to share career advice, pool resources, and get feedback.
Everyday Art Collectors by Tara Reed, interviews with everyday art collectors to demystify buying art.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be featuring each project on the Orbital blog, so follow along there. You can also follow all of the creators on Twitter via this handy list and back all of the Kickstarter projects via our curated page.
If you’d like to hear about our next Orbital 1K, join our mailing list where we announce all of our upcoming programs.
I’m positively astonished by how much the 1K participants managed to get done over the last 4 weeks. They overcame inertia, perfectionism, unknown and known unknowns, and serious emotional discomfort to push these projects out so quickly.
Also, thanks as always to Gary, who masterminded this program (and, like, all of Orbital) and invited me to teach it with him. There are friends, and then there are the people you can collaboratively write a blogpost with while you’re in two different countries.
Between teaching the 1K and a few other conversations, I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult it is to teach people how to exist online.
People have so many deeply held misconceptions about how social media should work for them—how they can trick and “solve” it—and resort to all kinds of different bad behaviors which don’t do them any favors. My philosophy: it’s not so different from moving into a new neighborhood and trying to fit in. You introduce yourself to people and help out where you can, but mostly what’s important is just showing up.
But for someone without these habits, it’s hard to get the momentum going, and facing it alone is overwhelming. How do you get people over the initial hump?
Maybe the answer is the opposite of one of those camps where you aren’t allowed to use your devices—spending a weekend with other people doing nothing but immersing yourselves in the sweet waters of the internet.
Last week, we welcomed 14 students to the June session of the Orbital 1K, a four-week program designed to coach them through launching a crowdfunding project, MVP, or community that can generate $1,000 in revenue. The program is led by Gary Chou and me, assisted by fantastic advisors from around the Orbital sphere. You can find all the students, instructors, and advisors on Twitter here.
I’m teaching the 1K because it sits at the intersection of a lot of things I care about: building support infrastructure for creators, assembling useful communities, enabling a sane way forward for people working independently, and generally teaching structural literacy to as many people as possible. It also enables me to do something I love—give lots and lots of advice over Slack—with a group of really amazing people.
As the participants would be quick to tell you, it’s a wild sprint. In the first week, we asked them to formalize and announce their projects in public (see below). This week, we covered audience development and community building at lightning speed and asked them to start contributing to the communities they’re working with. Next, we’ll cover scoping, project management, logistics and costing, messaging, and promotion—and then they’ll launch.
As for us, we’ll do it all over again with a new batch of participants in July. If you want to be among them, apply now! We’re even accepting remote applicants, though we’ll have to work through some logistical challenges.
Here’s a full list of the projects from the June session:
Amelie Lamont is starting a themed monthly salon called the Bold Creative for people to share their experiences around taking risks with their creativity.
KC Oh is assembling Dear Designers, a community for new and experienced designers to share their experiences, career advice, and feedback with each other.
Laura Patterson is starting Dinner for Good to introduce young professionals to great nonprofits they could be supporting.
Mike Ma is making a documentary called Being Dennis about the first customer of the mushroom burial suit and the hard conversations he’s having with his family about death.