That's What Xu Said

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.

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.

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?

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:

Ajay Revels is creating an art/storybook about the inner lives of trees called Tales of the Stick Clan.

Amelie Lamont is starting a themed monthly salon called the Bold Creative for people to share their experiences around taking risks with their creativity.

Caleb Dolister is releasing a new album, the Daily Thumbprint, while exploring new types of band merchandise.

Dior Vargas is raising the visibility of people of color dealing with mental illness through photography and storytelling.

Giana Gonzalez is continuing her work on Hacking Couture by creating a collection that decodes French fashion houses.

Harry Raymond is launching Barbook, an on-demand concierge that recommends and delivers craft liquors.

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.

Max Dana is launching the External Revenue Service, a peer-to-peer giving community.

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.

Mohammed Fayaz is creating the MoJuicy Mail Art Club, a subscription-based quarterly art package.

Moonsub Shin is publishing Dudoji’s Drawing Diary: Europe, a compilation of his thoughts and drawings during a recent trip.

Richard Baker is collecting illustrations of President Obama to create a record of his presidency told through images.

Tara Reed is interviewing people about their first experiences with buying art as part of her work for Kollecto.

Fruity Loops / FL Studio is the foundation for so, so much global dance music, from dubstep and bubbling to 3bal and reggaeton. I’m glad people are writing about the history of this little piece of software!

My favorite section of this piece, unsurprisingly, talks about the importance of the expert novice, playful interface:

 Another fundamental appeal of FL has been its playful quality. At a time when Pro Tools was still seen as an industry standard for Digital Audio Workstations along with Cubase and Logic, FL Studio uncomplicated DAWs for the masses. Dambrin credits the ease of use to the development team’s lack of musical knowledge. Los Angeles rapper and producer Jonwayne likens its interface to “water,” with other production software feeling “more like blocks of wood sliding all over each other.”

This year’s Met Gala had the unfortunate theme “China: Through the Looking Glass”, which was, according to their curators, "not about China per se, but about a China that exists as a collective fantasy."

Um. Oookay.

But what did the 600 million or so internet users in “China per se” think about the Met Gala? Armed with their ancient, mysterious language, I used my looking glass laptop to check out the conversation happening on Weibo.

#2015MetBall# had been trending throughout the whole event on Weibo. At time of writing, it’s been tagged in 160 million posts (and almost 700k comments). After reading a couple of pages of posts and comments, 

Mostly, Weibo users cared about the few Chinese celebrities who managed to escape the collective fantasy and attend the gala.

The gala’s complicated Orientalist-flirting nuance got lost in translation, and many Weibo users (including large major accounts) were slightly horrified by how Americans perceived Chinese style. In other words, the Orientalism actually translated perfectly.

Weibo users applauded Rihanna’s choice of a Chinese designer (Guo Pei) for her dress, but there were also a lot of joking comparisons of her dress to an omelet or egg crepe (see pic above). A lot of Weibo users declared that Fan Bingbing, who wears over 200 different elaborate costumes as Wu Zetian in the Empress of China, would have looked even better in the dress.