The world of bore-craft

By Raymond Zhou (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-24 10:45

Everyone is said to enjoy 15 minutes of fame, but not many people can achieve it in 15 minutes. Jia Junpeng did - almost.

Last week a post appeared in an Internet forum, which contained this headline: "Jia Junpeng, mom wants you back home for dinner". In six hours there were about 400,000 clicks on the post and 17,000 netizens left remarks.

Funny thing was, there was no text with the original post, and nobody seemed to know who Jia Junpeng was. Even the mighty "human-flesh" search army failed to dig up the real identity of Jia. So, why all the fuss?

This has since become a conundrum of the magnitude "Who killed Laura Palmer", the character in David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks that got all of America guessing. For all I know, Jia Junpeng could be fictional.

As Jia Junpeng is a character without a background, the respondents are rebels without a cause, so to speak. Maybe they had one, but could not bring themselves to articulate it.

The post first appeared in a forum for the online game World of Warcraft (WoW). As it happened, the game has been in censorship limbo for more than 2 months, leaving 5 million players in a state of frustration.

The Ministry of Culture ordered a review of the content of the game when the Chinese licensing rights were transferred from one company to another. During the waiting-for-Godot period, gamers filed lawsuits with the court, filed complaints with consumer protection agencies and stormed the new licensee's websites. They could mass tens of thousands of gamers to act simultaneously.

The cryptic Jia Junpeng post could well be the spark that got fueled by their boredom. Just imagine a couple of million young loafers roaming the streets. Any excuse could become the particle to ignite a wildfire of social unrest.

If this is reading too much into one elliptical post, the following is a sociological dissection both politically correct and warm-and-fuzzy. Internet addiction is a huge problem in China, and the victims are mostly teenage boys who play online games in Internet cafes. They can get lost in their virtual worlds for days and not bother going back home for food or lodging. Some places provide everything the youngsters need, including instant noodles.

"Mom wants you back home for dinner" may have functioned as a wake-up call for every netizen who has got carried away in their online affairs and forgotten about their duties in the real world. It jolted them from their game-induced stupors. In that sense, everyone who clicked into the forum thread subconsciously saw himself as Jia.

On the flip side, people might have seen everyone else as Jia, the one being dragged away from serious fun into the drab routine of real-life existence. That would give them a sense of self-importance, as the ones guarding the purity of a good-vs-evil cosmos. Jia could never break free of the shackles of the mundane, but a few, like heroes in a Hollywood blockbuster, get to save the world.

Examples of online spoofs inspired by the post "Jia Junpeng, mom wants you back home for dinner", which originally appeared in a forum for the online game World of Warcraft. The iconic scroll in the Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony (top) and the rainbow flag at a gay pride parade (top left) have also been lampooned. [China Daily]

 

Then again, "mom wants you back home for dinner" was a refrain popular long before the advent of Internet gaming, or any game. It is a throwback to an era when everyone knew his neighbor and let his kids roam free in the dorm building, often shared by fellow employees of the same organization. You'd hear mom yelling in the corridor or through the window. If she was not within earshot, a passerby would be an ad hoc messenger, yelling out her command for her.

Most kids do not want their peers to know that they are a "mama's boy". Teenagers are known for their rebelliousness. So, when mom calls, you don't take off immediately. Instead, you yell back: "I know. I'll be right back!" and then keep playing for 10 more minutes - until mom shouts the second time. I bet a few of the really defiant ones want to holler something like: "Shut up! I don't need your damn food!" But that's inviting a ready retort: "You think you can feed yourself? Go eat northwest wind!"

It's always a northwest wind. It has never occurred to anyone that wind from other directions does not carry nutrients either. But I don't want to bore you to death with Chinese etymology.

On the other hand, the origin of the Chinese phrase "northwest wind" could well be more intriguing and meaningful than someone by the name of Jia Junpeng. What drove the Jia phenomenon could be an immense feeling of ennui, an apathy and helplessness in regard to more meaningful endeavors. The spate of responses simply defied logic. You can easily divine why earlier Internet celebrities, such as Sister Hibiscus, aroused public interest, but nobody can decipher exactly what prompted the current craze for a context-less sentence. We can only say, for sure, that the online herd has its own signals and cues and nobody can predict where the next stampede will take place and what the result will be.

On a positive note, the past week's mania did not produce a victim. No one was stoned or lynched. What came out was a barrage of spoofs that were great examples of online humor. The sentence has been used as a slogan and inserted into all kinds of pictures. Someone wrote in former chairman Mao Zedong's handwriting - as if Jia Junpeng were Lei Feng, the altruistic soldier extolled by Mao as a role model. It also appears as a line in a soap opera, appropriately paraphrased with subtitles. The now iconic scroll in the Beijing Olympic Opening Ceremony opens to the heart-warming reminder that a kid should go back home for dinner. It is even hoisted on a giant rainbow banner in a gay parade - as if going home for Jia is tantamount to gaining the right to marriage for gay couples.

Coincidentally, WoW, the online game whose suspension led to millions being idle, passed the review of the Ministry of Culture on Wednesday - but with a caveat. Material deemed "violent" by the government body would have to be revised. "They'll ruin the original even if they don't ban it," a player was quoted by Global Times.

Is playing WoW healthy? Is venting through a nonsensical slogan meaningful? It all depends on what the alternatives are. Many players of the game said they would resort to drinking, smoking and taking drugs if WoW were not available according to Southern Weekend and other reports.

As for the Jia Junpeng brouhaha, a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands shouting some whimsical slogan on the street is definitely a less desirable option for the government.

It's time regulators adopted an "or else" mode of thinking for innocuous activities embraced by the public.