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Zhibo: Are You an Inke Drinker?

Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe (Inke). If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.

Survey Topic: Where/when do you watch Inke?

One thing that comes up over and over when talking to people about livestreaming is the question of why on earth people are wasting their time staring at strangers on their phones. It’s a reasonable question – but I think the first thing to keep in mind is that very few people are just watching a single streamer do their thing for hours on end. It’s much more like a million-person talent show and I get the sense that most people just use it the way people have used TV for decades; turn it on, flip through the channels, and occasionally focus on something particularly interesting.

But unlike TV, you don’t have to be planted on your couch for this. My instinct has long been that zhibo is primarily a commuting activity – pull out your phone, watch a few entertaining people for a few minutes, answer some texts, and you’re at your subway stop, that sort of thing. Recently, however, I’ve been getting a lot of messages about how oh-so-very-EARLY I’m streaming (around 7:30am – let’s all calm down here) and how “I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.”

Using my Sherlock-like deductive skills, I have come to the conclusion that a lot of people must be using Inke the same way lots of other people use Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter: laying in bed staring at something, ANYTHING vaguely interesting enough to convince your brain that getting up isn’t necessary just yet.

Nothing clears things up like a survey, however. So this week, I’ve actually conducted a daily survey on the same topic and tried to filter out the people just repeating themselves over and over as best I could:

Option 1: I mostly watch Inke on the subway/while commuting

Option 2: I mostly watch Inke while laying around in bed/generally lounging at home

Option 3: I mostly watch Inke at work/at school when I’m bored

By my count, the option 2s have it – around half of the total responses – but that’s probably at least in part because I’m streaming relatively early in the morning when a lot of people are likely to be on their phones in bed. There is still apparently quite a bit of commute-viewing (around 30%), and I suppose most people either are too worried about their bosses or have better things to distract themselves with at work (around 20%).

Unintentionally Existential Question of the Week: Brother, do you know the way?

My theories as to how this message ended up being so awesome:

First off, 哥们儿 (sounds like “geh-mer”) is a common way of saying “bro” in northern China, basically. But if you’re putting it into a translation app, I assume it would just say “brother.”

Secondly, “The way” is usually the result of attempting to translate 道 or dao, or as we in America for some reason insist on calling it, the Tao (as in, taosim).

Quick (but VERY whiny and petty) sidebar: I get that very few people study Chinese, but you can literally go on Wikipedia and see the correct versions of words like Dao (Tao) and Gong Fu (Kung Fu). Yes, the words came to us at a time where mass media wasn’t a thing and the way we learned to pronounced them got set before anyone knew any better, but – and this is a subtle detail but one I feel everyone can appreciate – we no longer live in that time.

Yeah, yeah, I get it: there’s a million adapted words in English – and that’s a real strength – and no one should be expected to go around learning the original pronunciations of all of the things from all of the places. But we’re talking about one of the most important and well-known philosophical traditions in the world, and it’s not like we came up with a new word for it – we just got it slightly wrong and are unwilling to change because change is hard and uncomfortable and DAMNIT POUNDS AND OUNCES ARE JUST FINE.

Whatever. I’m just bitter about all the teachers who yelled at me for using Wikipedia as a source for all those years, most likely.

Undeserved Ego Boost of the Week: You’ve been in China for a few years. How can you be so eloquent?

I try to strike a fine balance with people about my Chinese. On the one hand, I really do feel like mastering the language is an insurmountable task and that, for all my advances, I’m still basically just at step 2 or 3 out of a million. On the other hand, I recognize that always shooting down every compliment starts to get annoying, especially when they’re sincere and heartfelt.

But this isn’t about me and my ego – it’s about the audience. See, compliments about my Chinese – while much appreciated – are invariably the first half of a question about why similar progress isn’t being made on the other side of the aisle, if you catch my drift. People see me blabbing away in what is quite imperfect but nonetheless decent-sounding and confident Chinese and ask why on earth they can’t do that with English… to which my response is that I abandoned my friends and family to go live half way across the world and now spend every morning soliloquizing at my phone.

And on that note:

You-Just-Get-Me Award for Comment of the Week: Do we really need excuses for drinking?

No sir. No we do not.

Video of the Week: This video of a guy riding a motorcycle standing up that absolutely must be fake but goddamn does it ever look real

Catch up on more Zhibo here:

Zhibo: Pimpin’ and Player Hatin’
Article Mar 22, 2018

Zhibo: Sneezes and Shaved Secret Hair
Article Mar 12, 2018

The Mustache of the Apocalypse

Holy Jumping Jesus Fuck.

What possible combination of words could be more terrifying than: “John Bolton, National Security Adviser”?

Dennis Rodman, Uber Driver?

Robyn Hitchcock, New Album?

My ball sack, Tank full of rabid piranha?

If Thomas Friedman’s upper lip popularized the phrase “Mustache of Understanding,” then get ready for John Bolton and the “Mustache of the Apocalypse.”

Spark Notes: John Bolton was George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the UN (recess appointment, natch) and one of the loudest voices claiming that Iraq had WMDs. That analysis was, to put it mildly, flawed.

To say Bolton is “hawkish” also seems like criminal understatement. More like Bolton saw a flock of hawks, questioned their commitment to his vision for total war and had the flock poisoned, stuffed and mounted outside his office as a warning to the other birds.

Bolton may strongly resemble a giant albino schnauzer, but when he looks in the mirror he sees the smoldering gaze of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson staring back at him, getting ready to flex off the body cast and go to town on baddies around the world.

Tehran. Pyongyang. Beijing. Berkeley. Who knows what’s next on Ambassador Deathpool’s hit list, but you know he has one. Nothing this man has written or said in the last two decades suggests for a moment he would hesitate to urge President Trump to cowboy up and go first strike if given the opportunity.

Wǒ Men Podcast: Donald Trump as Seen Through Chinese Eyes
Article Jul 28, 2017

And so things are about to get profoundly weird. And this is in a month where our top diplomat on Korea issues seems to be Ivanka Trump while husband Jared is going full Fredo Corleone in the desert.

In terms of China, Bolton has made it clear that he has little patience for Beijing’s feelings on a range of strategic interests including what to do with a problem like Korea or the South China Sea.

As Trump’s economic advisors push the United States into a disastrous trade war with China, it’s comforting to know there will be a certain symmetry in the Situation Room as his National Security Adviser desperately searches for the best way to involve us in a disastrous shooting war somewhere on the Asian mainland. Clearly, Bolton is not Sicilian.

I don’t believe that the Chinese Communist Party’s undeclared war on the liberal order internationally or its growing cult of general domestic dickishness is merely a reaction to the US and the West unfairly pressuring China to become more like them, but… giving John Bolton a seat in the sit room isn’t going to do much to convince China’s leaders that the United States sees them as anything other than a threat. This is going to harden positions on both sides of the Pacific. That is bad.

Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in 2018: Evan Osnos, American Decline, and the Country of Cats
Article Jan 04, 2018

For Pugsly in Pyongyang, things are about to get interesting after a couple of pretty good months which saw the DPRK win a minor soft power victory at the Pyeongchang Olympics and reports that Donald Trump is ready for a sit-down. Now Kim Jong-un has to be wondering if he should be getting ready to meet the US president and share Swedish porn star stories or begin digging that tunnel to Dandong.

The only positive development? Perhaps I can make back some of the money I lost in the dumpster fire that is my NCAA tournament bracket by betting on whether the facial-hair phobic Trump makes Bolton shave his ‘stache. Would it rob Bolton of his power like Samson? Would the mustache wait on the floor, waiting for another host to inhabit? These are things I want to know. Well, that and whether or not this bizarre and stupid decision – and that’s saying something when you’re talking about Donald Trump – to appoint Bolton as NSA means US foreign policy and the world are about to enter a period of dangerous and bellicose instability.

Photo of the Day: Chasing Waterfalls

This week’s photo series is “The East is Green“. In the run up to Earth Hour this Saturday, and in the wake of officials once again declaring “war” on pollution in China at the “Two Sessions” meetings in Beijing, we’re looking at some of the country’s recent attempts to improve environmental conditions – from grassroots NGOs to technological innovations and more.

1.1 billion RMB. That’s how much it cost to create this man-made waterfall in Yunnan’s capital city of Kunming. But this isn’t some crazy expensive vanity project. Well, it might be, but it does at least have a positive purpose: it’s cleaning the heavily-polluted and algae-ridden Dianchi Lake. The 400m-wide waterfall is part of a Waterfall Park in the city, which uses water diverted from the Niulan River to “flush” the pollutants out of the lake.

Opened two years ago, the Park has become a major tourist attraction, and signs are that the impact on the lake’s water quality has been largely positive.

Image: 7c Education.

Zhibo: Pimpin’ and Player Hatin’

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe (Inke). If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.

Survey Topic: What do you think of PK?

This requires a bit of explanation.

See, Inke used to just be a solo livestreaming app. You go on, you broadcast, people watch. End of feature list.

But in a world of countless imitators and competitors, China’s livestreaming apps need to constantly innovate – or at the very least, come up with new shiny things to dangle in front of users in the hopes of keeping them coming back. Just since I’ve been using it, they’ve added voice-only radio-style channels, started supporting Let’s-Play video game streaming, and come up with more ways to animate a sports car driving across a phone screen than you can shake a stick at.

This picture is now part of the ash heap of history

But by far the most dramatic addition to the app that I’m aware of is “PK” – a 1-on-1 “battle” of sorts where two streamers go head-to-head in an attempt to earn the most gifts and thus win…

…um…glory?

A pretty typical PK experience

…wait, what exactly is the point of this?

I’ll be straight with you – this feels like a pretty blatantly obvious attempt to get people to pour more money into the app. The vast, vast, VAST majority of PKs I see consists of two young pretty people blasting music, shaking various body parts, and yelling that their audience hasn’t given them enough gifts to win yet. And, shocker of shockers, it seems to work.

Once the timer runs out, the “winner” is supposed to order the “loser” to perform some sort of “punishment,” which in theory has a lot of potential but usually seems to come down to either “drawing a funny mustache on your face” or “singing a silly song you can’t sing.”

So, knowing how much cash tends to get thrown at people in these little battles, I posed a question to the audience: what do you think of PK? Since I am nothing if not a shameless cheater when it comes to these surveys, I weighted one of the options just a BIT in favor of the answer I wanted. See if you can spot the standout answer:

Option 1: PK is fun! You should do it!

Option 2: PK is boring and shallow and people just do it to get more gifts. You shouldn’t waste our time or yours.

Option 3: I don’t really care.

The results? Overwhelming support for #2 (staying the hell away). And in defense of my unscientific survey, that was already the clear sentiment before I phrased it that way.

Oh, by the way – if you’re curious what “PK” means, so was I. People on Inke kept telling me it stood for “Player Killer,” and I just couldn’t believe that was the case. Turns out, it is. Apparently “PK” is a gaming term from games that have PvP where players can actually fight each other – like most MMORPG’s (if you’re trying to evaluate just how nerdy I am, I’m the kind of wishy-washy agnostic who knows what those terms mean but has never actually played “World of Warcraft”).

 

I know this guy is the Lich King, but I have no idea why he’s called that.
Does that clear things up?

So why has “PK” edged out the much more obvious “VS” or “1 v 1”? To be honest, I haven’t a clue. Perhaps because livestreaming is naturally connected to gaming and Let’s Play videos? My theory is that since “V” is a notoriously difficult sound for native Chinese speakers, literally any alternative to “vs” has a huge leg up. But who knows?

Poorly-Phrased Request of the Week: can you give me your find a young girl?

Setting aside for now how this guy got me confused with the guys Liam Neeson keeps using his Particular Set of Skills on, it is kind of surprising just how many messages I get asking me to introduce “a foreign girl.” Not as a joke or a throwaway line, but genuinely creepy dudes sending me private messages (until I have to block them) about how they need a girlfriend and they need me to help them find a foreign girl.

Look, I get it. There’s a lot of gross guys on the internet; and guys making life on the internet miserable for women is nothing new. But this weird intersection of racism and sexism – that because I’m a foreigner, I have binders full of cute foreign girls (just to pluck an analogy out of the air) sitting around somewhere waiting for fuxboy821 to hit me up – is this a thing? Do guys ask American Youtubers and other internet figures to introduce them to women? Or is this exclusively a “you’re a foreigner, you must know lots of foreigners” kind of thing?

Seriously, I’m not making this shit up

Even if I did for some reason want to help the random creepers on the internet find love in this hopeless place, I’m not even a particularly good wingman in real life; I can’t for the life of me figure out what part of my whole vibe is causing these guys to look at me and go yup, this guy is gonna get me laid.

Either way, my response is usually to suggest that these gentlemen spend less time staring at a guy on their phone and more time out in the real world – or at the very least, close Inke and open a dating app.

That and just the TINIEST facial reaction:

Undeserved Ego Boost of the Week: Your spoken English is very standard. It’s a bit like broadcast spoken English

Much as I’d love to take this stellar review and use it to apply for a job at NPR, this just brings us back to the supply-and-demand anomaly that is English in China: everyone needs native speakers to practice with, yet everything about China ensures that they’ll always be in short supply.

Not that actual Chinese human beings aren’t open and welcoming to foreigners – in my experience, the vast majority are – but between official policies, unofficial policies, longstanding traditions, and just the sheer physical distance between China and most English-speaking countries, it just doesn’t seem like a problem that is going to be solved anytime soon.

And just to take a few more whacks at the pile of giblets that used to be a dead horse, that’s why zhibo is such a game-changer for our two worlds getting to know each other.

Existential-Crisis-Provoking Comment of the Week: What do u live for?

God, I hope more than this.

Refreshingly Honest Comment of the Week: You look like an idiot

Well, you know what they say about livestreaming: It’s a tale told by an idiot, full of dumb questions and petty irritations, signifying nothing.

But apparently, my idiocy is working for at least some portion of the audience:

 

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On World Poetry Day, 3 Chinese Poets You Might Not Know

When you’ve got around 3,000 years of material to wade through, it can be hard to pick out a few key people of verse. But here — in honour of World Poetry Day — are three interesting figures whose prose you may not know and who we think make for good starting points if you’re planning a deep dive into the world of Chinese poetry.

Ancient Poet: Li Qingzhao

Any discussion of ancient Chinese poetry usually starts with Li Bai, the Tang Dynasty writer famous for liking a drink and for crafting some of the language’s best-known verses. Almost as celebrated but not so familiar to audiences outside of China is Li Qingzhao, who was born in 1084 in what is now Shandong and is seen as an archetypal figure of “ci” poetry.

Born into a literary family, Li found renown while still a teenager for her carefree, song-like poems. The tone of her work changed dramatically over her lifetime however, reflecting the death of her husband during their escape from Juchen forces and her subsequent exile in Zhejiang.

Here’s her “To the Tune of The Song of Peace”:

Year by year, in the snow,
I have often gathered plum flowers,
intoxicated with their beauty.
foundling them impudently
I got my robe wet with their lucid tears.
This year I have drifted to the corner
of the sea and the edge of the horizon,
My temples has turned grey.
Judging by the gust of the evening wind,
There’s hardly a chance that I will be able
enjoy the plum blossoms.

Related:

Click-through: Lyrical Suicide Notes and an Ancient Poetry Matrix
Article Aug 03, 2018

Revolutionary Poet: Qiu Jin

As the New York Times put it recently, “With her passion for wine, swords and bomb making, Qiu Jin was unlike most women born in late 19th-century China”. That line comes from the NYT’s recent obituary of Qiu as part of their “Overlooked” series – and we recommend you read the full thing as it goes on to detail how the Xiamen-born poet’s unbinding of her feet, cross-dressing, and general dismissal of Confucian gender norms made her a pioneer of feminism in China.

Such revolutionary fire didn’t sit well with everyone however – she was ultimately beheaded in public in her home town by imperial forces in 1907, having been captured ahead of a planned uprising in Anqing in Anhui province.

Here’s a translation of her poem “Capping Rhymes with Sir Ishii From Sun’s Root Land”, credited to Florence Ayscough:

Don’t tell me women are not the stuff of heroes,
I alone rode over the East Sea’s winds for ten thousand leagues.
My poetic thoughts ever expand, like a sail between ocean and heaven.
I dreamed of your three islands, all gems, all dazzling with moonlight.
I grieve to think of the bronze camels, guardians of China, lost in thorns.
Ashamed, I have done nothing; not one victory to my name.
I simply make my war horse sweat. Grieving over my native land hurts my heart. So tell me; how can I spend these days here?
A guest enjoying your spring winds?

Related:

Food Delivery Driver Crowned Champion of CCTV’s “Chinese Poetry Competition”
Article Apr 06, 2018

Modern Day Poet: Yu Xiuhua

Of course, some of modern day China’s most famous poets are ones you won’t find much trace of on the Chinese internet.

Lesser known outside of the country is Yu Xiuhua. In late 2014, the previously unknown poet from a small village in Hebei province shot to nationwide fame when her poem “Crossing Half of China to Sleep With You” was published by literary scholar Shen Rui via his Poetry Periodical.

On WeChat, Shen likened Yu’s work to that of Emily Dickenson and soon publishers were scrambling for her signature. It didn’t take Yu long to release an anthology. “Crossing…” was one of just thousands of poems that she had written since dropping out of school due to suffering from cerebral palsy.

“Crossing…” remains her most famous work however, and it was even turned into a performance art piece by Christopher Winkler and Naishi Wang, who also highlighted some of the issues inherent in poetry translation. Here’s Mind Di’s translation of the poem that made Yu 网红 (“internet famous”):

To spend or to be spent, what’s the difference if there is any? Two bodies collide
— the force, the flower opened by the force, and the virtual Spring brought by the flower — nothing more than this,
and this we mistake as life restarting.
In half of China, things are happening:
volcanoes erupt, rivers run dry,
political prisoners and displaced workers are abandoned,
elk deer and red-crowned cranes get shot.
I cross the hail of bullets to sleep with you.
I press many nights into one morning to sleep with you.
I run across many of me and many of me run into one to sleep with you.
Of course I can be misguided by butterflies and mistake praise as Spring, and a village similar to Hengdian as home.
But all these are absolute
reasons that I spend a night with you.

Cover photo: Yi Huang as Qiu Jin in the film The Woman Knight of Mirror Lake.

Every Day Matters: Rain, Tomb Sweeping, and Tea

It’s that time of year again: all across China, countryside farmers are checking their fields, dusting off their machinery, and preparing for tea season.

Spring is a complex and often hectic time for tea farmers, buyers and drinkers alike. In some cases the yields for a whole year are produced in the months of March and April. During tea season, every day matters.

Each day can bring new variables and challenges, most commonly in terms weather. What you hear all the time when people talk about a tea — as is often the case with wine — from a certain year is, “How was the weather that year?” Yet while everyone knows weather plays an important role in tea making, few people really understand why.

A farmer at a Huang Shan Mao Feng farm inspects a fallen tree beside his plantation

Tomb Sweeping and Tea

You can’t talk about green tea harvesting without talking about Qingming Festival. Qingming is a Chinese holiday on the first day of the fifth solar term of the traditional Chinese calendar, in which people visit the graves of their ancestors and give them a good cleaning. You might have heard it referred to as Tomb Sweeping Day.

Every year, Qingming coincides with a considerable price drop in some green teas. Why? Because it rains.

There is an ancient farming calendar which suggest when the best times to yield different crops are, and sometimes even predicts the weather. For generations on Qingming or the days around it, it has always rained. After the rain, the weather begins to warm up and the tea tree will grow faster, causing the buds to grow beyond their optimal size for tea-making.

This is not to say that post-Qingming teas aren’t still good — they just lack the complexity and liveliness of those picked beforehand. It is important to note, however, that the Qingming pick date does not apply to all teas, or even all green teas.

Related:

What Leaf Size Tells You about Your Tea
Article Aug 31, 2017

Around the same time green teas are picked, red tea and white tea are picked as well. Because these two teas also involve the bud, white teas and I suspect red teas (though I have yet to confirm) also see a great difference in cost in the days before and after Qingming. White teas will tend to have a clearer difference due to their low processing; with red teas the difference is a little more subtle, but still there.

Don’t Wait Too Long For Oolong

Around mid-March, Part Two of the tea season arrives. The teas that were picked in the early parts of the season become older and sell for a much lower price than when they began. But more importantly, a second wave of teas begin to get picked around this time. These include some greens such as houkui and guapian, but also a widely favorited tea known as oolong.

Oolongs, for the most part, almost always use no bud — they’re not even picked until the bud opens up into a leaf. Not having to worry about the bud makes oolong picking a little easier than picking green tea.

Green tea makers often fixate on picking the bud at just the right time, when it is big enough to produce flavor, but small enough to still be delicate. The bud size strongly correlates to the weather, and over the course of a warm night, a bud can go from too small to too big, completely skipping over the optimal size.

Since oolong varieties don’t use buds, the weather conditions during the picking period are a little less critical. Yet though the picking may not be as strict for oolongs, and therefore less weather-influenced, it’s the making that can be lost to bad weather.

An oolong maker fixes his machine

A major part of all tea making is the removal of moisture from the leaf. In green teas this is less of a worry, since in the “kill green” phase they are exposed to high heat right away and all the moisture evaporates in minutes. But for teas such as white and oolongs, they spend hours and even days sitting out, in which time the moisture is expected to leave.

What happens if it’s not a sunny day, or if it is raining? A rainy oolong season could kill the majority of the harvest. These days they’ve found ways to bring the drying withering process indoors, but it is not the same.

Often times I have talked to oolong makers during the tea season to find that they cant make tea that day because it is raining. This is part of the reason why tieguanyin is so successfully made in the autumn; the autumn is a drier season than the spring and can allow a more reliable harvest and processing.

The influence of weather is such that many famers will put it as one of the most important factors in creating a good tea, second only to soil. So if you ever see a tea farmer obsessing over the weather forecast, you now know why.

All photos by Dylan Conroy.