Our last regular post of the 2023 calendar year is by frequent guest blogger Janan Chan, who writes, “I was born in Hong Kong SAR and moved to Canada with my mother when I was seven. Growing up in a small university town in Québec, I struggled with accepting my Chinese heritage. Graduating from Concordia University, Montréal with an MA in English Literature and Creative Writing, I found an ESL/EFL teaching position in Shanghai, China. From 2021-2024, I have continually modified the lesson materials provided to discuss real issues and to use language in creative, expressive and meaningful ways. Teaching ESL/EFL in Shanghai, China has helped me to develop my teaching ability and allowed me to reconnect with parts of my identity which I had once rejected. I am a life-long creative and my poems have been published in The Mitre (118, 122, 128), yolk. (1.1), Soliloquies Anthology (25.2), Warm Milk (3), and the chapbook “Water Lines”. My poems explore identity and belonging (Chinatown, Montreal, pg. 62-63) and feelings of nostalgia and longing (On Track, pg. 15, Knowing Few People in Early Semesters, and 15.), to name a few.
My previous four BILD-LIDA blog posts explore my conflicts of identity in Shanghai; “hyper-Canadianness” in Shanghai’s Tim Hortons; cyborg relations during Shanghai’s 2022 COVID-19 lockdown; and real L2 use while skateboarding.“
This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
Internet access in China can often seem contradictory. While smartphones allow people to scan QR codes in restaurants to order food, unlock shared bicycles and make cashless payments, China’s internet firewall blocks access to foreign websites or sites which might provide dissenting information (Economy, 2018). Social media posts can be removed, censored and monitored, and users can be blocked from posting text with certain keywords. Within this restrictive communicative landscape, however, internet users still find creative ways to express transgressive opinions, thoughts and information.
微信 (wēixìn) WeChat is a ubiquitous Chinese messaging and social media app. In China, people rarely exchange phone numbers but rather prefer to add one another on WeChat. WeChat allows for communicative textual, visual and video exchanges and even quick cashless payments, and features online stores, promotional pages for individuals, groups and companies, among other convenient features. In 2012, WeChat added 表情包 (biǎoqíngbāo; literally meaning facial expression bundle and translated as “sticker” in English) to their software (de Seta, 2018). Stickers (表情包) combine text and (sometimes animated) images to express particular and nuanced sentiments. While emojis replace or are integrated alongside or between words 📝 within a text message (Stavans et al., 2021), stickers are sent as individual messages. WeChat’s proprietary sticker bundles and user-created bundles are based around similar aesthetic themes, motifs or mascots and often express a variety of emotions, sentiments or “facial expressions” (Fig. 1). WeChatizens (Qi & Li, 2022) can create and send their own custom stickers and build a small “inventory” of stickers received, fulfilling what Liu (2023) suggests is a positive benefit of stickers.
Liu (2023) suggests that the use of stickers in China is not evidence of a lack of formality or politeness among Gen Z people (i.e., people born between the mid-1990s to the late 2000s) but rather a reinterpretation of traditional etiquette. Users are mindful of social contexts and can use stickers as validating gifts which show respect, create friendly or cordial atmospheres and build intimacy through expressing deeper personal emotions.
Furthermore, authoritarian censorship which prohibits discussion of dissenting information often forces WeChat and other social media users to invent creative and transgressive modes of expression for circumvention. Qi and Li (2022) noted that Chinese-English bilingual students were able to effectively translanguage in their conversations on WeChat. In 2010, China’s General Administration of Press and Publication banned hybrid borrowings from English or other foreign languages from appearing in Chinese publications as a way to preserve the purity of the national language (Qi & Li, 2022). However, WeChat and other social media websites allow netizens to translanguage in creative, expressive and transgressive ways. In 2022, China’s zero-COVID policy led to strict country-wide lockdowns where residents were barricaded within their 村 (cūn; village) or 小区 (xiǎoqū; walled-off residential blocks within a neighbourhood) and at times subjected to daily COVID-19 testing. Under these restrictions, ten people were killed in 新疆 (Xīnjiāng), an autonomous region in Western China, as rescue services were unable to access a burning building in time and residents within could not evacuate (Goodyear, 2022b). This led to a series of protests, dubbed the White Paper protests, erupting across cities in China, from its capital Beijing, the Special Administrative Region (SAR) Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chengdu, and others (Reuters, 2022). Demonstrators displayed sheets of blank paper (Reuters, 2022; Goodyear, 2022a; Perrigo, 2022), symbolizing the futility of expressing truth under censorship.
Restaurants and street signs which included the Chinese words 新疆 (Xīnjiāng) were substituted with the generic, apolitical name 西域 (Xīyù; Western Region). Netizens also creatively switched to using the pinyin initials XJ, rather than the Chinese words 新疆 (Xīnjiāng) to discuss the deadly fire, among other political issues (The Associated Press, 2018). This was to circumvent immediate censorship or fears of being monitored.
In another example, users on Weibo, a Chinese social media website, used emojis for rice 🌾 and rabbit 🐰 to express solidarity with Me Too, as these two words in Chinese sound like Me Too (de Seta, 2018): 米 (mǐ), rice; 兔 (tù), rabbit. However, stickers caught my attention because of their ability to express so much in a relatively small space.
Continuing from Qi and Li’s (2022) proposition that WeChat can act as a site for translingual, and therefore transgressive, language practices, stickers can also have transgressive potential. In China, teachers often create WeChat group chats with their students to communicate and provide updates. During my last ESL/EFL class with a particular group, I expressed an interest in stickers, and Fig. 2 was among the many that students sent into our group chat. This sticker derives from a sticker format known as 微笑中透露着 (wēixiào zhōng tòulùzhe), “What’s behind a smile…”, where users complete the sentence with their own words to express 丧 (sàng) sentiments, i.e., irony, despondence and self-deprecation through humor. In Fig. 2, a student modified this format by adding their school motto, 创造幸福, 分享快乐 (chuàngzào xìngfú fēnxiǎng kuàilè), “Create contentment, share happiness”. This motto employs 对仗 (duìzhàng), a poetic device where statements are presented as parallel in meaning through sound and grammar, which then suggests to readers that both statements or “actions” occur simultaneously or as a result of one or the other. A good parallel structure (对仗) also ensures matching grammar (e.g. in Fig. 2, verb–noun, verb–noun). While 幸福 (xìngfú) and 快乐 (kuàilè) can be loosely translated as “happiness” in English, each has distinct meanings. Kuàilé (快乐) is a personal and individual happiness, whereas xìngfú (幸福) is a formal and shared familial and communal happiness which arises out of a fulfilment of duty or responsibilities. In short, this school motto, chuàngzào xìngfú fēnxiǎng kuàilè (创造幸福, 分享快乐), can be translated as “Create communal happiness through fulfilment of shared responsibilities; share, enjoy personal happiness”.
Slogans and politically correct formulations have an enduring history in China as a way of promoting and reiterating the correct social values according to those in power (Karmazin, 2020). For example, after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, slogans such as 爱国家, 卖棉花, 家中不留一点花 (ài guójiā, màimiáhuā, jiāzhōng bùliú yìdiǎn huā; which I personally interpret as: “Love the country, sell the cotton, leave not one flower at home for personal use) (Ning, 2020) employ a memorable metre and rhyme scheme to promote contributive and selfless farm work to rebuild the country’s economy. China’s President Xi Jinping’s 绿水青山就是金山银山(lǜshuǐ qīngshān jiùshì jīnshān yínshān; which I personally interpret as: “Clear water, clean mountains are mountains of gold and silver”) reiterate the Party’s vision of environmentalism in 2005 (Ning, 2020) through a succinct ten-character slogan with internal rhymes. Chinese political speeches similarly employ rhetorical formulations and slogans which use poetic devices to reiterate the CPC’s (Communist Party of China’s) contemporary values.
Therefore, someone unfamiliar with the school from which Fig. 2 originates could likely identify the values within its motto and its similarity to other politically correct slogans. However, Fig. 2 is significant because of its juxtaposition of image and words. While the full textual statement, “What’s behind a smile . . . . Create contentment, share happiness (微笑中透露着 . . . . 创造幸福, 分享快乐”), could be read as genuine, the drawing of a person with haunted, hollow eyes and a hesitant smile suggests a darker inner anguish.
What’s more, as a teacher seeing this sticker, I can gain an understanding of what sentiments my students might be feeling. This sticker could be interpreted as students’ playful mockery of their supposedly blissful learning environment, and it could also be read as an expression of an individual’s dissatisfaction with the system. What is behind their pained smile is either their passive resistance towards the high academic pressures from the school itself or their ironic satire of the wider societal values behind the motto. Receiving these stickers gave me insights into my students’ feelings about school and society and allowed me to appreciate their creativity in expressing transgressive opinions and thoughts.
Acknowledgements: Warm thanks to Fay for her help with interpreting these stickers and for providing insights into parallel structures (对仗), stickers (表情包) and Chinese culture.
References
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de Seta, Gabriele. (2018). Biaoqing: The circulation of emoticons, emojis, stickers, and custom images on Chinese digital media platforms. First Monday, 23(9), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i9.9391
Economy, E. C. (2018, June 29). The great firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s internet shutdown. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/29/the-great-firewall-of-china-xi-jinpings-internet-shutdown
Goodyear, S. (2022, November 28). Chinese protests have human rights advocates feeling inspired, yet terrified. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/chinese-protests-human-rights-watch-1.6667121
Goodyear, S. (2022, November 29). Uyghur mistreatment to blame for fire behind Chinese protests, says victims’ relative. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/china-protest-fire-uyghurs-1.6668427
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