Sunday, September 6, 2009

"Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you to come home and eat."

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting report on one of those mindlessly silly but cute Internet memes that's going on around, this one involving randomly placed messages to some person named Jia Jung Peng that his mother is calling him home to eat.

Apparently the online community in China is running with it. ChinaSmack introduces loads of pictures that have resulted. The meme is being inserted into all kinds of places and in all kinds of images, including the Mao-era inspirational poster-looking painting below, where the people unite to say, "Together we will make sure Junpeng returns home to eat."

And why not? When you can't talk online about Tibet, Uighurs, Taiwan, wrongdoing by the Beijing government, local corruption, sex, nepotism by the authorities, etc., etc., you eventually have to start making up innocuous stuff that you can talk about without getting in trouble. Amiright?

My favorite is the one below, which is pretty obvious even if you don't understand Chinese: Albert Einstein theorizing that Jia Junpeng should come home to eat. Indeed, it's the Theory of Relatives Eating.

And of course there are efforts to take this meme global, with one jpeg file taking it to other languages:

Indeed, "펭, 당신 어머니 집에 가서 먹으라고!"

And here's the part where I tell the Chinese netizens that Jia Junpeng is actually Korean and this meme was created by Korea. Just like Confucius and chopsticks.

Oh, how the Chinese netizens love me.


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