Chinese Netizens Livestreamed a Guestbook Hunt in Lhasa — and Found the Meme Line
A line Li Na wrote into a Lhasa restaurant's guestbook on Xu Fei's behalf has become the month's favorite meme — and this week netizens livestreamed themselves digging through hundreds of notebooks to find the real page. They did.
The meme that has been appending the singer Li Na's name to Chinese sentences all month just acquired a physical address. On Friday afternoon, netizens in Lhasa walked into the Makye Ame restaurant, asked for the house guestbooks, and began flipping through them on camera — a live-streamed hunt through hundreds of notebooks for one handwritten line. They found it, dated August 25 and signed "Xu Fei, written for her by radiant Nana," and the internet promptly declared "we got the big result."
The line, and where it came from
The words in the notebook — "the world has no way to have both; I will not fail my youth, nor fail you" (世间安得两全法，不负少年不负卿) — are what Li Na wrote on Xu Fei's behalf for the show "Hou You You Qi," and they are the seed of the whole phenomenon. The sentence riffs on the most famous love poem in the Chinese language, the sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso's "the world has no way to have both; I will not fail my faith, nor fail you" — which is why finding its echo in a Lhasa guestbook, in the city the poet-king came from, landed with such a click. As we covered when the meme took off, the reunion show turned the two 2006 Super Girl contestants' twenty-year friendship into a national template for ending sentences (How a 2006 Friendship Made 'Li Na' China's Favorite Way to End a Sentence); the earlier chapter of the turn to friendship is here (A Word That Turns Any Sentence Into a Tragedy).
From meme to field trip
What turned Friday into a spectacle was the execution speed. The line trended in the morning; by early afternoon, netizens on the spot were already streaming from the restaurant with updates — "found it, found it!!" — while the camera panned across stacks of notebooks and onlookers. One onlooker, posting under the name Shangxiaolüe, articulated what everyone was noticing: the scariest species online right now, they wrote, is the heavily internet-addicted person who is also completely fluent in the offline world — the kind who takes any trending meme, locates its physical coordinates in the three-dimensional world, and goes there, in numbers, before the meme is even a day old.
The original line-post that relaunched all of this was liked more than 12,000 times, but the numbers matter less than the pattern: memes in China now routinely grow a geography. A celebrity guestbook in Lhasa — a city already famous for notebooks collecting travellers' confessions — became a pilgrimage site within hours.
Whether the restaurant leans in — a display case, a queue of its own — is what to watch.