A Variety Show Catchphrase Became a Meme — and a Worker Was Fired for It
A variety show catchphrase escaped the show into general speech — and a Weibo user who wrote it in her WeChat status was fired for "poor work attitude." The show's market share has climbed to 74.3 percent, and the catchphrase has become a workplace hazard.
"I draw a prison around myself, Li Na." The line — singer Xu Fei, in tears, to a woman she had been estranged from for nearly twenty years — is the catchphrase of a season. It comes from the variety show Hou Hui You Qi, which reunites four pairs of former friends who have fallen out, and it has escaped the show into general speech: a Chinese man's "画地为牢" (drawing a circle on the ground and standing in it) is a classic image of self-imprisonment, and the phrase has become a meme that people use to describe anything they are stuck in. This week, the meme collided with a workplace: a Weibo user wrote "I draw a prison around myself, Monday" in her WeChat status, and was fired by her boss that afternoon for "poor work attitude." She got her compensation, and the story became a Baidu trending item under the headline "because a meme got a worker fired." A worker's private WeChat status is now a performance review, and the show's catchphrase has become a workplace hazard.
The show behind the meme has become the year's biggest hit. The story has moved past the show itself: the Li Na meme — a 2006 friendship that ended badly — has been a running story on the site, and the latest episode is the one that has taken the meme into general speech. By the end of October, the show's market share had climbed to 74.3 percent, according to the data firm Yunhe, and the mother company Mango Supermarket's stock hit its 20-centimeter daily limit on November 2. The show's success is the story of a variety show that has become a public argument about friendship — a relationship that, as one Baidu trending item put it, is a long-neglected intimacy that people are finally starting to talk about seriously.
The episode that has the country talking is the one that has taken the two women back into the show's orbit. The producer Yu Zheng posted a video late at night begging Li Na to forgive Xu Fei — "we sent the video to Li Na, watched it with a death grip," he wrote — and Li Na, a post liked more than 7,800 times reports, replied. "Now we're in the era where everyone begs Li Na to forgive Xu Fei," one post read, "Yu Zheng is just one of them." The two women, meanwhile, have been photographed on the show: a post from China Blue News reports that when the host Li Wei Jia was asked at an event whether the two had made up, he simply performed the catchphrase on the spot, to the audience's laughter. "The two women chose a graceful farewell, both tacitly not getting off the carriage," one post read — and the image of the two women, both refusing to get off, is the one that has made the story national.
The fired-for-the-meme story is the part that has real weight. The user's own account, posted on Weibo, describes the sequence: she wrote "I draw a prison around myself, Monday" in her WeChat status, and that afternoon her boss called her in for a talk, judged her attitude as "poor," and fired her. The company, she said, was already planning layoffs, and the meme was the excuse. "A worker's private WeChat status is now over-interpreted," she wrote, "and the space to play a meme is nearly gone." The story is a small one, but the catchphrase is the point: the show's catchphrase has become a workplace hazard, and the show's catchphrase has become a workplace hazard that has been read in China as a story about a worker's private WeChat status.
The story is a small one, but the catchphrase is the point: the show's catchphrase has become a workplace hazard, and the show's catchphrase has become a workplace hazard that has been read in China as a story about a worker's private WeChat status.