Starring the South American Alpaca and set to the tune of the Chinese Smurfs, this video about the mythical "mud grass horse" spread like wildfire across the Chinese Internet in early 2009. "But you can't put it on the site," Gail told us. "It's absolutely hilarious," she admitted, "but far too dirty." And she's right about the vulgarity: the entire point of the video is a gigantic in-joke about how efforts to build a harmonious society in China are clamping down on people's ability to swear.
We've embedded the Youtube version here as the original not-so-mysteriously disappeared from all Chinese video websites after the New York Times reported on it as a case of online dissent. There are some political references, but the song is closer to doggerel than political protest. Nonetheless, if you can't pick up on the subtext from the video alone, we encourage subscribers to check out our manually annotated transcript on the text page. We've added special commentary in the extra notes field of our popups which explain the in-jokes and homophones that Chinese natives will pick up automatically.
barrister
said on December 4, 2009
This is hilarious. Sort of impressive that the Chinese government managed to snuff it off the internet. Talk about having no sense of humor.
Brendan
said on December 4, 2009
The best part about this, of course, is that it's set to the Chinese version of the Smurfs theme song. I've done this at karaoke.
蓝大卫
said on December 4, 2009
Hey, I went to Yellow Bridge to get the pinyin translated! That wouldn't be aired in the United State either!! Remember George Carlin's "Seven Words"? I think one of those seven words is part of the "Grass River Horse". The literal translation has a reference to this event, and then a link to the intended vulgarity.
barrister
said on December 4, 2009
@lan_dawei - sure. but it's no worse than a lot of Eddie Murphy's stand-up, and there's a huge difference between not airing something on prime time television and forceably removing it from the Internet at large. So still a totally lame move by the Chinese government. That and keeping the proper character for cao4 out of most IMEs. Irritating to have to go hunting around the Internet for the original character because modern day computer systems don't support it.
Censored by an input method? Crazy.
蓝大卫
said on December 5, 2009
@barrister,
I was just thinking about this and you're correct, a different medium, so the comparison is like apples and oranges. The internet is a medium that the US government by and large leaves alone. (If they could leave *many* other things alone, that would be a good thing! ;-) )
I ran across a You Tube of this that was annotated. My! Very vulgar indeed! I eschew this type of humor, I must admit that it was very ingenious in the overall message it was sending.
蓝大卫
said on December 5, 2009
Just out of curiosity, does a similar double entendre exist with the Chinese word for "strawberry"? 草莓 cǎoméi
If so, I would want to make certain that I have my tones very accurate to avoid any confusion!
Xiao Hu
said on December 5, 2009
真可惜，《草泥马戈壁》比 《蓝精灵》的信号曲好听一些！
:(
Xiao Hu
said on December 5, 2009
@Barrister,
I have a difficult time wrapping my head around your position on this. What's the big deal if we don't have instand IME access to one of the dirtiest words in the Chinese language? What's the urgent need to use it? 何必呢？(not to be confused with our illustrious 何毖老师)
trevelyan
said on December 5, 2009
@Xiao Hu and lan_dawei: true story here. I got my tones horribly, horribly wrong trying to buy the film 草房子 shortly after coming to Beijing (it's a pretty sweet coming-of-age film set in the 1960s). I don't think the staff had ever heard of it, but telling them the movie was "very popular in Hong Kong" and "starred a bunch of kids," didn't do much to alleviate their clear shock.Finally I wrote it down and they started laughing and told me they didn't have it. I didn't figure out what I must have really been saying until the ride home....
barrister
said on December 5, 2009
@Xiao Hu - as i see it an IME is a tool for communication no different than a typewriter. I don't see any valid reason why anyone should put up technical roadblocks to prevent people from using certain words? This stuff is between the speaker and his audience.
In this case, all the omission seems to be doing is forcing people to appropriate other characters as homophones.
蓝大卫
said on December 5, 2009
@trevelyan,I'll take your example as a possible "yes". I don't recall any problems when I bought strawberry smoothies at the Taipei 101's food court last year.BTW, it appears that 羊驼毛 yángtuómáo is the actual word for alpaca. At first I though they called it "mud grass horse" in Chinese. Appears to be a red herring.
Xiao Hu
said on December 6, 2009
@Barrister我的看法是, it's less shocking to see a homophone or pinyin as a stand in than the real thing in print. I just wish people would realize that there are other, much more clever and funny ways than 脏话 to get one's point accross. You tube, at times is unusable because of the sheer level of f-bombs in comments. I log in to watch a video and have to shake my head at what people have written. I don't even know where people's heads are these days, or if they use them. I'm telling you, peppering posts with bad language is absolutely unnecessary and shows one's own lack of 文化. The point is, that in a puplic forum, it's not between you and your reader, it's between you and your readers, because in a forum, everyone who logs in becomes your audience. Some may not appreciate your choice of language. Maybe banning the c-bomb from IME's is a good thing, it will force people to think of better methods of self-expression.
trevelyan
said on December 6, 2009
@barrister - the early Chinese-developed IMEs were restricted to a smaller subset of characters because they didn't have the space for the full set that eventually went into UTF8. That is probably a contributing factor, since if you're going to have to cut and choose characters, it makes more sense to cut ones like that.
Echo
said on December 6, 2009
@蓝大卫，
I don't think 草莓 has this kind of problem too :) Although there is a riddle : 有一片青草地，来了一群羊， 打一种水果。你能猜到是什么吗？
前不久有一个新闻：现在的一些孩子认为羊驼就是草泥马，一群学生去动物园，围着几只羊驼，大叫“草泥马”，老师告诉他们，这是羊驼，他们完全不相信，说老师一定是错了，这就叫“草泥马”！
其实我觉得那种动物挺可爱的。
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
蓝大卫
said on December 6, 2009
Glad to hear that strawberries are safe! :-)
Also glad that I could run all this through Adsotrans. I believe I understand the gist of your meaning. Looks like the alpaca is marked for a while by another name!
Brendan
said on December 7, 2009
It may just be a font issue -- I believe 肏 appears in extended GB but not the default character set. There's also the fact that most people are unaware of this character and its similarly uncouth brethren, as they've only ever seen the more commonly used homophones. @Xiao Hu - I've decided that it's probably best to let people get all the c-bombs and b-bombs out of their system early on so that they can realize that cursing in Mandarin, or at least cursing in this way, is just not very much fun. There are much better, much more effective ways of verbally crushing your enemy than just lobbing a couple of these -- indeed, cursing in this manner is really just counterproductive, since if you don't know how to escalate you're basically stuck wheeling out the heavy guns first thing in the argument and then watching helplessly as your bluff gets called.But 肏 and 屄 and 𣬠𣬶 (those last characters don't show up in my font: a 毛 and a 几 and a 毛 plus a 巴, respectively) all have their places -- including 红楼梦, where they all occur. (Often hilariously, as in the case of 𣬠𣬶, when the drunkard and lout Xue Pan is taking part in an after-dinner poetry game with his more cultured relatives and finds himself unable to think of any rhymes that aren't inane or pornographic.)
scott
said on December 8, 2009
Haha! Reminds me of Justin Timberlake's "Mother Lover" song he did with Saturday Night Live. Except his was all doggerel and no political commentary.
My son is learning Spanish, but says his teachers never teach him "the good stuff" like pop up Chinese.
paglino9
said on December 8, 2009
What does the "J" mean in CJTV?
LanZi
said on December 8, 2009
@paglino9CJTV=纯洁(chun2 jie2)电视台“纯洁”is pure and innocent. Sarcasm here.
Gail天堂的声音
said on December 9, 2009
@Echo,
真的吗？以后直接把羊驼叫草泥马算了。。。。。。。：（
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