Link Click, internet slang, and Chinese culture
On the Chinese internet, there's a nickname for Link Click called Shiguang Daidaoren, meaning "the blade-bringers of time" instead of "the managers of time," the original title. Calling something "blade" is Chinese internet slang for something being angsty; whether it be derivative content or the originals themselves. Another meme is that Link Click isn't zhiyu (治愈，healing), which it is tagged as on Bilibili, but zhiyu (致郁，causing depression).
Link Click, especially its first season, is a deeply emotional and sentimental show. And it's a shame that so much of it gets not so much lost in literal, linguistic translation as much as it does in cultural, contextual translation. Many people can understand Emma's pain of being away from her parents in a new city, working a difficult job. But watching the scrolling comments on Bilibili, you get the cultural context of it -- the massive migration patterns within China from rural to urban, the children growing up and having to shed their local fangyan (方言) or, less formally, tuhua (土话)("speech of the locations" and "old-fashioned words," respectively) in exchange for Beijing Mandarin. This massive nation, nearly twice the population of Europe and only about 6% smaller in terms of area, is so diverse as to have created (what is close to) an immigrant experience for its citizens entirely within its borders. You visit your parents on Chunjie (春节）, lunar/Chinese new year, on packed trains during the largest singular human migration event on Earth, annually. And when you get home, you are faced with something different from the cities you now live in -- everything from the buildings to the furniture to the clothes they wear. I hadn't realized how deeply I missed the gaudy, garish mianao (棉袄，coats) and mianbei (棉被，cotton blankets) until I saw familiar shades of too-bright burgundy in the hands of Emma's parents. The concept of this original-home, laojia (老家, old-home) is so strongly baked into our lives that every time I meet another Chinese person, I cannot but help but ask them 你老家哪儿啊? Where is your original-home? And even though I know nothing about Chinese geography, every time I hear the answer, a little piece slots into place nonetheless.
In slang, if something made you cry or otherwise feel an emotion you weren't expecting to feel, you refer to it as pofang (破防，breaking defences). And maybe it says something that an expression of human emotion is viewed as a failure in some defences, but that's introspection for another time. Watching on Bilibili, with its hundreds of comments scrolling by "My defences have been breached" and sobbing onomatopoeia, people in the comments saying that they miss their mothers and fathers -- I, too, miss my family. When Cheng Xiaoshi, in Chen Xiao's body, tried to speak his host body's local variation and came up with butchered dongbeihua (东北话, words of the east-north), I nearly fell out of my chair. It was the sound of home, of my grandmother telling us to hush around noon because our neighbours were napping and my grandfather showing me how to play spider solitaire.
Cheng Xiaoshi's breakdown in episode 5 hits hard for its vulnerability. "I'm scared of the dark" has the same literal meaning as "我怕黑," sure, but there is something devastatingly childlike in that three-syllable declaration of fear. Where English so often derives meaning from complexity, from winding metaphors and beautiful prose, Chinese can derive breathtaking meaning from less breath than it takes to say the word analogy. 我怕黑 is stripped of any grown-up pretenses of control or dignity. It is the barest this statement can be: I. Scared. Darkness.
And what he says following, too. 我害怕一个人. Longer yet no less potent. Alone, or lonely, has many translations in Chinese. 孤独. 寂寞. 孤单. 单独. Many more synonyms for all the different ways you can be lonely. But 一个人 is, once again, an almost child-like way of saying it. Before you have the vocabulary to express these complex emotions, 一个人 is a perfectly working expression. Translating it character-by-character, it means one singular person. It is something you say when you've been left behind. When you've been made to face everything by yourself. When the world is so, so, big, and you are just one singular person, with no companions to stand with you.
And, ah, Li Tianxi's Chinese nickname, 小希. It is the last character of her full name, with a "little" shoved right in front. It is an affectionate way to call someone younger than you. It is different from Xixi, its English rendition, because a repetition of the last character is a more generalized, affectionate nickname, whereas diminutives are almost always reserved for someone younger than you, when used in real life. The diminutive says don't be scared. I'm here now. I'll handle it.
There are endless details in Link Click that make everything about it seem a little bit more like home. The word 面馆 which means something a little, subtly different than "restaurant" or "noodles shop," a difference lost without the context of the phrase 下馆子 and the way adults say it with the gladness of once-children who only ate meat on new years. The "honorifics" as English calls them, to me more of just -- ingrained parts of someone's name. Within the snap of Mandarin syllables there is meaning and memory in every character. Jie, mei, di, ge, lao, da, xiao -- they are more than their literal meanings. They are a relationship, a promise.
Perhaps I am overthinking this, awkwardly Chinese as I am: too localized to be considered first-generation, too stubbornly attached to relate to second-generation. Maybe these linguistic subtleties only exist and matter in my mind, a writer of both languages (though I must say, my Chinese prose leaves… much to be desired) with a knack for pedantics. Regardless, I hope other Chinese fans of this show share this feeling. And surely, other people will, too. All the rural children who left home to pursue higher education and opportunities in faraway cities; the raised-in-poverty who spent their childhoods dreaming of buying their family new coats; the speakers of languages long since abandoned by their childhood friends. What a delight it is to see yourself in stories, neither exception nor abnormality but a norm. What a joy it is to be one of one point four billion.
