The latest craze sweeping through the Chinese-language internet started with a simple sentence: 贾君鹏你妈妈喊你回家吃饭 (Jia Junpeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner). According to wikipedia, the sentence was posted in July on a forum for players of the online game World of Warcraft, and the body of the post simply said “RT”, short for 如题, “as the title suggests”. Others quickly responded, either puzzled by the very random post, or pretending to by Jia Junpeng’s mother or other relatives. Within two days the post had received more than 8 million views and 300,000 comments. The craze spread outside of the forum, as people photoshopped the sentence into various humorous backgrounds and posted their own variations on the topic.
It was later revealed that it was actually a PR company, KPMedia, that was behind the concept. Although they haven’t revealed who they were hired by, the purpose seems to have been related to online gaming, and the team took advantage of the fact that the online game World of Warcraft was down for maintenance by posting on forum for WoW users. They apparently spent two months designing the marketing plan, and used 800 online marketing members who registered 20,000 online IDs and responded to the post 100,000 times. However, once they’d gotten the fad started, the team pulled out, and theirs only accounted for around 3% of total replies to the original post.
In honor of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a friend sent me a link to a page with a series of pictures that all bear the message “Luo Ruiya, your mom is calling you home to eat mooncakes” (Luo Ruiya is my Chinese name), one of many varations on the Jia Junpeng theme. If you follow the link, at the bottom of the page you can enter your own name and create your very own version.
Luo Ruiya, your mom is calling you home to eat mooncakes
And then there’s another popular variation on the phrase, in honor of the recently celebrated Chinese national day: 台湾，你妈妈六十大寿，喊你回家吃饭 (Taiwan, your mother who is turning 60 years old is calling you to come home for dinner).