英文零分作文練習：The Story of Grass Mud Horse

The Story of Grass Mud Horse

Today I’d like to introduce you one of my favourite animal, alpaca, a species originated from South America, and is better known as Grass Mud Horse(‘草泥馬’, ‘GMH’ in short) in China.

The story of Grass Mud Horse begins from 2008(or so), when a bunch of animals termed as ’10 mythical beasts’ (十大神獸) occur on Baidu encyclopedia and soon become popular between Chinese netizens (網民). Behind each of these animals is a curse-word or sex related terms. The French-Croatian Octopus (or Fa-Ke-You, ‘法克魷’), for example, is homonymic (諧音) to the English slang ‘f**k you’; while Ya-mie Butterfly (or ‘Ya-Mie-Die’, ‘雅蠛蝶’) is a Japanese word meaning ‘No’ or ‘Stop’, which could be heard from rape scenes of many Japanese pornographies, and thus known to many Chinese people; Da-Fei Cock (or ‘Da-Fei-Ji’, ‘達菲雞’) is the Chinese homonym of ‘Jerk-off’. None of these beasts, however, has achieved a greater success than GMH, and there are obvious hints to explain why it is so popular.

Grass Mud Horse the mythical beast

First of all, the slang behind GMH is ‘Cao-Ni-Ma’ (‘*你媽’, literally means ‘f**k your mother’), which has been familiar to Chinese for years and was entitled as ‘The National Curse-word of China’. No wonder people were prone to accept it rather than those from English or Japanese.

The image of alpaca is not only cute and attractive, but also novel and amazing to Chinese. Unlike pandas, lions, or many other mammals, alpacas don’t appear on TV too often, neither on cartoons nor animal documentaries. Driven by curiosity and admiration, people would surly take a deeper look at GMH, as well as alpaca itself.

Furthermore, the facial expression of alpacas somehow reminds us the Chinese character ‘囧’ (pronunciation: 'Jiong'), a new emoticon that hit the internet several years before GMH did. The emoticon is majorly used to express helplessness or disappointment, which is a bit similar to GMH.

A very 'Jiong' Grass Mud Horse

But GMH is more than a meme or an emoticon, it is actually the representation of the spirit of the grass-root and the lower class. GMH has an imaginative rival, the River Crab, a brutal and aggressive animal that invaded the homeland of GMH. The mild and peace creatures bravely fought for their legal rights and their homeland. After years of struggle they finally kept the River Crabs away, and live with freedom and happiness.

 

The story itself is a decent fairy tale, but it’s in fact the reflection and expectation of our society. While China economy has been rapidly growing, the gap between the rich and the poor keeps extending. People are quite angry and frustrated about unfair phenomena such as corruption, ‘Rich 2G’ and social injustice. The River Crab(‘He-xie’ or ‘河蟹’) is resemble to ‘Harmony’ (‘和諧’) in Chinese, reflecting the ‘Harmony Policy’ of the Communist Party. The policy is, after all, an excuse for the party and government to exploit human rights of their people. Crab itself is also the symbol of tyrant for hundreds of years because of the way it walks. There was an anonymous poem saying '嘗將冷眼觀螃蟹, 看你橫行得幾時', which means 'Trying to glare at a crab with cool eyes; let's see how long thou can tyrannize.'

  

A Grass Mud Horse fighting against River Crabs

So the fairy tale of GMH is actually the dream of the grass-root and the lower class; it’s the anticipation of Liberty and Justice. It’s a way we express our depression of our society. Well seeing the potential influent of it, the government has decided to censor (or ‘harmonize’) GMH (together with other ‘mythical beast’) from the internet. The effort, however, is invalid. The trend of GMH is simply unstoppable. To me, it is the most crucial factor why GMH has been so successful.

A cute Grass Mud Horse drawn by me

The image of Grass Mud Horse is much more than just a curse word. It’s a combination of cuteness, peace, bravery, intelligence, liberty, and black-humor; it gives us hope and expectation of our own future. That’s why everybody (except the Rich and the Communist Party), boys or girls, young or old, love this ‘mythical beast’, as well as its origin, the alpaca.