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.
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| 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.
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| 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.'
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| 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.
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| 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.
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