A bald Chinese man films himself in the snow singing the chorus of Fei Yu-ching's 1983 ballad Yi Jian Mei, uploaded to Kuaishou in January 2020. By May it had crossed to TikTok and Spotify, where the line 'xue hua piao piao, bei feng xiao xiao' became a caption for any situation that is going badly and cannot be helped. The record's entry for a forty-year-old song getting a second life through a stranger's phone.
The singer in the clip is not Fei Yu-ching, and the clip did not start on TikTok. It began on Kuaishou, a Chinese short-video app, and spent months there before anyone outside China saw it.
The lyric means roughly 'the snow falls and the north wind blows'. The internet used it to mean 'this is happening and there is nothing to be done', which is not what the song means but is what the man's face suggests.
Filed from a group chat in lockdown, where someone replied to a cancelled holiday with the five characters and nothing else. Everyone understood. Nobody in the chat spoke Mandarin.
Covers, spoofs and remixes followed once the song charted on Spotify in May 2020, most of them performed by people who could not read the lyric they were singing and had learned it phonetically from the video.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
