Nobody knew what this was, but we think the English meaning makes more sense than the Chinese one.Īmong Chinese users there is also a lot of confusion about this one-as one user asked on Baidu’s forums, “I was talking to a girl and she sends me the ‘relaxed’ expression. Keyboard command (Chinese): (yōuxían, relaxed) You can still make it with the keyboard commands, though. This one is not available in the menu of some newer versions of the WeChat app, probably because no one understands it (is it upset? Did it eat something bad? Is it disbelieving?). Keyboard command (Chinese): (jī è, starving) The Chinese meaning is actually closer to “scornful” than “smug,” though. We also got responses like “thinking” and “confused” for this one. Keyboard command (Chinese): (àomàn, pride) To show or “flip” (翻 fān) the white of your eyes at someone is like rolling your eyes in annoyance or disdain. Admittedly, the raised eyebrows are misleading, and the meaning is very specific to Chinese culture. Opinions: Our respondents overwhelmingly picked this one as the most confusing, and, fittingly, thought this was the emoji for confusion. Keyboard command (Chinese): (báiyǎn, literally, the white of your eyes eye-roll) The list is written in the order in which each expression appears in the default emoji menu on the WeChat app.
Finally, we asked TWOC editor Sun Jiahui, our very own expert on Chinese internet slang and writer of our “ Street Talk” section, to weigh in on how some of these expressions are used among her own acquaintances. Due to time constraints, we’ve limited ourselves to just the faces that come pre-installed in the WeChat app, which also existed on Tencent’s older messaging platform, QQ. We took a poll of a group of international graduate students at the Communication University of China as well as our own staff on the WeChat expressions that confuse them the most, and discovered that apart from the oft-touted “generation gap” in people’s understanding of these expressions, there are also misunderstandings rooted in cultural differences as well as the fact that it’s really hard to get across a complex emotion in an illustration that’s a few millimeters across.īelow, we’ve listed the 11 expressions that confused our respondents most, excerpting some of their responses as well as the “official” explanation, as defined by the commands you can type in the app get the expressions to show up in both the Chinese and English settings of the app. As shown by a recent guide published by Quartz, not to mention perennial accounts from Chinese internet users of funny ways in which parents and older relatives misuse expressions or make tacky stickers of their own, WeChat expressions can elucidate subtexts as much as they add further cryptic nuances to conversation. WeChat has certainly opened up new avenues of communication in China, not in the least by providing a rich arsenal of emojis and “stickers” that help us put hard-to-convey nuances and human expressions in messaging. State media calls it the “new channel for individual expression,” but to Chinese netizens, it’s the source of a new “generation gap” (代沟 dàigōu).
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