The following round up of recent Youku videos is by Kaiser Kuo. It is reprinted here in full with permission from the author. If you would like to receive monthly English language updates about Youku content directly, e-mail buzz@youku.com.
No Legs, but Lots of Heart and Great Pipes
13-year-old orphan boy Chen Zhou lost both his legs while playing on a railroad track. To compound Chen’s misery, the kindly grandfather who raised him died soon after. In the intervening 12 years, Chen, now 25 and endowed with very strong arms, has wandered the country homeless, making his living by singing on the street. Somehow, his optimism remains intact. “I’m not a handicapped person: I’m a singer,” he’s fond of saying, and he insists that his condition has only increased his desire to give something to those less fortunate. In this video, Chen Zhou visits the May 12 Sichuan Earthquake disaster zone, where he entertains people who’ve lost their homes in a duet with a PLA soldier. Riding a wave of charitable sentiment buoyed by Olympic year patriotism and empathy for the quake victims, this inspiring video has been viewed more than 266,000 times.
Tao Xiangli, an Anhui native with only a primary school education, has built himself a submarine! He built the 6.5 meter long, 800 kilogram mini submarine in Beijing for less than 30,000 RMB and in less than a year, using five oil drums. Although it hasn’t made its maiden voyage underwater yet, Tao says that it can go as far as ten kilometers at a depth of ten meters. I hear they’re using mini subs to smuggle cocaine from Latin America to the U.S. Maybe Tao has a market opportunity here…
This Farmer Has No Fear of Flying
Xu Bin, a native of Quzhou County in rural Zhejiang, took car engines, steel tubing, and propellers to create three amazing one-seater aircraft. He’s been working on these projects for 12 years now, gaining quite a bit of local fame, but also generating controversy, with some local officials opposed to his aeronautical tinkering – determined, as it were, to fight the flight mechanism. This video, which shows Xu Bin airborne over the Zhejiang countryside, appeared earlier this summer. Check out his manufacturing facility here. Impressive as I’m sure all viewers might be with his resourcefulness and raw courage, I’ll bet he has trouble getting a life insurance policy.
This Internet cafe in Shanghai’s Xujiahui area isn’t your average Chinese wangba: It’s more preposterous by several orders of magnitude. “China’s most luxurious Internet cafe,” inspired doubtless by the nation’s deep-rooted karaoke culture, is staffed with dozens of pretty women in skimpy outfits whose job, apparently, is to sit by you as you surf the Web or play games. I’d be mighty distracted, I’d think. The place caters to the pleather clutch-purse set, and accepts credit cards. While normal Internet cafes charge only 3 RMB an hour, this one starts at 30 RMB per hour – 40 if you want a private room, 50 for a VIP room, or 100 for a deluxe VIP room. I just wonder what the Internet connection is like…
Last year, Peking University professor Xu Dianqing made the confident and very widely broadcast assertion that Shenzhen real estate prices would continue to rise throughout 2008. When he was proven wrong and housing prices tumbled this year, he issued an apology to the people of Shenzhen. But that wasn’t enough to placate many of those who’d lost money in real estate, and they demanded more. They got it. On July 8, a fan and self-appointed defender of Professor Xu’s, showed up in front of a Shenzhen shopping center wearing a little pink dress and fishnet stockings, holding a sign titled “Xu Dianqing Apologizes Again.” The sign explains that she’s using her own body – not a bad one, I must say – as a poster board for further apology. She then pulled her dress down to the waist, covering her breasts with the sign drawing, as you would expect, quite a crowd. I didn’t know Beida economists had groupies.
Aerobics for Insurance Salesmen
People who work as salesmen for Chinese insurance companies have it rough. They’re under constant pressure to sell, but as they’re widely regarded as nuisances and frauds, they get a lot of doors slammed in their faces. To thicken their skin and build up that company spirit, aerobic exercise sessions are apparently common. And why not? Can you imagine anything that would inure you to shame more than having yourself filmed doing this ridiculous dance and having it viewed by 1.22 million people? Watch the skinny guy on the left as he loses it toward the end.
Nouveaux riches the world over aren’t known for having particularly good taste, but the anonymous baofahuwho owns this monstrosity near Xinxiang, in Henan Province, takes the prize for his garish monument to tackiness. What’s with the fixation with Romanesque statuary? Neighbors, all of whom live in humble pingfang, complain that it looks like a church. I pray I’m never forced to see what the actual inside of the place must look like.
US: Give me your huddled masses yearning for Wanglaoji
Hats off to the marketing Einstein who thought this up. Wanglaoji, the wildly popular Chinese beverages made from various teas and South Chinese medicinal herbs supposedly able to “quell the heat,” made its maiden tour of Manhattan in early July. This strangely earnest video shows an outsize can of the tonic at the bow of a leisure boat as it plies the East River with the Statue of Liberty usually in shot. Later in the video, a song I’m pretty sure is 80s New Wave band Devo plays in the background. For whatever reason, this “viral” has been viewed over half a million times. Jiaduobao, the company that makes Wanglaoji, recently gained fame for gargantuan corporate donations to the victims of the Sichuan Earthquake of May 12.