In early February, as the novel coronavirus gathered force, it was impossible to ignore the heartrending news coming out of Wuhan, China. I was about 945km away in Taiwan, where I started keeping a close eye on WeChat, the do-everything messaging and social-media app that rules China.

Lost in this are the many inspiring ways that China’s 1.4 billion people are turning to humour in the midst of pain

Among unsettling accounts of people collapsing on the street and bodies being carried out of apartment blocks, something surprising soon began appearing on my feed: a deluge of funny homemade videos made by Chinese men and women, most with an unpolished, do-it-yourself charm. This, of course, was the first glimpse at what the entire world now knows: that while many people are fighting for their lives against coronavirus, the vast majority of us are simply trying to stay sane and find some humour in the midst of life under lockdown.

No-one faced that paradox earlier than the Chinese. Yet, while much has been reported on the many creative ways that people in other nations are coping with government-imposed lockdowns, the narrative from China has tended to just focus on the reliability of coronavirus reporting from the Chinese government. Lost in this are the many inspiring ways that China’s 1.4 billion people are turning to humour in the midst of pain to help lift their neighbours’ spirits.

While Italians have been defiantly belting out arias from their windows and people from Madrid to Mumbai have been gathering nightly on their balconies to applaud medical workers, the Chinese have often brought a subtle and sometimes self-deprecatory sensibility to their creative expressions.

These responses to uncertainty and helplessness have roots in the ancient Chinese art of kuzhong zuole – “finding joy amidst sorrow”

Videos in China have riffed on how the simple act of picking up a package left by a scooter deliveryman turned into a daring, Mission Impossible-esque endeavour. After a run on toilet paper paradoxically left people with more than they knew what to do with, they began posting videos of themselves lip-syncing in whimsically elaborate dresses made from unspooled rolls. And instead of gorgeous opera arias, Chinese people filmed videos of themselves frantically trying to break out of their apartments to escape their spouses’ terrible singing.

As it happens, these seemingly off-the-wall responses to uncertainty and helplessness have roots in the ancient Chinese art of kuzhong zuole – “finding joy amidst sorrow”.

[Kuzhong zuole] has come to symbolise a sense of smiling through everything from natural disasters to heavy-handed state control

According to Christopher Rea, professor of modern Chinese literature at the University of British Columbia and author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China, the phrase “kuzhong zuole” first appeared in the Chinese translation of the Buddhist Mahāratnakūṭa Sutra from the Tang Dynasty about 1,375 years ago. In modern times, it has come to symbolise a sense of smiling through everything from natural disasters to heavy-handed state control that can leave people feeling helpless.

“Few would argue that China’s modern experience has been primarily jolly. But its wits and wags have arrested attention and influenced public sentiment,” wrote Rea. “‘Humorists fatten on trouble,’ EB White noted, and in modern China there was plenty of that to go around.”

Rea has made a career trying to correct the widespread perception among outsiders that China is a humourless place. Today, he says, kuzhong zuole is a kind of cultural touchstone in China and encompasses a broad range of humour, from slapstick routines to the particularly Chinese knack for irony and subversive satire often used by critics of the ruling Communist Party.

“I think [kuzhong zuole] is kind of an uber metaphor,” Rea said. “It’s a way of thinking about Chinese humour that has been dominant at least in the 20th Century, and even into the 21st, with censorship and all of these infringements on civil liberties that Chinese people live with, including freedom of speech.”

The idea has not been without its critics, among them some prominent humourists. Back in 1933, one of China’s greatest 20th-Century writers, Lu Xun,asked, “Can people even talk about humour in places where it’s raining bombs and the fields are inundated with floodwater?”

In China, apparently, yes. From earthquakes to floods to famine to pandemics, China has never been a stranger to large-scale disasters. Today, with roughly one-fifth of the world’s population in China, the nation’s struggles can often leave mind-bogglingly large numbers of people utterly powerless. And in the face of uncertainty, the first instinct of many Chinese is often to turn to kuzhong zuole.

In 2011, for instance, after Beijing was hit by violent rainstorms, people used the opportunity to take aim at a gargantuan infrastructure project that had been widely panned as useless: the South-North Water Transfer Project. As the streets of Beijing filled with water, people traded waggish text messages that, in spite of past stumbles, the Water Transfer Project now seemed to be working very well. Other incidents, from high-speed rail crashes to high-profile corruption cases, have all bred their own form of public cheekiness.

This year, as coronavirus left an estimated 60 million Chinese under lockdown in February and March, Chinese en masse turned to WeChat and a flurry of video apps like Douyin to make and share short videos in the spirit of kuzhong zuole.

Many videos seemed to be sardonic takes on current affairs. At a time when police were sometimes forcibly compelling people on the street to wear masks, one spoof shows a policeman and a municipal worker with a spray tank full of disinfectant berating a man without a mask. The man defiantly stands his ground – until the sanitation worker sneezes, at which point the man frantically digs a mask out of his back pocket and crams it onto his own face.

[It’s] a way of coping and saying that we’ve been forced into this really humble, trapped existence, and we’re making the best of it

Other people seemed to conclude there was nothing to do but turn the surreal reality of life into a joke. In one Douyin clip, a narrator compares the lowly neighbourhood watchmen enforcing the lockdown to philosophers challenging people with simple – yet profound – questions: “Who are you? Where have you come from? And what is your destination?”

Other memes are more puzzling, like the one with the hashtag #qupa, which means, more or less, “maggot crawling”. The vast majority of people who are doing it are young women, usually clad in the unofficial uniform of the lockdown: pyjamas, bath robes and fuzzy slippers. To qupa, you lie with your cheek pressed flat against the floor, stick your bottom high into the air, and slowly propel yourself forward bit-by-bit, inchworm-style, off the screen. It is an admittedly odd sight; odder still is a variation in which entire families wrap themselves in quilts, maggot-style, and film themselves crawling around their flats.

But what does it mean? No-one I know – not even my friends in China who forwarded me the videos in the first place – has a clue. Rea has a few ideas, though.

“I think [it’s] a way of coping and saying that we’ve been forced into this really humble, trapped existence, and we’re making the best of it,” he said. “We’re all going stir-crazy, so let’s embrace that and crawl around.” As Rea puts it, “If we’re living like bugs, let’s act like bugs.”

As Chinese author Yu Hua told the Los Angeles Review of Books several years ago, “reality [in China] is more preposterous than fiction.”

According to Rea, the already-surreal realities of daily life for many ordinary Chinese have only become more pronounced with the pandemic. He points to another oft-used Chinese phrase: “jianguai buguai”, which, as he puts it, roughly means “we’re so used to the bizarre being part of our everyday lives that the bizarre is no longer bizarre”. As Rea explained, social media memes like qupa are a way of “having fun playing with that: anything goes, anything’s possible”.

It’s always tempting to look for hidden subtexts in anything that shows up on Chinese social media. Yet sometimes, you don’t have to analyse things so closely.

Even when we all feel powerless, each of us has the potential to be a hero

In early March, an acquaintance in Beijing forwarded me a 30-second clip that has proven strangely unforgettable. In it, a young woman in pink flower-print pyjama bottoms, bathroom slippers and a surgical mask emerges from a massive high-rise apartment tower with a bag of rubbish in one hand and a sword in the other. After dropping the bag in a bin, she tosses the sword high over her head while doing a split kick, catches it, executes a perfect aerial cartwheel and then launches into a highly choreographed martial arts routine. Just as quickly as she starts, she nonchalantly strides back inside and disappears.

Set to a song called Nameless, the video immediately grabbed people’s imagination. Who was she? Where was she? Admiring comments flooded in, quoting Tang Dynasty poems and comparing her to a much-loved heroine in the late writer Jin Yong’s swordfighter novels.

The clip was notably context-free, yet it invoked several themes at once: the cherished Chinese swordfighter genre; the mundanity of daily life under lockdown; and the feeling of isolation, smallness and anonymity that seems to be felt by everyone waiting out the storm. Yet, these shared emotions seem to be bringing people together in new ways, and videos like this are playing an important role in that shift.

More than a month after I first saw the swordfighter video, I can’t keep myself from watching it. And each time I do, I still feel as if I’m catching a fleeting glimpse of something inspiring and joyful. It feels like a reminder that, even when we all feel powerless, each of us has the potential to be a hero.

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