Author Archives: Ellie Wong

Red Note Refugee

Context:

The informant is a 19-year-old undergraduate student at USC. During the spring semester of 2025 she downloaded Red Note (小红书) and used it for a few days as part of a trend where users outside China temporarily joined the platform as so-called “refugees.”

Text:

The informant describes her experience using Red Note after downloading it during a period when many new international users joined the app. She explains that she used the platform for a short time out of curiosity and to observe the content and community style. During this period, she was part of a group of users jokingly referred to as “refugees,” meaning people who temporarily migrated to the app from other social media platforms. She notes that the experience felt both unfamiliar and entertaining, as the platform’s content culture and user interactions differed from what she was used to.

Analysis:

This phenomenon reflects how digital platforms can generate temporary, identity-based user communities through migration trends and internet humor. The term “refugee” is used playfully to describe short-term users who “escape” from one platform to another, turning platform switching into a shared cultural joke. This labeling also highlights how online communities construct group identity even around brief or superficial participation. At the same time, the informant’s short engagement illustrates how users often treat new platforms as exploratory spaces rather than long-term commitments, revealing the fluid and trend-driven nature of contemporary digital folklore.

Language Cosplay (语c)

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old undergraduate student studying linguistic at Cambridge. She was previously involved in Chinese online youth subcultures and participated in “语C” (language cosplay), a text-based role-playing community that originated from online forums and fandom culture in China. She also have a love in studying online subculture that often involves writing and the use of languages.

Text:

The informant describes 语C as a form of pure text-based role-playing where participants pretends they are a certain fictional characters and interact with others through written dialogue and narrative description. Rather than simply writing stories, participants actively perform as characters by imitating speech styles, emotional reactions, and behavior in real time.

She explains that the experience always felt like more than just writing. It felt like performing, closer to dramatic acting than literature. Within this community, there are also shared vocabularies and conventions that only insiders understand. For example, participants often refer to a piece of writing as “the play” (戏) instead of a “story.”

Analysis:

This practice demonstrates how digital subcultures can transform writing into a performative and collective activity rather than an individual literary act. 语C functions as a form of vernacular performance, where identity is constructed through continuous role-play and interaction rather than fixed authorship. The emphasis on embodying characters highlights the blurred boundary between writing and acting, showing how online communities can create hybrid forms of artistic expression.

Fan-fiction “Tropes”

Context:

The informant is a 20-year-old undergraduate student studying linguistic at Cambridge. She was and still is involved in both Chinese and the English online community for fan-fictions. In the interviewee she shared a interesting characteristic of the Chinese fandom community.

Text:

The informant explains that in traditional Chinese poetry there is a concept called 词牌名 (brand of a tune), which can be understood as the name of a fixed melodic pattern. In classical poetry, lyrics (词) were written to be sung according to set tunes, meaning the 词牌名 functions like a structural template or musical framework, while the actual content of each poem could vary.

She notes that in modern Chinese fan-fiction communities, a similar concept exists. Certain recurring titles and narrative tropes are reused across different fandoms, and users themselves sometimes refer to these as 词牌名.

Examples include phrases such as:

  • “真相是假” (The Truth Is Fake)
  • “五次他……这一次他没有” (Five Times They …, and This Time They Didn’t）
  • “生长痛” (Growing Pains)
  • “花吐症” (Flower-Puking Syndrome – a fictional illness trope in fandom where a person coughs up flowers due to unrequited love)
  • “斯德哥尔摩情人” (Stockholm Lover)

The informant finds this particularly interesting because it represents a blend between traditional Chinese literary structure and contemporary youth creative writing practices.

Analysis:

This phenomenon shows how classical literary frameworks can be reinterpreted within digital fan cultures as reusable narrative templates. Similar to traditional 词牌名, these modern “titles-as-structures” function as pre-existing emotional and thematic molds that guide storytelling while allowing variation in content. Their repetition across different fandoms creates a shared expressive vocabulary, enabling writers to quickly communicate complex emotional narratives through recognizable tropes. At the same time, the adaptation of a classical term to describe internet writing practices reflects how traditional cultural concepts are continuously recontextualized by younger generations, linking historical literary forms to contemporary participatory culture.

Hand Gestures for “Rock Charts”

Context:

The informant is a member of the Trojan Marching Band at USC. At the same time, the informant is a strong supporter of USC school spirit and marching band traditions, and is very knowledgeable about band “lore” and internal practices.

Text:

The Trojan Marching Band consists of over 400 members and is led by a single director conducting from the podium. During the football game, the band must remain highly attentive, as they do not know in advance which piece will be played next, selections often depend on the progression of the football game. In many cases, the band is required to begin playing immediately in response to on field events. Given the extreme noise levels inside the Coliseum during games, it is often difficult or nearly impossible for the director to communicate verbally which piece should be played next. As a result, the band developed a system of hand gestures to represent specific tunes. Over time, these gestures became formally integrated into communication practices, with the director also adopting them as a primary method of cueing the ensemble, replacing reliance on members verbally relaying instructions among themselves.

Analysis:

This system of hand gestures reflects how large performance groups develop adaptive communication methods in response to environmental constraints. In the noisy and unpredictable setting of a football stadium, verbal instruction becomes unreliable, prompting the emergence of a non-verbal signaling system that ensures coordination among a large ensemble. From a folkloric perspective, these gestures function as an internally developed “language” that is both practical and symbolic, while presenting a more organized performance, it also reinforce the community identity through signs that only “insider” would learn and be aware of.