我们说的话，你们听不懂
Wǒmen shuō de huà, nǐmen tīng bu dǒng
What We Say, You Cannot Hear
An essay—Beijing, 2025. Written for a private circulation. Not for parents. Lǐ Wěi, 17 suì
My mother reads my screen sometimes. I know when she does it because she gets a specific look—the look of someone who has opened a box expecting to find the thing the label says and found instead something alive and unpredictable. She does not ask me what she has read. She knows, from long experience of my generation, that asking would produce an explanation so patient, so thorough, and so comprehensively beside the point that she would end the conversation knowing less than she did before she started. This is not an accident. This is the design.
We have built a language. Not from nothing—nothing is built from nothing, and we are all educated enough to know the genealogy of our own inventions—but from the materials of the language we inherited, pushed into shapes our parents’ mouths cannot easily form and our parents’ minds cannot easily follow. The shape of this language is the shape of our situation, which is: intensely observed, intensely managed, living under a scrutiny so continuous and so well-intentioned that the only privacy available is the privacy of meaning. If they can see everything we do, we can at least ensure they cannot understand everything we say.
The starting point is pinyin, which is the romanisation system they taught us in primary school to help us learn the characters. Our parents regard pinyin as training wheels, something you discard once you have mastered the real writing system. We regard pinyin as raw material. We took the sounds of Mandarin and wrote them in the Latin alphabet and found, in that writing, a new way to be illegible—not because our parents cannot read Latin letters, but because the sounds we encode are not the sounds they expect. Yyds is not a typo. It is a compression: yǒngyuǎn de shén, forever the god, the highest praise, the thing that means this is so perfect it has achieved divinity. Nbcs is niú bī chōu sī, which is so good it pulls silk from a silkworm, which is so rare and so excellent it cannot be ordinary. My mother, reading these strings of consonants, sees noise. We see an entire rating system, a vocabulary of absolute praise operating at a speed that adult monitoring cannot intercept before we have already said the thing and moved on.
The characters themselves—the ones we use when we write in Chinese—we bend into homophones and near-homophones and visual puns until the official meaning detaches from the word like a label soaking off a bottle. Xīguāmeans watermelon. It also means, in our usage, something that is worth watching, a situation developing in public that you should observe. Chī guā qún zhòng—the crowd eating watermelon—is an audience, specifically an audience of voyeurs watching drama unfold from a comfortable distance, eating their fruit, uninvolved. When we say we are eating watermelon, we mean we are watching someone else’s situation with great interest and no intention of intervening. The visual is so precise—the summer fruit, the distance, the detachment—that once you understand it, you cannot un-see it. But if you do not already understand it, you hear someone talking about fruit.
This is the central mechanism: the image that is doing two things simultaneously, and that gives away the second thing only to people who already know to look for it. Mōyú is rubbing fish. It is also the practice of doing the minimum necessary at work or school while appearing to be fully engaged—the fish slips through the hands, you cannot hold it, it is gone while the appearance of holding it remains. When we say a classmate has been mōyú all week, we mean she has navigated the entire week without doing anything her teachers noticed or required, producing the impression of effort while the actual effort, like the fish, has escaped. This is a technical skill. We respect it. Our parents would call it laziness, which is why we do not use their word for it.
The vocabulary of emotional states is where the language does its most interesting work, because emotional states are the territory adults most want to access, and therefore the territory we most carefully protect. Nèijuǎn—internal rolling, involution—describes the state of competing against your peer group in ways that benefit no one, least of all yourself. It is the feeling of studying until midnight because everyone else is studying until midnight, of running a race whose track is a circle, of acceleration toward no destination. Adults call this ambition. We call it involution, and the difference between those two words is the difference between their aspirations for us and our experience of those aspirations. Tǎng píng—lying flat—is the response to nèijuǎn: the deliberate withdrawal from the race, the decision to stop accelerating, the discovery that if you lie down the race can continue without you and you can, for the first time, feel the ground beneath you. Adults call this laziness. We call it survival.
Neither of these words is invisible to adults. Nèijuǎn and tǎng píng have been written about in newspapers, discussed on television programmes, examined by sociologists and educational researchers and government advisors who have noted, with various degrees of alarm, that young people are using these words with enthusiasm. The words have been noted. What has not been noted is what the words feel like from inside, which is: accurate. Precise. The first vocabulary in our language that describes the texture of our actual experience rather than the texture our education says we should be having. When adults note these words, they note them as problems to be solved. When we use them, we use them as windows through which we can finally see something real.
The real obfuscation—the deepest layer—is not in the vocabulary. It is in the speed. Our language moves faster than observation can follow, not because we are particularly secretive but because we generate new terms the way a city generates new buildings: continuously, in response to immediate need, with no planning authority and no requirement to consult the people who were not there when the need arose. By the time a word reaches the newspapers, we have already half-abandoned it, already shifted the meaning, already moved the site of the private exchange to a new term that has not yet attracted attention. Emo arrived in our vocabulary as the English word for a kind of music and became our word for a kind of sadness—the particular sadness of late nights and small rooms and the feeling that the enormity of your inner life has no correspondence in the world outside it. By the time adults were writing articles about emoculture among Chinese youth, we were already using it ironically, which is to say we were using it to describe the performance of that sadness, the aesthetic of it, the way you could put on the feeling the way you put on a coat—not because you were not also feeling it, but because you could also observe yourself feeling it, and the observation changed the feeling, and the changed feeling needed a new word that we had already made.
I should say something about the adults. I do not mean this essay as a complaint against them. My parents work very hard. They work hard for reasons that have my face on them, and I know this, and knowing this is its own kind of weight. The aspirations they carry for me are heavy with love—genuine love, the kind that wants to protect, that scans the horizon for threats, that wants to know what I am saying because knowing feels like keeping me safe. I understand the impulse. I also understand that what they are trying to keep me safe from, and what I am actually living in, are sometimes so different from each other that we are not speaking about the same world at all, even when we use the same words.
Juéjué zi means a young person who has a very clear sense of what they will and will not do, who defines their own boundaries and defends them with great calm and absolute firmness. The word sounds almost derogatory from outside—stubborn, rigid, difficult. From inside, it means: certain. It means: I know where I end and where the pressure begins, and I have decided the pressure stops here. This word does not translate into a vocabulary of filial piety and collective aspiration, which is why we keep it for ourselves.
Pǔ rén—ordinary person—we use as an affectionate claim. Not as an insult, not as resignation, but as a declaration of reality: I am an ordinary person. I am not going to Tsinghua. I am not going to win anything. I am going to eat my lunch and talk to my friends and feel things that have no names yet, and that is a complete life. The aspiration economy that surrounds us has no word for this because it has no use for this. We have made the word ourselves.
What we are doing, if I try to describe it clearly, is building a private architecture inside the public one. The public architecture belongs to everyone—to the school, to the family, to the state, to the economy of aspiration and examination and achievement that is the official language of being young in this city. We live in that architecture because we have to live somewhere. But inside it, in the spaces between the official rooms, we have built something else: rooms made of homophones and compressions and images that do two things at once, rooms that are warm and crowded and full of the particular knowledge of people who know what it is actually like to be seventeen in Beijing in 2025, which is: complex, funny, exhausting, occasionally beautiful, frequently involuted, and ours.
My mother reads my screen and sees a box that does not contain what the label says. She is right. The label belongs to the architecture she built. The contents belong to us. This is not an act of hostility. It is an act of habitation. We are living in the language the way you live in a city—using its streets, finding the alleys, learning which doors open, building in the gaps. The language does not know we are there. The adults do not fully know we are there. But we know where we are, and for seventeen-year-olds in a world that monitors almost everything, that knowledge is not a small thing.
It is, as we would say—and we would say it in characters that look like something else, and in pinyin that looks like noise, and at a speed that has already moved on before the observation registers—yyds.
Forever the god. The best possible thing.
You can look it up. By the time you find it, we will have already moved.
Note:
Some terminology in this essay has been simplified for the benefit of readers outside the generational context. The author acknowledges that this is itself an act of translation, and that some things, in the translating, are always lost.
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