We’ve noticed that Westerners on the internet love pictures of Asian people wearing ridiculous shirts in English. Commenters derive so much joy and laughter from pointing out how often seemingly unaware kids or senior citizens don clothing with taglines ranging from the crude and sexual to bizarre and unintelligble.
But with 460 million English speakers across the Asian continent, we thought it was only fair to interview at least a few people to see what they knew about the sayings they were wearing. We had our team chat with residents from cities like Shanghai, Seoul, and Manila and what we found was surprising! (Including how many people thought we were doing the TikTok/Douyin trend of asking what music they were listening to on their phones. We didn’t want to disappoint them so their answers are below.)
“See it’s funny because Americans love sex jokes but women are mocked for having sex,” Wanting told us in Shanghai.When asked for comment, Ms. Bai just winked at us.Sharon, who originally hails from Toledo, thought it was hilarious her coworker Cy had no clue what her/his top read. After some aggressive side-eye from Cy, we decided not to let Sharon in on the truth. Before we opened our mouths, this young woman told us, “Yes I know what a pun is, Greg. And ‘money machine’ by 100 gecs.” (no one on our team is named Greg).Xiaobing informed us he’s a huge Biggie fan, but told his mom who doesn’t speak English that it means “Forget getting a dog, save money.” We respect the hustle.It turns out this kid is a huge Black Eyed Peas fan and has another shirt that says “I’m so 3008, you’re so 2000 and late.” Unsurprisingly, he was listening to Black Eyed Peas.We found this child reading Das Kapital as “a bit of light reading.” He looked at us with intellectual disdain the whole time, and we left terrified of his immense powers.“I did what every woman did in her 20s in the big city: Make friends, find love, work for an underground vigilante organization to assassinate corrupt crime bosses,” Ms. Yang recounted. She was listening to “Sweet as Honey” or (“Tian Mi Mi”) by Teresa Teng.This British man in Manila showed us this photo, unprompted, from his mission trip in rural Philippines. “During my voluntourism trip, where I contributed good vibes, I took a photo with this kid who understood zero English. Which is why I’m sharing his image without informed consent for all to see on the internet.”Hyeon from Seoul told us he had no idea who [Nirvana or other band] was but said he liked the “vibe” of the shirt and compared it to “when white people get tattoos in Chinese or Arabic and don’t know what they mean, but at least mine’s less permanent and embarrassing.” Touché, Hyeon.
