ep 125 TikTok Refugees
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Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Coffee Corner. Today is your episode 125. You probably noticed my voice. I've been sick for a while, so pardon my voice. Let's step in this episode today. I have no specific topic, but I do want to mention a keyword in this video that is TikTok refugee. I don't know if you guys have noticed what's going on on Xiaohongshu and TikTok recently, but it has been very phenomenal to me.

And it brought me back to my childhood back in 2005 and even before that when people were able to talk about things with the different cultures and different backgrounds. Back then we were able to use ICQ. I was using ICQ to practice my English. And I think at one point we were able to use Instagram, those kind of things that you got a chance to know yourself.

different cultures and different values and different things, good or bad, but you got a chance to choose what you want to see or not.

Now it's happening and I feel a little bit complicated about what's going on on Xiaohongshu right now. As a content creator, I feel a little bit threatened, to be quite honest, because that's a part of my advantage that I was able to speak English or deliver knowledge in English to people who don't have access to those kind of things.

But now, apparently, I don't have that vantage or privilege, let's say that. But part of me feels so proud of what's going on right now on Xiaohongshu that people get to know China. And...

When I started the channel, of course, I said my goal was to promote myself or improve my English. But as I'm doing that, I wanted people to have free access to learning things and to have real information, to know real things going on. But again, I'm just an individual. It's very hard to promote or very hard to deliver the true authentic message

knowledge or things without filter to everybody while I'm not professional. I can't really customize my content to favor all the audience. That's why the channels don't get popular because of that, because I don't know it. Okay, well, that's another story. What I'm proud of is finally, finally people outside of our culture start to realize that China is a great country and

We have great history, we have great culture, and we have so much diversity in this country that people don't know.

And what they know about China is just only the single dimension that they are exposed to. And I know some of you might know this term, information cocoon, which was first coined by a Chinese scholar and then popularized by a journalist later on.

And basically it says that the information you have now is exposed to you because of algorithm or certain selections or confirmation biases. So you only see what you want to see because you are fed with such information.

And you start to have a single mind or narrow mind about certain things that you just believe what people say. And very good example would be parents-in-laws in Western countries don't love their grandchildren and they don't take care of grandchildren. And when things open up, they see, oh, grandparents in other countries actually really love their grandchildren, just like what we do today.

They're shocked. But if you think about it, who brought that information to you that you firmly believe that was the truth? Okay, that's the first one. And second one, I'm going to...

talk about. The example I have here is people often just ask me about pandas or bamboos or ask me about, you know, dumplings because those are things they knew about China. And then even some people are really dumb. They just came to me and asked if I eat dogs. And I would say, yeah, I eat dogs. Do you have dogs? I would take them as a joke. But

Problem is somebody said something or they've seen this somewhere rarely, rarely happened. But they saw that and then they believe that that represents the whole country. And that's how I feel about when we're so locked up that we're not exposed to real things. Again, back to what I feel moved and touched and the moment is now.

Great artists, young artists, young talented people showing their arts, martial arts, showing their drawings, showing their dancing, showing our culture, our heritage and everything. And the comments down below in English, even with the translated version,

kind of lame Chinese there talking about how amazing China is and Chinese people are and they've never learned and they've never seen them before and how they have been blinded and now they finally got to know those people and culture and amazing content and we're promoting that you know in China it's such a big and a small word it's only five it's only five letters to form a word China

But it's such a big country that has amazing people on this land with diversity, with different culture backgrounds, with different habits, with different diets, with different foods, and with different languages. And people don't get to know that how amazing we are. They just think China as what appears on the news, on the TV.

And now they know, you know, people eat differently because they're from North or because from their South. And even now, you know,春节 and spring festival is coming. And we, we don't, you know, the funny thing is, sorry, I'm getting very emotional about this. The funny thing is, last week, I took my son to a family center. They have a special event on Saturday about New Year events. It's called New Year's Reunion.

And they have this book. I love that book. And it's about Chinese New Year. But the funny thing is they eat rice balls, tang yuan, for Chinese New Year. But they have snow. So I find it very funny. And then I came back and talked to my husband. You know why that story is a little bit ridiculous to me. Just because, first of all, snow normally happens in the north. And in the north, we eat dumplings for New Year, for Chun Jie.

And in the south, they eat tangyuan for chunjian. Maybe, I'm not really quite sure. But in the south, they don't normally have that heavy snow. So how can you combine snow with a southern diet?

and made up a Chinese New Year story, which shows you that people don't know us, but they're trying to be part of us and saying that we know Chinese New Year, we know this tradition, and we want to show you that we care. I want to say you don't care. If you really care, you should have done some research.

Anyway, but also part of that could be that it is so difficult to get deep inside of our culture to really know how that only a few people have access to know how to know it. You know what I mean? But anyway, coming back to what I was talking about, the moving part is I saw a couple of posts online.

One was a Chinese scholar, I think it was a doctor, surgeon, talking about certain surgical procedures in a female medical problem. And she was asking or he was asking about how they did that in China, but they find that difficult and ask maybe Western surgeons.

if they do the same thing to the similar problems, what are their procedures, what kind of challenges they have during the procedure, what have things. And there are a lot of comments sharing professional knowledge about how they've encountered certain things, how they've solved the problems, or how they still have those challenges there. It's like having an international conference on a social media platform.

Without paying for anything, without traveling to anywhere, and for our average people, we have access to such information for free. Like, it's like having fireworks in your brain, you know what I mean?

And another thing is they're talking to teachers. I'm a teacher. I often have that information on my feed. There are English teachers or other teachers talking about certain things that they don't know how to explain or solve, or they don't normally know how to really explain things. So they post a question there and asking other people who also are teaching English or certain subjects in other countries how they explain certain things or do they have similar things.

Or now they started to share salary, comparing salaries, you know, in the same field. What is the gap between the salary? And they started to talk about tuition in a certain major, how much tuition you pay for your university or things like that. They started to get to know each other. You know what I mean? They broke the wall and they started to shake hands, started to tear down the bias, right?

I feel, I really feel very emotional about that. I feel like here, certain people don't have privilege anymore. Everybody is the same. Everybody has same access to same content.

If you're good, you have awesome content to let people know. People will know you. People will know our country through you. And I feel it's a very great thing to have. But I don't know how long it's going to last. But I feel really, really happy that I'm part of this phenomenal group.

situation you know it caused by of course political reasons or certain things but you know what it's like when we watch those old shows that when they have a turnover and one emperor after another one it doesn't matter to our average people ordinary people because we want a life and we're living our life and this is our life and it's happening i feel happy

That's a good part. Another part, I cannot say it's a sad part, but I want to talk about it. As a content creator and a lot of content creators out there on Xiaohongshu, I'm sure some of them felt a little bit threatened just because...

You know some of your content are referencing other contents from outside of our country that people don't have access to. So you are bringing not new information, but new information to our people. And they probably this is their first time learning this, seeing this or get in touch with this.

So that's our privilege, our advantage. We're trying to get our views up and get more followers. But now all of a sudden you have this flood of TikTok refugees bringing a lot of great, awesome content, including dancing, English content, cooking or arts or other things that they are doing.

Already ahead of us, we have no privilege anymore. And people see...

Content can be super great like this. It's simple. There's no fluff. And they just do things in a simple explain everything. For us, if you have fluff before to try to attract other people or gimmicks to try to attract other people, now they don't work that well because a lot of audience have seen great things that they think, oh, you know what? The things I watched or listened or seen before are kind of like,

Okay, and now I've seen awesome dancers there. I've seen awesome scholars there. And those are the things that might have brought threats to content creators. And that's why you might see or hear negative voices about those TikTok refugees.

But also, I have to say that some of the people who came to this platform are not very nice. They came with their privilege and arrogance as well. And you can tell when they talk, they talk with a condescending tone to us. Like, oh, do you know how to? It's like when you come here because you speak English, you think you're the best. And you ask a question like, do you know how to say thank you in English or something like that?

Without knowing that average education in China is above, like basically above a lot of countries. Yeah, we know how to say thank you. Thank you. Right. Those kind of things make me very mad. But also we have to acknowledge or I have to remind myself that, you

There are good people in different countries and there are also bad people in different countries. You cannot say everyone in China is awesome. I'm sure they're good, they're bad. And you cannot say all people from other countries are good because they're from other countries. No, there are good things and bad things. There are good people and bad people. That means we have free access to everything, including the bad and the good.

So of course you're going to see those negative nasty comments or content about things and maybe try to... They don't even want to learn our culture and our rules to post things on Xiaohongshu. They just all flooded in here and think if I post something I'm going to get followers. Which some of the content creators there and you see they just came in and already got like a thousand likes or...

thousands of thousand followers or a lot of comments and also you've seen some people our people trying to kiss their ass to the point if you like this is not good you you're just trying to embarrass yourself and everybody and the thing all the Chinese people are like that but again you can't control things and that's the good and bad about having open access to

So that's why I kind of understand why for a while we are locked up here, but we had the freedom back in the past and then we locked ourselves in this safe space.

And now we all of a sudden accidentally open up to another world. We start to, of course, realize, oh, there's a reason we should keep ourselves to ourselves. But there's also a reason we should open up and learn each other. And yeah.

Good or bad, right? Every coin has a two sets and everything is double-edged sword. So you can't just have the good ones without having the bad ones. So that's the reality. But I'm just very happy to see this happening.

you know, makes me happy and also makes me want to talk about things. And that's why I threw this random episode here to talk about things. I might got a little bit emotional in the middle of it. But I'm just very, very, very proud that people finally can see our country, can see how great it is.

We're not a factory in your garden. We are a country with a great culture and history. We have great people. You've never seen you before. And here's a chance for you to learn our histories. And you know, the funny thing is when I watch some...

vloggers talking about their food like this and every day they make different foods or things like that I'm like and then there was oh my god it's so yummy oh my god it's so amazing and you put this there you put this there I'm like you in the you in your 500 episodes of vlogs you only talked about instant noodles ramens and other things with chili peppers honey and soy sauce

And that's when I wish people could come to China and travel in China and see how amazing just our food is. You can experience from tropical food to very northern and culture-infused food.

In the north. You know how amazing it is? Even just one small city. You can probably have like 100 dishes. With totally different flavors and totally different spices in there. And you can call that food. You can call that yummy and amazing. You can call that it's the best food you ever have. But you don't call like only three ingredients in your repeated dishes. They're amazing. And that's when I really want to just push people to share our food.

And another thing is on TikTok, when I see TikTok recipes, blah, blah, blah. And then they share like a Chinese kind of recipes about how to make garlic oil. I'm like those kind of videos got thousands and thousands of followers and likes. Are you kidding me? Like, do you really know Chinese culinary, Chinese cuisine?

how they make fantastic thing with the simple steps and with the extraordinary knife skills. And they probably got like three likes. And those people with their dumb, dumb, dumb skills, like I'm like, this is how I cook every day. And then you post that on TikTok and it gets thousand likes. And this is what I call information cocoon because they don't know it.

and also because you are exposed to it constantly which we call that echo chamber and you just think this is your world everybody lives in echo chamber and i can tell you and this is another reason that i want to do a video like this because i'm constantly exposed to teaching materials and my students with their language i live in that repeated information in-house

and whatever there that I am only exposed to certain people, certain information, certain things that my knowledge and my information have been narrowed down to that point. And I want to do something different to expand my knowledge, expand my vision so I can learn more and be an open-minded person. And I think because of technology, they constantly feed us certain things that

and then you believe that's your world and then you start to shut yourself down and start to think

This is the world about that. This is the world about this. So why do I need to learn more? Why do I need to make effort to learn? Because again, if you lock yourself up and it takes effort to open up to learn things and effort is painful, you have to do and you're not going to want to do it. And then you lock yourself up really tightly and then you are not going to be open up and learn things. And that's how I feel about whole situation.

happening on xiaohongshu and tiktok but what i want to say is welcome everybody to this world small village and be friends and share your opinions and share your knowledge and be friends with each other and i don't know how long this is gonna last but i'm happy to see that in my whole life twice so anyway this is a really random video i hope you like it and i'll see you next time bye