'Tornado beer' Twitter star
Liu Shichao performs beer-drinking with a "tornado" formed in the bottle in Zhengyuansi Village, Xingtai, Hebei Province, on December 17, 2019.
In a short online video, a Chinese man with a round face and a buzz cut pops open a beer cap with a single chopstick.
After a sip, he quickly lifts the bottle to his mouth while giving it a few sharp turns.
A small “tornado” forms in the bottle and Hebei Pangzai, or “Fatty from Hebei Province,” as the 34-year-old is known on Twitter, drinks it all in seconds.
Hebei Pangzai’s real name is Liu Shichao. The odd-job laborer hails from Zhengyuansi, a nondescript village where everyone knows everyone.
Thanks to the Internet, Liu now has over 130,000 followers on Twitter, drawn to his beer-drinking clips. This week, he even had three new American friends visit.
His claim to fame was an old video of Liu’s shared on Twitter in August. It went viral, gaining 12 million views.
Liu Shichao breaks a brick at his home in Zhengyuansi Village, Xingtai, Hebei Province, on December 17, 2019.
In the video, Liu opens a beer bottle with a chopstick, mixes the beer with several other liquors, including baijiu, a potent liquor made from grain.
He lights the concoction, uses his finger to carry off a bit of the flame to light his cigarette, then drinks the whole thing.
He said he knew something was up when he first got hundreds of new followers on Kuaishou, a short video-sharing platform popular among people in small Chinese cities and the countryside. All of them wrote their comments in English.
“One of the first videos I saw was a brick-breaking video,” he said. “Those videos looked fake and I thought I could do a real one.”
So he did.
At the peak of his fame, he had over 400,000 Kuaishou followers, earning up to 300 yuan (US$42.62) on a good day.
