'Poetic street signs' pointing to a dead end

Public complaints about certain "street signs" have gone viral lately as these once-popular "creations" lose much of their gloss.

These pseudo "street signs" gained Internet fame about a year ago. They look like real ones but actually replaced street names with such "poetic" lines as "Miss You in so-and-so City" (我在XX很想你) or "Here the Wind of Memory of You Blows" (想你的风还是吹到了XX).

For a while, these creative posts went viral across China as they somehow served to increase the online popularity of these streets.

Adapted from the Internet

Over time, however, these originally creative "street signs" were replicated on a massive scale. As a result, many people began to feel aesthetic fatigue.

China News Weekly, an influential national media outlet, reported on April 10 that many netizens had made hilarious parodies of those "street signs" by substituting complaint words for the "poetic" lines.

For example, some netizens would download a "street sign" and then replace the original lines with parodies like "Enough is Enough" or "No Time to Miss You."

The vicissitudes of fame of those once-creative "street signs" reflect the fate of many Internet-famous things. Internet fame is something that spreads fast and wide in the virtual world. It may be short-lived or long-lived, depending on whether it ultimately has unique real-world values.

In the case of many "poetic street signs," a quick decline in popularity should have been anticipated, because they were only superficially "poetic" at the very beginning.

China News Weekly found that most of those "street signs" went viral mainly because of netizens' herd mentality: I will go to a place with such a fancy "street name plate" because a certain Internet celebrity has been there.

As the magazine noted, more and more netizens have discovered the gap between the verbal romance of a "poetic street sign" and the harsh reality of the place, not to mention aesthetic fatigue caused by constant exposure to too many banal replications.

Beijing Daily wrote on its Weibo account on April 11 that a really creative landmark of a place should reflect its unique charm. A simple, superficially romantic "street sign" will not do.

That reminds me of my latest visits to several villages in Shanghai. Some are so beautiful that a romantic "street sign" does give color to the local ambience. But in other villages which lack a unique character, such a "street sign" hardly evokes a poetic response from a discerning visitor.

It's the character of a place that matters most, not its name plate.

For instance, I like Shanghai all the more as it goes ever "greener" ― several massive ecological belts are taking shape, linking Suzhou Creek and Huangpu River with their respective upper reaches. In the last two weeks, I saw many expats exercising enthusiastically and quite a few local kids scampering merrily along the bucolic Wusong River Ecological Corridor, which encompasses Minhang, Qingpu and Jiading districts.

The beauty of a place, and its beauty alone, beckons.