“Internet Celebrity” Wang Cuncun’s Paradox: “I Do Need an Audience… But I’m Not Performing”

He grew a bathtub of rice, but “hopes it won’t be rice in its next life.” He is an internet celebrity, and doesn’t much like being one.

On July 23, 2016, Wang Cuncun posted a four-minute selfie video on his Weibo account under the title “This video is boring, there’s no punchline, and I’m posting it only to prove I tried…” In it he wears the same floral T-shirt Ge You wears in I Love My Family, licking a lollipop wide enough to hide his mouth and chin — one he mocks as “impossible to finish in a lifetime” — and between licks drinking water from a goblet the size of a fishbowl, which he calls “the cup reserved for aristocrats.”

In the edit, the licking is sped up and set to breezy pop. The clock behind him shows he licked from 11:40 p.m. to 2:33 a.m. and still didn’t finish the candy. His tongue had clearly gone numb, but he slurred on for more than a minute, ending with “I’m Cuncun, I hope you’re happy” — overblown and ridiculous.

Wang Cuncun was 24 then, two years into a job at a Beijing ad agency, making three or four thousand yuan a month and sharing a rented flat in Tiantongyuan with roommates. On the side he ran a Weibo account, “My Name Is Wang Cuncun,” as a video blogger; since he worked during the day, he usually recorded after getting home at night, in bouts of “revenge bedtime procrastination.”

The lollipop video counts as his first hit. It ended with 15 million plays and pushed his following from 150,000 to 2 million in a month. The post now carries 46,000 comments; amid all the “hahaha,” one person wrote, “You really are boring enough — but then I thought about it, I’m pretty boring myself, watching you lick candy for four minutes.”

More than two years later, this March, he told the lollipop story again on the talk platform Yi Xi, calling it “classical boredom.” The talk was his summing-up of four years of Weibo. Other “classical” works: more than 200 screen protectors stacked on one phone, a count of the 16,250 grains in a bowl of rice, and the 289.2 seeds on a single strawberry. “In the technical language of my field, this is called having nothing to do on a full stomach,” he said of the classical period. “They eat up time, and they mean nothing at all.”

Besides the classical, he said, he had passed through “realist boredom,” “magical realist boredom” and “romantic boredom” — it sounded like a personal history of art. The audience kept breaking into laughter as he went through the episodes and drew his conclusions. On stage he clasped his hands behind his back, a little tense, glancing down at the floor now and then, his voice and face barely moving, and asked the people in front of him: “What, exactly, is funny here?”

His boredom really was changing, though.

Some of it came out of close observation. He once took the 90 seeds out of a pomegranate, lifted each one with tweezers like a jeweler, measured it, studied its “cut,” laid them all out on a table at equal intervals in six rows and fifteen columns, then photographed them and posted the picture on Weibo. He turned it into a “Pomegranate Seed Beauty Pageant” and asked followers to vote in the comments for the most beautiful seed. By his account he went through all 537 comments one by one and crowned a winner, though what set that seed apart was too small to notice once it had been swallowed.

Another strand, the “realist” one, looked more like household ingenuity — dismissed as boring, probably because none of it met a real need. He built a storage-and-warehousing system in his flat: the unfinished lollipop, the Ge You T-shirt, leftover dried fruit and an old phone, all vacuum-sealed, barcoded and scanned into a computer “inventory system,” the way a supermarket does it. Or: an ad for a villa turned up on his phone, he envied the swimming pool and could see no way to get rich, so he knocked out the 0.7-meter-wide, 1.7-meter-long bathtub in his rented flat, tiled it himself, fitted spotlights, snorkeled in it for photographs, and named the pool “the Maldives.”

The talk did make Wang Cuncun famous for being boring a second time. He now has 3.48 million Weibo followers, and a few thousand reposts hardly compare with his old hits. But the comments were no longer mostly “hahahaha.” Most praised a line from the talk — get as close as you can to the life you want, under the conditions you actually have — and some said he had “turned boredom into an interesting art.”

We met him a week after the talk went up. He wore black clothes and a black cap, smiled rarely, and spoke in a low, level voice that the café noise sometimes swallowed. He had seen reporters almost every day that week; he thought it was “pretty cool that someone wants to record what I do,” and said the coverage might help his parents understand him a little better — “my dad sometimes worries I’ve joined a pyramid scheme.” But he was wary of journalists who wanted to make him the representative of some group, or to pin a label on him: “I’m a 27-year-old guy. How big do you want to blow me up — I mean, how big can I be blown up?”

He could not enjoy what he had made, or summon the easy charm that had carried the room during the talk. He was full of contradictions instead. Several times he said the people who really deserved to go viral were the other Yi Xi speakers, “they’re genuinely contributing something to society,” and that “maybe deep down I don’t think much of what I do either.” He didn’t want “kids to see internet celebrities making money and decide to become one, or to look down on scientists because scientists are poor” — and yet he “really does like doing all this random stuff,” and “even if I had the chance to be a scientist, I’d still want to be what I am now… improper, maybe, a bit restless.”

For an internet celebrity, he doesn’t seem to like internet celebrities much.

Wang Cuncun is of course not his real name, and he won’t give it out. Like the bathtub, the pomegranate seeds, the strawberry seeds and the lollipop, “Wang Cuncun” is a sign — a set of things that are interesting because they are boring, and a point where certain internet moods come into focus.

When he registered the Weibo account in February 2015, he meant to turn it into a marketing account; before that he had barely used Weibo. He had just dropped out of a graduate program at a French business school, where he had spent four years counting his undergraduate degree.

The immediate reason was his father’s building-materials business: it ran into trouble, and the family might not have been able to cover another year of fees. The coursework tired him too. Every time he came home to China he saw the internet quickly changing the way people around him lived — hailing cabs, paying for things, reading — and the syllabus hardly touched any of it.

At the end of 2014, back in Chongqing for the winter holiday, he wanted to start a company with four or five friends from high school. The idea was a news app: people had limited time and more to read every year, so filtering content ought to have a market. To build up users for a product that did not yet exist, he registered on Weibo and went straight for traffic — “followers first, everything else later.”

Getting those followers involved nothing new; Wang Cuncun called it “building the account.” First he spent ten days coming up with “basic content” he thought would draw people: furniture-design recommendations, poems that were closer to jokes, and the ups and downs of raising a Samoyed named Nuomi. Step two was riding the trending posts of big bloggers for traffic — for several days he refreshed the hot posts of accounts popular at the time, like Huiyi Zhuanyong Xiaomajia and Tiancai Xiaoxiongmao, and wrote jokes in the same vein. Finally he spent 70 yuan on Taobao for 15,000 bot followers, and within a month he had the 35,000-odd followers he was after.

Somewhere in there, with schedules slipping and the group loosely held together, the startup stopped coming up in conversation. The account “My Name Is Wang Cuncun” stayed. In July 2015 Wang Cuncun left Chongqing to join the “Beijing drifters,” writing copy and planning campaigns at an ad agency. The 1,000 yuan of rent he split with roommates took a third of his income; the rest just covered food. “Buying instant noodles I had to check whether it was 2.3 yuan or 2.4, in case I picked up the wrong one.”

Weibo became what he did after work. Stirring up “a bit of something” online at night made life less dry; being broke was probably part of it too. The 35,000 followers sat still for half a year, and Wang Cuncun put it down to “a positioning problem with the product.” He needed another field, and new followers.

The position he found was boredom. He judged the field vacant on Weibo — “nobody’s doing it, so who cares how big the market is; claim the ground first.” “Boredom is how most people live now, because everyone has too many things they want to do and are too lazy to do, or can’t do. I do them in their place.” Once that was settled, he labeled himself “the most boring man” on Weibo and threw out everything he had posted before.

That is how the series “My War with Netizens” began, and with it his classical period. On April 8, 2016, Wang Cuncun posted a video of himself spending six hours counting the grains of rice in a bowl. The pretext was a heckle: he had posted a poem containing the line “a bowl of rice holds more than 18,000 grains,” a figure he had found online, and someone asked, “How do you know it’s exactly that many?” Wang Cuncun replied, “I don’t concede,” then actually counted the rice, filmed it, and laid a blockbuster battle score under the footage. It amounted to adding interaction to a boring task, and with it traffic and followers.

Before that he had also posted photographs of stars he wove from drinking straws, and other handiwork. Someone commented, “Give you a few steel bars and you’d weave a Bird’s Nest, wouldn’t you?” He went to a friend studying architecture, read up on the structure of the Bird’s Nest stadium, built a model out of wire, photographed it and posted it.

Wang Cuncun was confident about his feel for the internet in those days. The boredom model was like the only road from his house to the entrance of the village when he was small: “keep walking and you’ll get there.” Stay on boredom, keep the positioning clear, keep filling it with content, and one day it would blow up — “I just didn’t know which day.”

The day did come. On the night of July 23, 2016, having posted the lollipop video he had recorded the day before, he scrolled Weibo as usual to see whether any big accounts had shared it. It spread faster than he expected: the video went up close to midnight, and within half an hour it had five or six thousand reposts, then more than ten thousand. He described how he felt that night: “Of course it felt good, but it was also baffling — I had no idea why a thing like this took off.” Then he went to bed on schedule, “because I had work in the morning.” Looking back, besides having foreseen that the day would come, the calm came from content that cost almost nothing and carried little of his own ideas or taste. “There was no extra pressure.”

He vaguely remembered getting a bit puffed up then, “a little less humble about learning things,” and enjoying the sudden attention. Knowing any post of his would collect reposts and comments, he once posted a single comma and still got several thousand shares. But he hurried to make fun of himself in front of me: “Come on, how puffed up can you get living in Tiantongyuan? Was I going to be the big man of Tiantongyuan?”

The peak did bring some steady advertising income — enough to “get by,” and enough to send money to his mother. In October 2016, Sina Weibo invited him to its “Weibo V Influence Summit,” where he gave a talk called How to Make an Account Blow Up and was named one of the Top Ten Influential Humor Bloggers. The same prize went to accounts like Guan’ai Zhizhang Ertong Chengzhang and Leng Xiaohua Jingxuan, most of them verified as “comedy bloggers.” In that talk he said he had already been through the “early stage” and the “growth stage” of running an account; next should come the “mature stage,” with a stable business model.

Anxiety arrived at that point. Original video had become his standard format; besides the “War” series he started a food strand, Cuncun’s Food Notes, but the form and the content were thin, closer to maintaining the boring persona he had set up. Keeping it running — no more money spent, few new ideas, the same thing day after day — began to bore him for real. And by his own marketing logic, good content or bad, taste runs in cycles. Carry on this way and “maturity” would be followed by “decline.”

His pay at the ad agency barely moved: up 1,000 yuan in two years. Doing marketing plans, he proposed several times that the company spend more on original video — “the video wave has already arrived” — and got nowhere. In April 2017 Wang Cuncun quit, and around the same time sold the apartment his parents had left him back home. Between May and October he posted four times on Weibo. He was a missing person.

“The road to the village entrance had been walked to the end,” he said. “Then there were a lot of new choices, but nothing to measure them against, so I had no idea which way to go.”

Wang Cuncun insists on defining himself as “someone who does creative work.” Being “different from everybody else” is what he brings up most.

Selling the apartment left him with cash for a while. He moved out of the 1,200-yuan-a-month rental in Gaobeidian and into a 30-square-meter studio. Of all the flats on the floor, his was the only door flanked by a pair of stone lions, one couched facing out and one lying on its side; on the door hung a Spring Festival couplet no longer than the handle, and in the middle, where the character for “fortune” usually goes, he had put the character “cun,” village, from his own name. He put all of it up in early 2018, while he and the neighbor across the hall were competing over “whose place looks classier.” For a while he renamed his Wi-Fi network “A Household of Means” to call across the corridor.

He never spoke to the neighbor face to face. The neighbor found his Weibo instead and messaged him one day to say he was leaving Beijing. Wang Cuncun went out to a flower shop, bought a sunflower and stuck it in the neighbor’s door, and that day changed the Wi-Fi name to “Grow Some Sunflower Seeds for the Road.”

The room was a little disordered. The trophy from his humor-blogger year sat on the bookshelf, surrounded by the vacuum-packed objects of his storage system. One package held a palm-sized toy bear and a quilt the same size: when the neighbor moved out he gave Wang Cuncun a stalk of cotton in return, and Wang Cuncun picked it, fluffed it into a tiny quilt and kept it as a memento.

One vacuum bag also held three longans left over from a snack. Asked what he was keeping them for, Wang Cuncun looked faintly annoyed. “To eat,” he said. “Can’t you eat dried longan?” He scratched his head and thought of his girlfriend, who often asks why he keeps photographs on his phone with nobody in them. They aren’t even nice to look at. “And I think: my friend, that is a moment of my time. Why does it need to be nice to look at?”

The “Maldives pool” in the bathroom was unrecognizable; only the blue tiles along the rim were still visible. The rest was packed with soil and planted with rice in November 2018, and the rice now stood taller than a man. Half of it looked yellow and withered, but the room still smelled green. “The rice is dying. Stressful,” Wang Cuncun said, standing beside it. “When it was growing well I really liked being next to it. It felt like nature.” A row of lamps imitating sunlight hung above the crop; switches and wires ran around the tub, feeding instruments that measure carbon-dioxide levels, soil pH and the rest. The showerhead he bathes with had been hung outside the tub, one step from the rice.

When he started growing it, what he wrote on Weibo still sounded like the war with the netizens: someone had jeered, “Grow your own rice if you’re so clever,” so he did. His original plan was more elaborate — to document the whole process of genetically modified rice, altering gene segments so the seedlings would look different in shape and size from the start, then cooking an actual bowl of it and “setting it out to ask myself whether I dare eat it.” He thought that was a very artistic question, then realized it was a sensitive one. To be safe he grew ordinary rice at home, posted photographs of himself raising seedlings and working the soil, and told his followers he got up on time to switch the lights on for the crop, enjoying a farmer’s hours and a farmer’s pleasures.

You could see that his ideas and his ingenuity were not entirely a function of his online persona; notions of all kinds kept surfacing. Walking down the street, he pointed at the pavement, where cars often park and block the way. “That’s wrong,” he said. “I keep thinking that one night I’ll get workmen to seal a car in cement, then call the residents’ committee and report an illegal structure.” He also remembered a spell when cotton clouds were a fashionable indoor decoration; his first thought was, “What’s fun about that? A cloud in your room that can actually rain — that would be cool.”

In December 2017, after almost half a year of silence, Wang Cuncun posted a video on Weibo titled “How Many Balloons Does It Take to Lift a Pig?” The shooting and the cutting were visibly more careful. This too came out of an older curiosity. During the disappearance he worked out a budget, hired an events company to gather a crowd on a mountain in Chongqing, ordered helium, bought a pig, and spent four and a half hours inflating more than 10,000 colored balloons.

Recalling the making of it, he could produce the arithmetic of helium and balloon counts, the healed feeling of standing there looking at the balloons once the shoot was over, and the line he had put to himself while he was still only curious and longing to see the scene: “Can this be done? It can. Do it.”

The pig ran off and was never lifted, but the video became his comeback piece, the “romantic boredom” he likes. From there the videos looked more like small science projects or tutorials in traditional craft, though in his own words they were sometimes “improper” or “boring”: using magnetic levitation to float a bowl of instant noodles, a car ornament and a desk lamp; growing water spinach at home and beating out a wok by hand; using the high-voltage field of a Tesla coil to light a fluorescent tube from a distance. He learned the techniques as he went, from people he knew and from the internet, which slowed the videos down considerably.

He thought these things were cool, and you could see he had made peace with himself by then. He used the same word for the American documentary series Curiosity — in one episode the crew bought a Boeing airliner, crashed it into the desert to study crashes, and filmed the whole thing. “I hope my kid can watch things like that one day, things that make you curious,” he said, returning more than once to his future children. “And I hope the videos I make are ones I can show him or her… The lollipop kind, I wouldn’t want to show.”

It is hard to say who Wang Cuncun would be without the internet and social media. He went from chasing traffic to make a living to trying to find his own worth in it, working out his interests and his character in step with getting famous, and laying each result out online without stopping. As he put it when he was explaining how to make an account blow up: “You have to keep reinforcing your persona [on Weibo]… but those personas aren’t invented. They’re all taken from my own character.”

“I probably do need an audience,” he said. A life without the internet is beyond supposing, but he thought about it for half a minute and said: “Still, I think I’ve always been this kind of person… I’m certainly not performing. Why would I bother?”

The contradictions go on in his life. The day after we met, he sent several WeChat messages in a row.

He said tech videos cost a lot to make now, that the pressure of ordinary life is heavy, and that work which doesn’t make money doesn’t get recognized. “I don’t know why, but not making money is nearly the same as being useless.” “I’ve been struggling lately. I think I might do some traffic stuff this year too… The right way into this era may be Mimeng’s way: never mind whether the content is right, grab the traffic first, and then whatever you say is right.”

Repetition tired him; once an idea was out, he felt “that’s finished, I have to find something new.” He said several times that he wanted to make videos with taste, that caring about the content and about what his future children will see is “a human instinct” — and also that this was “a mantis in front of a cart, and the cart is traffic, eating away at everything you find interesting.”

He was planning a funeral for his dead rice, and showed me the headstone he had made. The epitaph read: “Ten thousand jin per mu.” “I hope it isn’t rice in its next life,” he said. “Rice is about yield. People treat you as grain; looking good gets you nothing.” Better to be a tree in a forest, he thought: “Nobody keeps judging you and comparing the meaning of your existence. Being rice like that is a bit grim.”

Cover image and in-article photographs provided by Wang Cuncun unless otherwise noted.