“Jia Junpeng, Your Mom Wants You To Go Home To Eat!”

From Sina:

According to a report by “Information Times”, on Baidu Tieba during the morning of July 16th, an anonymous user made a post titled “Jia Junpeng, your mom wants you to go home to eat” [original post, Chinese]. Within the post there was no content, only the two letters “rt” which mean “ru ti” [如题, "refer to title"]. Just like this, an internet post with only a title and no content swiftly became popular on the internet receiving, within a little over a day (by last night [July 17] 12am), 7.4 million netizen views and 300,000 netizen comments.

This funny phrase, within a few hours, attracted over 390,000 netizen views and nearly 17,000 netizen comments. This reporter also say that there were netizens who changed their online screen names to “Jia Junpeng’s mom”, “Jia Junpeng’s grandpa”, “Jia Junpeng’s maternal aunt”, “Jia Junpeng’s paternal aunt”, and so on, forming an abnormally huge “Jia Junpeng family”.

This reporter saw a netizen with the name “Jia Junpeng” reply on the thread, “I will not go home to eat today. I am eating at the internet bar right now. Tell my mom for me.” However this netizen named “Jia Junpeng” was very quickly exposed by other netizens who discovered that his ID’s registration time was July 16th 11am, one hour later than the original post and therefore “definitely ‘egao’ [parody, imitation]“, other netizens said.

This post attracted hundreds of thousands of netizens’ attention, with many netizens on the thread questioning just who is “Jia Junpeng”, and hoping that someone could explain the cause of the “Jia Junpeng, your mom wants you to go home to eat” matter. However, there has yet to be an “insider” to come forth to explain.

Some netizen started a human flesh search using the original poster’s IP address. The search discovered that on the internet there are two matching identities, one who is presently in Haidian of Beijing selling books, and the other is in some construction group in Zhenjiang of Jiangsu province. However, neither can be verified.

The Baidu Tieba [Post Bar] was the World of Warcraft tieba. Right now, World of Warcraft is changing companies from The9 to NetEase and many Chinese WoW players cannot play.

In addition to many photoshops, a reason why this topic became so popular is because a new internet phrase/meme started when one commenter on the original WoW Baidu Tieba thread wrote:

我们跟的不是这帖子，是寂寞。

[What we are following is not a post, but loneliness.]

After this comment appeared, many people copied it. For example:

我发的不是帖子，我发的是寂寞。[Tianya]

[What I am posting is not a post, I am posting loneliness.]

我买的不是新电脑，是寂寞 [KDS]

[What I purchased is not a new computer, but loneliness.]

你看的不是妞，是寂寞 [KDS]

[What you are you looking at is not a chick/girl, but loneliness.]

There are many many examples. Why did it become popular? Probably because it is so exaggerated so it is funny. Why “loneliness”? Maybe because many WoW players cannot play right now and are very bored.

Here are some more photoshops:

“Together we will make sure Junpeng returns home to eat.”

Yang Shaohua contributed to this post.