Why do office workers turn their jobs into a classic novel?

The full narration of the video.

Eleven at night. You've just finished draft six of the proposal, and you open your phone to scroll. Up comes a post: Xiangzi at a Big Four firm. Scroll on: Granny Liu's first day at a big company, and the Monkey King at his performance review. Work is tiring. So why does everyone borrow classic novels to say so? Let's try a small experiment.

Same day, written twice. Version one: worked till eleven, six drafts, still not approved. Version two: Xiangzi pulled his rickshaw six times today. Each time he came back, the boss said: wrong route, go again. Which one would you forward to a coworker? Most likely the second.

Think of a classic novel as a mooncake mold. Everyone knows the pattern on it. Your day is a lump of dough. Press it into the mold, and out comes a ready-made shape. That mold does three jobs for you.

Job one: a single name does the work of a whole paragraph. Camel Xiangzi was written by Lao She, serialized in a magazine starting in 1936. Today it's required reading in Chinese class for 12-year-olds. Say Xiangzi, and anyone who read it remembers: honest, hardworking, saving up for his own rickshaw, and losing it three times.

Write just his name, and readers fill in the rest themselves: tired, frustrated, all that work for nothing. Job two: the mismatch is the joke. The mold is a rickshaw puller from ninety years ago. What comes out is proposals, weekly reports, and reviews.

Among people who study laughter, the leading idea is this: when what you expect and what you see don't match, you laugh. It isn't the whole story, but it explains a lot of jokes. Job three: told as someone else, the pain sits a little farther away. In 2014, a study at the University of Michigan had people think about something stressful. Those who used their own name instead of "I" felt less anxious.

Writing yourself as Xiangzi works in a similar way: you step back and watch Xiangzi do the suffering. Though that study never looked at novel memes. And the mold keeps changing. In 2012 it was talking like a palace drama. In 2020, "dagongren" and "Versailles literature" made the Chinese buzzwords of the year list. Now it's Xiangzi and Granny Liu's turn. The workplace account at Xiaohongshu even runs a campaign to collect them.

So office workers borrowing the classics aren't showing off. They're borrowing a character everyone knows, to sigh on their behalf. This week at work, which character were you?