Hip is a 'smart' start

Technically, half of them are counted as rural population. For the sake of simplicity, we'll add them up as one group, subtract half of it as urban youths and end up with 200 million Gen Y members in desperate need to fit into the urban world and occasionally err on the side of trying too hard.

You cannot blame them. This generation does not want to be like their parents. They would hate to be mistreated by urbanites because of their rural origins. While older generation migrant workers tend to speak native dialects only, the dislocated Gen Y have no problem conversing in Mandarin, albeit with accents. They do not go around reminiscing about the good old days in the wheat fields or rice paddies, but flaunt their knowledge of the latest tabloid gossip.

My first conspicuous encounter with this group happened a decade ago while I was traveling by land from Yunnan to Tibet. In an extremely remote village made inaccessible by bad roads and landslides, a band of young men emerged. You'd be forgiven for mistaking them for pop stars. They instantly put my group to shame. A colleague of mine joked that we were the real country bumpkins.

Two decades ago, there was absolutely no danger of that mistake. A city slicker would look so out of place while visiting the hinterland that villagers might have come out in crowds to gawk at him or her. A Westerner may still get this royal treatment if he ventures deep enough into the interior provinces.

Early in the 2000s, I was living in Guangzhou and often returned from assignments with a weary body and dirty clothes, dragging a broken suitcase. As I trudged through a busy street, I often noticed the police checking IDs to find out-of-towners who failed to pay the temporary resident fee. I thought I'd surely become their target. But time and again, I was wrong. They would go for those young men I thought were dressed quite smart.

Now I realize why they are called "smart". In a sense, they have outsmarted themselves by crossing that invisible line into the realm of kitsch. Even though they are widely seen as a laughing stock, their tastes have, to a large extent, determined what songs get downloaded and what books get sold, en masse.

In musical taste, they belie their punk appearance and go for Internet "water songs" such as Mice Love Rice, or anything with the simplest melody. They don't mind that a singer cannot carry a tune as long as she looks cute or he looks unthreateningly effeminate. The popularity of the Phoenix Legend duo is obviously rooted in this aesthetic.

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