To Achieve the Effect of Moistening the Air
15 February 2026
“Holy shit. I figured it out.”
“What is there to even—” my girlfriend responded, assembling the few interlocking parts of our new humidifier.
I waved the manual at her.
“That you met me at a very Chinese time in my life meme. It’s this.”
Jules recently coined the beautiful word crusticles, referring to the flakiness we observed on ourselves as outside temperatures dipped into the bitter teens and New Yorkers saw the most snowfall in recent memory. We purchased a new evaporative humidifier, which many reviewers had claimed to be superior to the quieter ultrasonic humidifiers that I had. Ever the gearhead, I was quick to unbox, diving straight into the manual.
Here’s the first page:
I hurdled over our sleeping cat and leapt to the junk drawer, returning with the manual of the humidifier I purchased last winter. I presented the two side by side on the coffee table and motioned for her to look closely.
“Holy shit. You figured it out.”
The first page of the manual for my girlboss-core, “Designed in California” Levoit humidifier opens with a formidable notice in all caps, warning of fire and electrocution for those who fail to follow all the instructions, presented as a long bulleted list of Do not’s, Only’s, and Always.
We flip through the two manuals in parallel, now completely absorbed in fervorous pattern recognition. In the troubleshooting sections, we discovered a distinct softness in tone in the manual for our new Livatro humidifier, in what otherwise appeared to be a one-to-one copy of the Levoit manual. While the Levoit manual lists a column of Problems and its respective Possible Solutions, the Livatro manual lists a Situation, its Possible Causes, and Workarounds. The differences didn’t end at simple word choice. Where the Levoit manual listed imperatives, like Make sure, the Livatro manual took on an interrogative tone, and when it suspected user error, it softened the correction with a Please.
请
“This manual’s English is directly translated from Chinese,” I looked at her. “This explains everything.”
The “becoming Chinese” meme, also known as “Chinamaxxing”, or “being a Chinese baddie”, is documenting a very real social media phenomenon: the West intimately introduced to the soft nostalgia of Chinese rural life through TikTok; Chinese wellness habits reaching deep into suburban America. The New York Post denounces it as a “senseless trend—as young people romanticize living in a Communist society”. Vogue Singapore and South China Morning Post herald the arrival of Chinese soft power, declaring cultural victory. Diasporic bloggers cry appropriation, unable to reconcile the cherry-picked commodification against memories of school lunch bullies and COVID-19-related hate crimes. Zeyi Yang, writing for Wired, states:
A common thread through the disparate discourse is that they’re all treating it as content—a trend, a meme, destined to be eclipsed by the next thing. I think it’s older than that, more persistent, as permanent as infrastructure. The West is feeling Chinese because it is, more than ever before, living in Chinglish. Call it the Sino-American Commons: while not new as a concept, it is newly legible through language—not as creole, not in error, but as the dominant vernacular of the world’s largest trade system.
Revisiting Engrish
I’m old enough to remember FailBlog, a cesspool of aggregated mercilessness of Web 2.0. Among the violent displays of ridicule existed recirculated pictures of bilingual signs in China. You’ve seen them before: menus selling “Fuck the duck until exploded”, a mangled homophone of “dry-fried duck”; signs at the OBGYN pointing to a “Cunt Examination Room”; bootleg Darth Vader captioned screaming “Do not want”.These were genuine attempts at opening to the outside world through machine-assisted, word-for-word, or outdated translations, only to be reduced to a mockery by the outside world.
Mandarin was technically my first language despite being an American-born Chinese person, as it was spoken at home with my grandparents before I began to attend English-language school. Seeing these being casually shared by people “for teh lulz” who, as far as I knew, never had any relationship with China did not sit well with me. Every summer trip to Beijing gave me firsthand experience—my aunt and uncle sitting me down, demanding me to correct my cousin’s English homework. The anxiety was everywhere: officials set up tip lines to identify public use of Engrish leading up to the 2008 Summer Olympics. It was an embarrassment of national proportions—and not just for China. Japan, Korea, Taiwan—no part of the East Asian realm was spared, except for maybe Hong Kong and Singapore, for obvious reasons.
I began to wonder what it would be like to not be able to read Chinese characters, to be free of the context that explained how Engrish was constructed. I wished to see Chinese as I viewed Hiragana, Hangul, Yiddish, and Devanagari—to see Chinese logographs as alien as hieroglyphics.
Tetsuhiko Endo writes for huck on Engrish in 2013:
Here’s the thing: Engrish never accounted for the fact that the language is calling from inside the house. Lose face is directly from 丢脸, “be humiliated”; long time no see comes from 好久不见; look-see from 看见. In context of historical Western mercantilism and imperialism, Chinese has made irrefutable, indelible, and lasting contributions to the English vernacular, and Americans have been speaking Chinglish for at least 150 years without knowing it.
And all the evidence points to Chinglish never being broken to begin with. It sells and ships. It instructs and converts. More Americans are reading Chinglish daily, while shopping online, within TikTok captions—more than anything from the AP Stylebook. Chinglish has its own grammar and its own affective register that is earnest, pedagogical, a little too formal, lacking parallelism, but all the while accidentally poetic. While no one was watching, the joke became the lingua franca.
In the last decade, Western consumer pundits noticed an inundation of highly-rated products carrying unpronounceable brand names—PLOVELXN, JOOMFEEN, KOORUI—and in typical fashion, warned readers not to get scammed. As Xiaowei Wang describes her aunt’s Boston street stall in Blockchain Chicken Farm:
But the voice beneath the gibberish in the product descriptions remained consistent and legible:
The lenticular brackets 【 】 are the first tell, alone signaling that this was written by someone trained in Chinese document formatting.
Next, let’s take a look at the wording. Assured after-sales service is a translation of 售后服务. This is the language of commitment taken directly from Chinese e-commerce, translated formally. Whereas American copywriting might say “we’ve got your back”, this listing says every customer. And there it is again, the please feel free, 请随时 , carrying a warm and invitational tone baked into a place otherwise reserved for a call to action like “contact us”. Instead of “make it right”, the copy promises you the best solution. It assumes that if a problem arises, that the problem is solvable, that you’re welcome to bring it forward, that you will be met with competence and care.
American copy for the same product might say: “Questions? We’re here to help.”
Five-and-a-half words.
Next time you unbox something, just take a look at the warranty card. This is what the Sino-American Commons sounds like at the point of sale. You’ll feel it, I promise.
“If it catches mice, it is a good cat.”
Be it the Chinglish on an Amazon product or the efforts to eradicate Engrish in the 2010s, all of these moments stem from the black box, at least from the West’s perspective, that was China from 1977 through 2001.
My mother, while working as a hotel manager in Beijing in the early 80s, kept a photo album from 1983 produced by China’s state-owned airline, CAAC. The opening insert greets the reader with a Warm Welcome, “热烈欢迎”, echoing a chant commonly reserved for dignitaries and VIPs at the time.
It reads:
Deeper within:
This is the same voice, lush with the floridity and the sincerity that lives on in the product descriptions of Chinese-made goods on Amazon, fully formed decades before Engrish on FailBlog, and a whole generation before my humidifier manual.
In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, recently rehabilitated revolutionary Deng Xiaoping launched the Four Modernizations—in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense—with the explicit goal to transform China from a producer of heavy industrial goods into a consumer society. At the Fifth National People’s Congress in 1978, the Four Modernizations became enshrined in China’s constitution, forming the basis for all the policies that lead us to today. As the 1980s progressed, quality became a point of national pride, printed on factory propaganda posters, written on product packaging, and built on the pragmatism that what we make needs to work. During this time, a generation of workers, academics, designers, and factory owners became oriented toward a future of excellence, but not without the costs of increased social inequality, widespread environmental damage, and the repression of calls for the Fifth Modernization of democracy.
In the decades that followed into the 21st century, as China took on the role of “The World’s Factory”, Made in China became a warning label, shorthand for shoddy, disposable, and suspect. In 2015, the Chinese government adopted the Made In China 2025 national strategic plan and industrial policy as a part of its thirteenth and fourteenth five-year plans, with the goal to move away from being a producer of cheap, low-tech goods facilitated by lower labor costs. At its core was transformation: from sweatshop to factory floor, and eventually, a leader in the world's R&D.
By 2018, the turn had a name: 国潮, the national tide. That year, domestic sportswear brand Li Ning took its place at Paris Fashion Week, and Nike, for decades known as a brand of prestige, witnessed a decrease in sales within China. Now, Californian car influencers fly to Shenzhen to test-drive BYDs and FAW electric vehicles they can’t legally import. They post videos marveling at the build quality, the software, and most importantly, wondering: if they were really so bad, why would they be slapped with a 100% tariff?
That voice, the earnest, slightly formal voice that says ”the Bluetooth device is ready to pair”—recently itself having become meme—is the deliberate endpoint of a fifty-year-long national modernization project that decided that Chinese goods, and the quality of life they bring, would be good.
Good, even for Americans.
You met me at a very Chinese time in my life could just be a meaningless joke about surface-level appreciation, but it is a very real feeling not just about dumplings, house slippers, hot water, and geopolitics. It’s about being addressed by your electric kettle, your battery pack, your computer components, your robot vacuum, or your humidifier, not as a potential lawsuit, but as someone worth educating.
One manual says: you are a liability, and here are the ways you might destroy yourself and us.
The other says: here’s what this is, here’s how it works, and we trust that you will enjoy what it will do for you.
That’s not absurd. That’s the future arriving at your doorstep, one instruction manual at a time. ❖
s.x. liao writes at xuanlin.substack.com