Luo Shiying’s talk about the Great Famine is punctuated by “I fuck your mother.” Whenever she wants to end a topic and switch to the next one, she says, “I fuck your mother;” Or worse, “I fuck the thief mother of your mother.” Who or what is Luo Shiying cursing? Does the “you” refer to the person, to whom she is talking? Apparently not. As the interviewer Li Xinmin explains, dirty phrases like these are extremely common in her hometown. Nonetheless, it still comes to me as shocking that she looks off the camera and at the interviewer, probably right into the eyes, when she says, “I fuck your mother.” Indeed, sometimes dirty phrases begin to lose their literal meanings in daily use and become expressions of feelings that are not exactly speakable. But are they empty? Do we truly hear Luo’s curses? Do we even see her in the video? — Tenggeer Hao
