Be patient for about 40 seconds. I think the payoff is worth it.

The official title is given above, but I like to call it instead “Song To Fuck With Foreign Perception”.

《凌宵话》 is a musical toast to friendship, urban life, and the delightful weirdness that comes from bringing different backgrounds together. It’s playful, heartfelt, and a little bit cheeky—just like the singers themselves. (Both singers are known to be boundary-pushers and just a little bit “off” in their approach to things.)

To explain the video, it’s two friends: one native-born Shanghai, one outsider to Shanghai, playfully teasing each other over their different upbringings, habits, etc. This divide is emphasized by one (Huang) singing in the Wu dialect of Shanghai while the other (Lou) singing in Mandarin. They’re playfully making fun of how each does things differently, but the chorus hits the core of the song:

“No matter where you’re from, you’re my sister, and we’ll always have each other in this big city.”

So go watch the video before you open the spoiler. Think about what the video is trying to communicate. Then read the explanation.

explanation

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The reason I think this fucks with foreign perceptions is that most people I show this to look at it and ask if this is in some way queer-coded.

It isn’t.

Asian, especially in this case Chinese, body language is very different from western cultures. To wit:

1. In Chinese (and more broadly, East Asian) culture, close friends—especially women—often hold hands, lean on each other, or share physical space in ways that are purely platonic but might be read as romantic or flirtatious by Western viewers.
2. The kind of teasing, inside jokes, and emotional openness in the lyrics and performance are signs of deep friendship in China. In the West, such emotional intimacy between women is sometimes only associated with romantic relationships, so it gets “sapphic-coded” by default.

The source of the confusion is that western pop culture is primed to look for subtext and “shipping” in any close same-sex relationship on screen, especially if there’s chemistry or strong body language. Asian pop culture, on the other hand, has a millennia-long tradition of “sisterhood” and “brotherhood” that’s overtly affectionate without any romantic implication.

Hence “Song To Fuck With Foreign Perception”.

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So why did I put it in WomensStuff? Because I really did not need to hear the male view of the singers and how they look. 😂