How a hit Chinese song from the 80s became a global meme

The lyrics “xue hua piao piao bei feng xiao xiao” from Fei Yu-ching’s Yi Jian Mei are trending on Spotify, Google, TikTok and beyond

Reading Time:2 minutes

Zhang Aiqin, or Brother Egg, performs Yi Jian Mei on Kuaishou.

Published: 4:54pm, 16 Jun 2020Updated: 5:09pm, 16 Jun 2020

To any native Chinese person of a certain age, the tune is unmistakable.

“The snowflakes are fluttering and the north wind is blowing,” serenades iconic Taiwanese crooner Fei Yu-ching in his 1983 classic, Yi Jian Mei. The melancholic love song compares the singer’s undying love to a blossoming plum tree in the middle of winter. It’s also an apt metaphor for the song that has found a second life in the unlikeliest of circumstances nearly four decades later, shooting to the top of music charts… in snowy Scandinavia.

Yi Jian Mei has occupied the top spot on Spotify’s Viral 50 charts in Norway for over a week now, and it’s second in Sweden and Finland over the past few days. It also reached the top of the charts in New Zealand, where it remained at the time of publishing.

Yi Jian Mei by Fei Yu-ching tops Norway’s Spotify Viral 50 charts on June 14, 2020.

The odd phenomenon coincides with a jump in web searches for the first line of the song’s chorus in Mandarin. Interest in “Xue hua piao piao” has surged since the beginning of May, peaking in early June, according to Google Trends. Even more surprisingly, the lyrics registered more-than-usual attention from countries where Chinese isn’t widely spoken -- like Latvia, for instance.

Just how did a 37-year-old Chinese song capture a global audience all of a sudden? The earliest clues can be found on Kuaishou, one of the most popular video apps in China.