Hong Kong’s best memes: from Bus Uncle to ‘Club 7-Eleven’, how internet culture took local flavour to a new level
- As the world’s ‘first’ meme museum opens at Hong Kong’s K11 Art Mall, we trace how social media users have injected local colour and wit into our newsfeeds
- Numerous Instagram pages are dedicated to creating memes that only true Hongkongers will relate to – here are some of our favourites
Memes have long been a joyously irreverent and acerbically insightful offshoot of internet culture. And since laughter transcends language, it’s no surprise that memes have reached deep, criss-crossing communities in multicultural Hong Kong.
Here are some of our favourite memes from the 852, and a look at how Hong Kong’s memes have evolved from a nerdy niche to exploding across the internet, even busting viewing records along the way.
Hong Kong memes existed before the term was widely used
Don’t believe us? An old classic is “Bus Uncle”, or “巴士阿叔”. Dating back to 2006, this widely shared quarrel between two agitated men was uploaded to several platforms, and even reportedly became the city’s most viewed YouTube video of May 2006 after attracting more than three million views. You can still check it out on YouTube today – but be warned it contains some pretty spicy language.
Typhoon season in Hong Kong has always been a topic that people can’t avoid, so much so that it’s almost inevitable to find your socials flooded with memes when it’s that time of year again. Videos of news reporters out on the field braving storms have also long been widely circulated in Hong Kong’s internet world – such as this clip from back in 2009.
Another video we loved that did the rounds showed this lady caught playing a game at one of the many stalls at Hong Kong’s Food Expo, in which she was given 30 seconds to grab as many seafood items as she could with the gripping tool. “Your tool’s broken!” she exclaimed as she was blatantly seen grabbing items with her hands, perhaps less sneakily than she expected.
With the explosion in popularity of Instagram in the early 2010s, the most common memes were no longer clickbait videos, but pictures and graphics laying bare commonly held beliefs with witty insights, frequently riffing on popular culture. And rather than just sharing the same old memes, Hongkongers took existing formats and modified them to make them relatable to the local audience. Check out some of the best memes about Hong Kong below ...
“Weather” you like it or not, Hong Kong’s weather gets the better of us
Throughout the long, hot Hong Kong summer, the sun isn’t what people are looking forward to the most, but rather work or school being called off by typhoon and heavy rain warnings.
So despite how heavy rainstorms can get during the summer, try to think of them as a free car wash!
