Named “Thinking You Can Take My Man?” this music video is one of the most hilarious and technically mature of many recent, widely circulated spoof videos that rework the footage of a 2001 tearjerking drama adapted from a Qiong Yao novel. Auntie Xue, a malicious and manipulative supporting figure in the drama, becomes the parodies’ central figure. Those familiar with Taiwanese popular culture since the early 1980s know it is no overstatement to say that Qiong Yao has invented a whole genre of romance fiction that portrays entangled, doomed relationships with emotional overkills. In the late 1990s her production company successfully entered the mainland Chinese market with franchised, adapted dramas, triggering a resurgence of “Qiong Yao Fever.”
In this video, Auntie Xue is seen hysterically yelling out her lines in time with the electronic music. The whimsical editing has reassembled the dramatic confrontations, turning her self-contradictory statement into a self-defending narrative cursing the power of patriarchy. It has further twisted and deconstructed the brand-name sentiments of Qiong Yao’s romance, announcing Auntie Xue as the ephemeral icon of China’s web culture entertaining both playfulness and cynicism. The internet-generated genre of spoof video, known as “e’gao” in China, caused massive controversy in 2006 when Shanghai spoofer Hu Ge’s parody of Chen Kaige’s blockbuster “The Promise” infuriated the filmmaker.
