One post tagged with "manga artist"

If adult life is a game where you have to complete tasks, Jieni Wanzi only wants to crawl out on her weak limbs and “give the world a surprise.”

If her daughter hadn’t suddenly decided to change careers after graduating college, Jieni Wanzi’s mother might still have fantasized that her daughter would one day become the director of a city planning bureau.

Born in Shandong, a graduate of Tongji University, majoring in architecture… everything seemed to point toward a safe and smooth career path, but Jieni Wanzi managed to escape this system, and also escaped the algorithm that the world had originally set for her.

In her early years, she traveled back and forth between Beijing and her hometown, and eventually wandered to her “end of the world”—her own room. She spent most of the day there drawing comics, transforming from an ordinary office worker into a reclusive “weirdo.” After nearly eight years of drawing, she finally published her first comic book, titled Refuse to Play the Game.

In her view, if adult life is a game where you have to complete tasks, then she only wants to crawl out on her weak limbs and “give the world a surprise.”

In the book, Jieni Wanzi created a protagonist named A Mei, who overlaps with her own personality by 80–90%. This girl, who is always lost in thought, is more like a “Chinese version of Little Maruko”: idle, casual, wandering outside the system, yet still trudging along the edge of the world.

A Mei’s father thinks his daughter has grown into a “healthy good-for-nothing,” while her mother constantly tries to pull A Mei back onto the right track—from hairstyle and behavior to life choices. A Mei’s mother often tells her the story of “the lazy man eating the pancake”—in her mother’s eyes, A Mei is that lazy person who finishes the pancake in front of her neck and doesn’t even know enough to turn the pancake around and keep eating. Her mother also opposes A Mei’s consumption of Japanese art works, including the anime Chibi Maruko-chan, believing that A Mei’s scatterbrained, noisy, and shopaholic habits were all learned from Maruko.

A Mei feels that “worry is like an invisible umbilical cord connecting us (mother and daughter), never ceasing.”

But Jieni Wanzi really likes this 2D girl. When she was a child, the teacher gave her the English name Jenny, but by elementary school she discovered that there were seven Jennys among the 60-plus kids in her class, making it hard to tell them apart. Jieni Wanzi was the first to call herself Jenny, so the teacher called her “Jenny one,” followed by “Jenny two,” “Jenny three”… almost like clones, and they had to remember which number they were.

Jieni Wanzi was quite satisfied with being “number one,” giving her a feeling of being the “prototype unit,” so she took the Chinese homophone of “Jenny one” as her pen name: “Jieni Wan.” The “Zi” was added later, making “Jieni Wanzi” sound more interesting, as if it had a spiritual lineage with Maruko.

​“Living outside the system, like clinging to the edge of the big Ferris wheel”

Jieni Wanzi has never lived a very planned life. She once tried to “fight poison with poison” by studying urban planning, but she failed.

Looking back on her past life, Jieni Wanzi feels like the ball Galileo dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa: initially thick and slow, then accelerating under gravity, moving faster and faster as it goes down.

Jieni Wanzi has very early memories, and from a very young age she was sensitive to the feeling of being “trapped in a space.” She still remembers this scene: she was sitting on the bed in the nursery, sunlight streaming in through the window, making her fingers hot. There was a lot of dust in the air, slowly floating with her breath, and beside her feet was a worn-out cookie tin whose original appearance was unrecognizable, containing the only toy in the room—a set of meaningless building blocks.

At that time, her life had just begun, but the feeling persisted, as if there would be no end. She felt panicked and wanted to escape: she didn’t want to spend her whole life like this, staring at dust to pass the time.

After that, she stepped onto the predetermined track that many smart children go through: she had a happy time in kindergarten, and in junior high became the “other people’s child” due to her excellent grades. Life seemed to fly by in a flash. It wasn’t until after she graduated from undergraduate and decided to change careers that Jieni Wanzi nearly broke ties with her parents over it. In her family, behaviors deemed “derailed” were countless: from minor things like dyeing her hair in various colors, getting tattoos, and swearing, to major things like not having a proper job, not getting married, and not having children—all were criticized.

Her mother kept trying to stop Jieni Wanzi from switching careers, even mobilizing distant relatives and neighbors to persuade her. In her mother’s eyes, her daughter had “tragically lost” the chance to become the planning bureau director, because in her view, getting into a good university basically meant a stable life for the rest of your life, and becoming a director was not impossible.

After several years of such discipline, the mother had no way out and finally gave up. A while ago, she suggested that her daughter open a small convenience store. Jieni Wanzi just found it funny. Her mother’s expectations had dropped from “planning bureau director” to “small store owner.” “I’m scatterbrained and I stutter a bit. Not becoming the planning bureau director might actually be a good thing for the whole city.”

Jieni Wanzi also tried working as a planning editor at a private publishing company, but the job itself was painful for her: the tasks to be done had no clear standards, and sometimes she hoped to take a break after finishing the day’s work, but often found that impossible.

She gradually realized that she was not suited to enter this system. She liked drawing comics more and more, and kept searching for meaning in it. In college, a friend recommended a comic WeChat public account to Jieni Wanzi, where she read works by Terada Masaru, Yamada Hanako, Cat Soup… and then realized that comics could be so much more than entertainment; she had previously known almost nothing about comics.

From then on, she felt she had to take comics more seriously, and the seed of making comics a profession was planted.

Living outside the system might be like what Jieni Wanzi drew: adult life is like sitting in a big Ferris wheel at an amusement park. She didn’t get a seat with a safety belt, so she can only cling to the edge, at risk of being thrown off at any moment and shattered to pieces.

But she’s still holding on tightly. She won’t let go.

02 “A screw suddenly opened its mouth to speak”​

In January this year, Refuse to Play the Game was published. This might be her first step out of the system, “a bit like a screw suddenly opening its mouth to speak.”

She no longer wants to fit into a world that pursues “efficiency” and “usefulness.” As a defector from the bright future expected by her parents, an unfilial daughter who left home, and a fool with “aspirations higher than heaven,” she can be said to have refused every kind of game. She knows it’s impossible to completely withdraw from the modern survival system, but saying “no” is a gesture, a longing.

She still has to face reality every day, admit her own weakness and failure, and during family gatherings she still has to sit at the kids’ table. She once wanted to change careers and take a gap year first. To her parents, that sounded about as crazy as saying “I’m going to die.” They had countless arguments about it.

For a long time, Jieni Wanzi couldn’t understand why her parents wanted her to enter such a stable track. Later she came up with a reason: maybe because she has no memories of hunger, but her parents do.

Jieni Wanzi’s parents grew up in the countryside, often going hungry and surviving on sweet potatoes. Her mother always prided herself on the fact that her birth brought a cart of sweet potatoes to the family. When her parents argued about which family was richer in the past, they argued about who, besides eating sweet potatoes, could occasionally eat a few mixed-grain vegetable buns. When Jieni Wanzi’s mother was a teenage girl, she once trekked over ten miles because of hunger to seek refuge with her aunt who had already acquired urban household registration.

There’s also a memory from an even older generation. Shortly after Jieni Wanzi’s mother started working, she took her grandmother to the city. It was the first time her grandmother had seen a streetlight. She turned to Jieni Wanzi’s mother and asked, “Whose family put big steamed buns up there?” In the old woman’s mind, that round, white thing was a steamed bun.

This past event reminded Jieni Wanzi of The Moon and Sixpence—what her great-grandmother saw at that time was neither the moon nor sixpence; it was neither a dream nor money, but something that could fill the stomach right away—a luxury food belonging exclusively to city dwellers: steamed buns.

Later, the specialty products Jieni Wanzi received from her hometown were always dried sweet potatoes. These sweet potato strips were very chewy, sweet, and filling. Her aunt said, “I don’t have anything good to give you, just these homemade dried sweet potatoes.”

Besides the deep-seated fear of hunger, Jieni Wanzi’s parents firmly believed that people can change their destiny through study, just like planting in spring and harvesting in autumn—effort brings reward. They wanted their daughter to live a life that was secure regardless of drought or flood. Also, to live a better life, doing business or entering the government system were both common choices.

Jieni Wanzi doesn’t want to take the civil service exam, but she can understand that her family’s “love for the civil service exam” might come from an imagination of power. But each person’s life belongs only to themselves, and they need to balance others’ expectations with their own true desires. Living outside secular standards, Jieni Wanzi finds it hardest to maintain inner peace: “I try to find a balance among various inner worries and influences from others, like a magnet carefully moving within the force fields created by other magnets, trying not to be pulled back and forth.”

03 Fighting against concrete algorithms​

Now, Jieni Wanzi keeps Refuse to Play the Game on her bedside table as a motto.

Living in this era, besides fighting against the abstract algorithms of the world, there are also concrete algorithms. She posts comics on social media platforms, hoping to be seen, but finds that algorithms are everywhere, and some content formats get more exposure. For example, on Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), two-panel comics are easier to read and have a higher chance of getting organic traffic. She’s not especially suited to this format, but has to face the reality that there aren’t many platforms to publish comics, and if she doesn’t follow their rules, it’s very hard.

Jieni Wanzi once thought it was okay as long as she could be seen, even if she wasn’t being herself, but later felt that was hard to accept. She drew some more refined works, mostly published a few years ago in a comic magazine, which later closed down due to poor performance. She felt sorry about it.

She sensed the “authority” of data quantification very early on. When she worked as a planning editor at the previous publishing company, she found that in editorial meetings, whether a topic would pass was often determined not just by its content, but more by its data: how many followers the author had on social platforms, the number of likes and comments, how many influencers could be mobilized to help promote the book… The expected data level largely determined whether a book could be published.

Now, data is no longer a background statistic to assist decision-making; it is presented more directly and nakedly in front of us, becoming a pre-set standard for success or failure. Jieni Wanzi feels that the algorithm era has left modern people with many ailments, especially the fact that many people seek themselves on the internet and become more and more similar in the process. The more posts you scroll through, the more symptoms you identify with, and the more blurred your own face becomes. This is also a form of discipline from algorithms.

She often realizes she is living in an information cocoon. Many things she considers common sense, others see as fantasy: “For example, recently a friend said a video of a cat eating cucumber went viral, but I never saw it; and she had never heard of ‘family-based hukou.’ This makes me feel like we live on different planets.”

Different platforms have very different temperaments and ways of forming circles. For Jieni Wanzi, WeChat subscription accounts are like “her own village”; Weibo is a “cyber acquaintance society”; Xiaohongshu is more like a public space, like a train station; Douyin (TikTok) is basically “a foreign country”—lively but irrelevant to her; and Douban is a surviving “internet relic,” with an atmosphere reminiscent of the Republic of China era, quite old-fashioned.

Once, external order shaped our youth—a set of “algorithms” and order built by adults. Now, the internet also has algorithms, taking over from books, parents, and teachers to instill ideas and reshape us.

Jieni Wanzi hates algorithms that reinforce people’s inner prejudices. When surfing the internet, she often finds the same viewpoint flocking to her, making it impossible to hear other voices. This might be an algorithmic trap: to avoid offending users, platforms remove different viewpoints from the homepage, making it easy to believe that one viewpoint is absolutely correct. For example, if a mother is very worried about her daughter’s safety, the algorithm will frantically push content about children encountering misfortune after leaving home, constantly reinforcing the elder’s inner fears.

Platforms also tag users with invisible labels based on their online behavior. Jieni Wanzi doesn’t mind being labeled, but she doesn’t like being considered as “only looking at these is enough”: “It’s like I love pizza, fried chicken, and beef noodles, but then I can only eat these every day, and gradually I even forget there are other foods. Sometimes after searching for something, the same thing fills the screen for days. Being force-fed constantly gives me a chill.”

This might be like the “Lego world” that Jieni Wanzi drew: when we all use labeled “bricks” to summarize ourselves, it’s easy for the bricks to replace us.

Currently, human-made algorithms fill the world, and it’s almost impossible to escape to a place not covered by algorithms. Jieni Wanzi’s way of fighting against algorithms is to put her phone far away when saying something she doesn’t want others to hear, like tucking it under her pillow. Her mother is even more cautious and puts her phone alone in another room. When online, to stay rational, she also looks for viewpoints that can refute her own, because behind every view there are bound to be many blind spots.

Jieni Wanzi hopes that major platforms could set a slider in the system to adjust the intensity of the algorithm, from 1% to 99%, so users can adjust it themselves and decide how much new content and “tagged” content they want to be pushed. She’s afraid that she might never produce a truly satisfying work, scared of having to work for the platforms for exposure, or being alienated in constant self-doubt: “I feel I still have huge energy—anger, grievance, hope, etc. Some of it has been bottled up so long that it disappears like a fart held in too long. This might also be a difference between humans and AI: AI doesn’t want to fart, and doesn’t feel the urge to create. At least not yet.”