Unless you are a celebrity, everyone does not get their 15 minutes of fame. But some people, against the odds, get it more than once. And for one 90s generation girl in Jiangsu, it has been for the odd combination of workplace abuse and decoration.
2 years ago, dissatisfied in her career, Ms Xu took her tears online to complain about the ups and downs of her workplace; she often did overtime without pay and was subjected to the phenomenon known as PUA.
Well known as the abbreviation for “Pick-up Artist”, in the workplace context, PUA is a “euphemism for mind control, brainwashing and suppression that occurs between superiors and subordinates”, as the Global Times reported around the time Xu was speaking out about the issue too.
This was to be just Xu’s first brush with fame. Now, however, she’s gone viral again, attracting 200,000 followers online and a million likes. For a while, Xu was even trending on Bilibili.
It was down to her series of videos charting the remodelling of her parents’ bedroom.
But that which has been attracting the attention is the method employed by Xu to convince her parents to go ahead with the project.
Xu recalled their initial opposition to the renovation of the old room. “They thought the old appearance was OK. They’ve lived here for so many years there is no need to go to a lot of trouble”, Xu told the Yangtze Evening News.
In order to convince them, Xu came up with her “secret weapon” that comprised little wooden boards, glue, putty and other materials. As a former student of architecture, Xu was able to use them to first create a small-scale model of that she envisioned for the actual room.
In order to make the model more realistic, Xu even 3D printed a Chinese hanging lamp, while being careful to make videos of every part of the process.
“My spatial imagination is not very good. I can’t tell anything just by looking at flat designs, but a small-scale model is very intuitive”, she said.
Xu also believes her parents’ ideas are common among people their age. “Perhaps the older generation has an obsession and thinks that the more rooms, the better. In fact, breaking one room apart will affect the lighting, like picking up sesame seeds and losing the watermelon”, she said. “And nowadays, with means of security getting better and better, anti-theft windows are more of a hidden danger [in case of fire]”.
When she was a child, Xu also participated in a small-scale model competition with her classmates and won first place. That memory was perhaps what convinced her parents to give the project the go ahead upon seeing the model.
All said and done, Xu’s parents had their brand new bedroom, completed by their daughter alone, in little more than 1 week. Interested readers can watch Xu in action, at work on both the model and the actual room, via this link.
Not satisfied with that, Xu also made a fish tank out of a discarded TV, fulfilling her father’s wish to raise fish.
Looking back on her project, she smiled and said, “There can’t be two masters in one room, so I didn’t let my parents get involved!”.
And looking at the comments section of her videos where her fans admire her hands-on ability, Xu said, “If others think I can’t do something, but I do it, I will feel that it is cool. And ever since I was a child, I have never felt that these things can only be done by boys”.
