A Chinese New Year + Valentine’s Day Epiphany with the Dumpling 🥟 Emoji
新年快乐, 情人节快乐！Happy Chinese New Year & Happy Valentine’s Day!
What do these two holidays have to do with each other this year? The answer is below.
Dumplings (jiǎozi 饺子 in Mandarin) are traditionally a must-eat food during the Chinese New Year. Families wrap them up and eat them as the clock strikes midnight. This is because the form of the dumplings resembles “元宝” (YuanBao or Sycee), an old Chinese currency consisting of nuggets of gold or silver. By wrapping dumplings, you are wrapping fortune. The dumpling has thus become a symbol of prosperity and wealth for the new year.
In 2016, I created the artwork for the official dumpling 🥟, Chopsticks 🥢, fortune cookie 🥠, and Takeout Box 🥡 emojis. Together with the effort from Jennifer 8. Lee, we made these emojis available for billions of keyboards. I also co-founded Emojination, a community to make emoji approval an inclusive and representative process, with Jennifer 8. Lee & Jeanne Brooks.
People often joke around and ask me whether designing emojis is my job, and my answer is:
“It is not my job, it’s a calling.”
Joking aside, I do feel that if designing the dumpling emoji is like giving people a fish, I am more interested in teaching people how to fish — I intend to make other people passionate about design & creativity. Design connects us to the world. Design research has expanded my mind, and I’ve started to see connections and everything seems to come together, full circle. Recently, my design research has exposed a truly mystical meaning for me about the cultural symbols of this time of year.
Over the last five years, I have been traveling around the world, speaking about the topic of “Designing Across Cultures.” Through these talks, I share my experiences with cross-cultural branding, the design process of creating the Twitter Fail Whale 🐳 and the Dumpling Emoji 🥟, localization tactics for brands like Disney Shanghai, Google, 500 Startups’ objectives towards their Korean and Indian audiences, and so on.
Last week, while I was editing and uploading my design talks to my YouTube Channel, I had an epiphany:
When I was designing a bilingual logo (English and Chinese) for the Australian real estate company Home 789, I faced two major creative challenges: 1. Integrate the Chinese character of “Home” — “家” with numbers “789”; 2. Redesign the radical “宀” into an organic form.
As I was editing the above video, I remembered my discovery that the Chinese character of “Home” 家, consists of two pictorial components: the upper part “宀” (mián) symbolizing the roof, and lower part “豕” (shǐ) meaning pig. In ancient China, pigs were raised indoors to keep them safe. Pigs in the house then became associated with a bountiful home.
February 5th marks the start of the year of the Pig 🐷, I posted the snip of my talk on Twitter, as a New Year message to celebrate the Year of the Pig.
As I continued editing this video, ideas began to percolate.
During my redesign the roof radical “宀” into an organic form, I rediscovered that the name of 宀 is 宝盖头 (bǎo ɡài tóu), which literally translates to “Treasure (宝) Canopy (盖头)” (or according to Google Translator “Treasure Hijab”). The “Treasure” 宝 is the same character from the ancient Chinese currency “元宝” (YuanBao or Sycee), the “Inaugural Treasures”, which is also what the dumpling has come to signify, as mentioned earlier.
When you think about the word and concept of “home” in Chinese characters, it literally is like a dumpling: a roof made of treasure, protecting the pig inside the home. Making this year, 2019, the Year of the Pig, even more meaningful.
Dumpling 🥟 + Year of Pig 🐷= Home 🏠家
When you come to think of it, the notion of Home is where we find safety, comfort, and belonging. That is probably the reason why people say “Home is where the heart ❤️ is.”
On the topic of the heart, a couple of days ago, with Valentine’s Day approaching, I received a box of chocolate from my lovely friend Victoria Taylor.
Delighted, I tweeted “Chocolates are indeed food for the Soul!”, which reminded me one of my favorite tales about love: “Cupid and Psyche” (or “Eros and Psyche”) from the ‘Metamorphoses’ (a.k.a. ‘The Golden Ass’) by Apuleius, a 2nd century AD novelist, and rhetorician. You can read the longer version here, here and here.
In this story, Psyche is a princess so beautiful that the goddess Venus (Aphrodite) becomes jealous. In revenge, she instructs her son Cupid (Eros) to make her fall in love with a hideous monster; but instead, he falls in love with her himself. He becomes her unseen husband, visiting her only at night. Psyche disobeys his orders not to attempt to look at him, and in doing so she loses him. In her search for him, she undertakes a series of cruel and difficult tasks set by Venus in the hope of winning him back. Cupid can eventually no longer bear to witness her suffering or to be apart from her and pleads their cause to the gods. Psyche becomes an immortal and the lovers are married in heaven.
Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss
Marble — H. 1.55 m; L. 1.68 m; D. 1.01 m
Paris, Musée du Louvre
© 2010 Musée du Louvre / Raphaël Chipault
Psyche (psych•ee), whose name means “soul”. Psyche is the soul; Cupid is the heart. When they come together, they are forming LOVE, which is what home represents.
Home is where your heart and soul are together.
Heart ❤️+ Soul ✨= Love 💖= Home 🏠家
You might have heard the idiom: “Go Big or Go Home” which is a phrase said to come out of Southern California in the latter part of the 20th century as a sales slogan or sports. It is an exhortation to go all-out, to put all of one’s effort into an enterprise, to experience something to its fullest, to be extravagant.
In Silicon Valley, there are global success stories that apparently became household names overnight — from Uber to Airbnb, Dropbox to Pinterest. As much as we admire the winners on the pedestal who are “Going Big”, we tend to forget the value of “Home”, the things & people we love and enjoy — — the result is burning out, founder depression, and the lost of art and culture in the city…
Now here come more questions:
Why do we have to choose between either “Go Big” or “Go Home”? Why are they mutually exclusive?
Most importantly, what is the point of you “Going Big” if you can no longer “Go Home?”
You see, it is not sustainable to “Go Big” without the sense of “Home”. In order to authentically “going big” and keep the success, you need to incorporate who you are at your core.
Anything manifested out there, needs to be present within.
So, is there any way to have it all? The LOVE, the heart, the soul; to Go Big and Go Home at the same time?
The answer is YES!
How? You might ask.
Well, according to Forbes, if you can find your Ikigai you can Transform Your Outlook On Life And Business! That’s like totally Go Big and Go Home at the same time.
What’s an Ikigai, you asked? Well, Ikigai (生き甲斐, pronounced “eek-key-guy”) is, above all else, a lifestyle that strives to balance the spiritual with the practical. It is the Japanese secret to a long and happy life which might just help you live a more fulfilling life!
Ikigai is seen as the convergence of four primary elements:
- What you love (your passion)
- What the world needs (your mission)
- What you are good at (your vocation)
- What you can get paid for (your profession)
Apparently, discovering your own Ikigai is said to bring fulfillment, happiness and make you live longer.
So I took a long, hard look into the concept and truly asked myself these 4 questions:
- What do I love?
- What am I good at?
- What can I be paid for now — or something that could transform into my future hustle?
- What does the world need?
When I converge all my answers together, Eureka! I have discovered my Ikigai.
It was so straightforward and obvious, which makes me see we can really have it all — — Be in love in Year of Pig, Go Big and Go Home!
Since I have a generous soul, I am happy to share my transformative discovery of how I found my Ikigai — — fully animated!
In all seriousness…
You see, the Dumpling is not just a fixture in Chinese cuisine, it is universal: Khinkali 🇬🇪, Jiaozi 🇨🇳, Gyoza 🇯🇵, Mandu 🇰🇷, Ravioli 🇮🇹, Pierogi 🇵🇱, Pelmeni 🇷🇺, Momos 🇳🇵, Maultaschen 🇩🇪… during my design research, one of the most common kinds of dumplings in China is 馄饨, its English is Wonton (which is based on its Cantonese pronunciation), its Chinese Mandarin pronunciation is Hun Dun. What blows my mind is that I realized that the Chinese character of wonton is 馄饨, which rooted from 混沌, meaning primordial chaos. No joke, these things are related. 🤯! During Ming dynasty (1368–1644) The “Classic of Mountains and Seas” 《山海经》, the Chinese classic text and a compilation of mythic geography and myth, has an illustrated version of the “Wonton” 混沌 the “Primordial Chaos”—— it has four wings, six legs, no face, and apparently, good at singing and dancing.
Here is the unspoken truth through my design research: The reason why dumplings are so universal, if you think about it — — it’s primordial chaos in your mouth: You don’t know what’s inside until you take a bite. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat: You don’t know what’s inside a dumpling unless you take a bite of it, then you can find out whether it is chicken, or vegetarian, or pork, or seafood… So every single time when you eat a dumpling, metaphorically you’re opening up a new universe.
Happy Chinese New Year & Happy Valentine’s Day!
“When you feel what you love, And love what you do. Nothing can stop us….For life is made for you to mold it. And love is life to be lived…wishes are served on a silver plate…” Tom Oliver — Free Your Mind
So take a bite of the dumpling 🥟, be in love in Year of Pig, Go Big and Go Home!
And lastly, the Dumpling emoji 🥟 has been nominated as a finalist of Shorty Awards Emoji of the Year. To appreciate and support this delicious primordial chaos, you can vote below:
Many thanks to my friends and family for their wonderful feedback on this post, particularly: Harry McCracken, Kristy Lin Billuni, Matthew Rowett, Greg Galant, Alex Feerst, Ken Ozeki, and Victoria Taylor.
This post is the first article of my Cross-Cultural Design Infotainment series. In future posts, I will be sharing my creative process behind the Twitter Fail Whale, Disney Shanghai Mickey Mouse to the Conan O’Brien Pale Whale, and so on.
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By the way, I have a Solo Art Show featuring 100+ of my art pieces from 2/20–6/19 in San Francisco. If you are in town, please come by!
“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life and 🥟. “ — inspired by Federico Fellini
