Windows Live Messenger (nee MSN Messenger) is the IM tool of choice in my company, and pretty much the default communication mechanism. Occasionally I have to stick my head out of my office door and yell at people ten feet away to come talk to me face-to-face. I can only handle so much intermediation. Nevertheless, I've had to get used to the idea, and I now run MSN, AIM and Skype all in parallel. As a result, I don't get much work done. Such is the productivity-enhancing magic of information technology.

Yesterday I was having an online chat with one of my colleagues in Beijing when I noticed the icon she had chosen for herself. It was this:

It's a Hello Kitty-style caricature of a scarred, dark-skinned, knife-wielding guy in a hooded sweatshirt. The Chinese says "give me money" in traditional characters, suggesting a possible Taiwan or Hong Kong origin.

Question: Racist or not?

My colleague didn't know the origin of the image. She's certainly not explicitly racist. She got the image from a friend and used it because she thought it was funny. I, a racially sensitized west-coast American, thought it was a lawsuit with googly-eyes. I also looked at it and immediately interpreted it as a slight against black people.

This was my own cultural baggage, naturally. A straw poll of the first-impressions of the Chinese people in my office came up with the following ethnic interpretations of the little cartoon thug: Middle Eastern (three times), African, Japanese and Indian (from the Chinese girl who went to school at Leeds). One also gave me "space alien", but I've purged that as way outside the standard deviation. In general they thought it was pretty funny.

The other American I polled as a control came up with Japanese, which she conceded was more based on the art style, and Mexican (sorry, Hose-B, but you have to admit, there is a certain resemblance, what with the goatee). A heavily Americanized Frenchman also came up with Middle Eastern. The Middle Eastern ID seems to owe something to the covered head, although I took it as a sweatshirt and not, say, a turban. But there it is. We all see through our own prisms.

And what an odd prism it is. Inspired by this bizarre little image, I did a Baidu search for "给我钱" , which led me to a site chock full of QQ expressions, of which the mini thug above is one. QQ, for my friends back in the US, is the Chinese equivalent of MSN Messenger or AIM. It has a market share of about 80% in China, concentrated (if an 80% market share can be thought of as "concentrated") among younger users. MSN owns the urban professionals, which is to say my colleagues.

Going through a site full of QQ expressions is a Magical Mystery Tour; a kaleidoscope of psychedelia that takes you deeper into the minds of Chinese youth than you should ever go. You begin so see why the government is so preoccupied with what Chinese kids are doing online. Among the expressions that you can download for your QQ client are:

The standard quivery-eyed Japanese hamster:

A kitten with a rifle plugging pedestrians, Charles Whitman-style:

This image, which defies description and is fortunately not animated:

And a Chinese nationalist QQ penguin shooting a Japanese pig through the head:

I am not sure what all of this says about Chinese youth, but it can't be good. 

For the record, Imagethief's MSN Messenger icon is Wile E. Coyote holding a sign that says "Help!". After this little journey I feel it is more appropriate than ever.

Cross-posted as CNET 63.