Beloved childhood song seems 'insane' in hot weather

One panel of the comic strip with a line from the lyrics of Planting Suns: "I have a great wish, to plant suns when I grow up". [Photo/Sina Weibo]

As most of China suffers from high summer temperatures, a song popular with post-80s Chinese during their childhood, Planting Suns, recently enjoyed a revival of its popularity.

This time, it was presented in a vertical comic strip, consisting of 13 small panels. Each part was matched with a line from the lyrics.

The strip was widely posted and forwarded on WeChat Moments and Weibo.

"I always sang this song when I was a child, and now, as an adult, come to realize how insane the lyrics are," a Weibo user named Zouchuweicheng said.

The lyrics go like this, "I have a great wish, to plant suns when I grow up. One plant will be enough, and it will give many suns. I will send one sun to the South Pole, one to the Arctic Ocean. And hang a sun during winter, another at night. Then every corner of the world will become bright and warm."

In the comic, a boy, dressed like Superman, delivers suns he harvested to the places that seems to need a sun. Yet the animals or people he wants to help react with rude swearing.

The song was composed by Chinese musician Xu Peidong, based on a poem with the same title written in 1985 by a 10-year-old girl named Li Bingxue whose name means snow and ice from Liaoning province. The song premiered in a gala to celebrate Children's Day in 1988. And in 1994 a music video was made for this song.

Li, as a child, wrote the poem out of pure innocence. She wished the world could be a better place with more brightness and warmth.

However, the song sounds insane to people sweating in such a hot summer.

"This (the song) must be the reason for climate change," a netizen named Jineannian said, joking about the lyrics on Weibo.

Baidu Take Away Service made a small commercial animation based on the song. The boy from the comic strip grows up in the video, finds the window of his car melted and birds become roasted chicken under the sun. He is also tired and restless because of the hot weather.

"There is neither happiness nor gratitude under the hot sun, I am dying from the heat," the boy cries.

Mocking this song reminded more netizens of other childhood songs that sound unreasonable to them as adults.

One is I Have a Nice Father, which was on an album called "Classics for 3-7 Year-Old Children". There is no information on the composer or writer and it's difficult to find the song on the internet. Yet its lyrics were kept online and in people's memory.

The song mimics the sound of a child being spanked by a so-called "nice papa" and children crying. The lyrics include lines such as, "there is no such kind of father who will not spank his child, and there is no such kind of a child who will not be spanked", echoing an outdated principle in children's education: physical punishment and harsh scolding are demonstrations of love and care.