Shelley and Chinese New Year
Cherry Lee
On a holiday in a far-away land (2018). ▶
But present-me does no such thing. I concede, I adapt
and I contribute to the shouts of ads you see everywhere.
In it, Shelley (over)romanticises the poet, calling them
authors of language, higher beauty and truth. When
I think of my 18-year-old self, pouring over Shelley’s
exultations, I wonder if she knew what an unromantic
future awaited her. In days of plot twists, gags galore and action-packed
fanfare, it was a video that was vanilla in comparison.
But I thought there was beauty in its subtlety, that
despite its seeming simplicity, it was evocative of
buried childish memories and shared experiences.
As brands went louder and bigger, with a ferocity of
intention, I wrote a piece that was quiet, that revolved
entirely around a ubiquitous utensil: the chopsticks.
Fast forward ten years, that girl is now me. A 28-year-
old copywriter in an advertising agency. My job? (Over)
romanticising daily occurrences and menial products
in a bid for your attention and, hopefully, action.
But I’m not the only one who has changed. Today’s
audiences and their appetites are a far cry from
Shelley’s romantic era. On a day-to-day basis,
Facebook tells me that the maximum attention span
of a person is six seconds, that my sentences will
be truncated and most likely ignored after ninety
characters, and that no one reads copy anymore so
squeeze all your messages into a maximum of twenty
per cent of visual.
Does the current me protest? Maybe the Shelley-
influenced me would have argued that there is a
charm and allure in crafting that cannot be replicated
in ninety characters or less, and as people who have
the power to create and produce the backdrop of our
daily lives, we should be elevating and challenging
their capacity instead of pushing them further into
laziness. Maybe.
But then there are the anomalies, the rarities, the jobs
that refuse to bow down to all the rules. One such for
me was the script I wrote for SP Setia’s 2018 Chinese
New Year spot. In it, nothing happens. It is two and a
half minutes of pure dialogue.
Till this day, there is disbelief on my part that the script
actually made it through and got approved. It defied
every rule that media and Facebook had outlined for
us. Yet, by Chap Goh Mei, the video hit a combined
total of thirteen million views on Facebook and
YouTube. For me, it signified a quiet victory. And I think
Shelley would have been proud.
Cherry graduated with a BA majoring in Communications
and Writing in 2011. She currently works as a copywriter.
▼ Scene from SP Setia’s 2018 Chinese New Year spot.
93
As people
who have
the power to
create and
produce the
backdrop of
our daily lives,
we should be
elevating and
challenging
their capacity
instead of
pushing them
further into
laziness.
In the dim haze of my memory, uncoupled from the
tangle of forgotten timetables, no-longer familiar faces
and buried knowledge, is a single piece of writing that
shines bright. Hidden within one of the Authorship
& Writing (or was it Communications 101) readers is
an essay by Percy Bysshe Shelley, titled A Defense
of Poetry. It is one my favourite encounters of my
Monash days.