This. The inaugural tee. The tee that elicited sufficient semiotic and cultural confusion to inspire this blog.
When going to a new country, especially one where English is embedded but not ingrained, there will always be a fascinating linguistic exchange worthy of much academic ink. How some words survive translation is intriguing. For example, in Malaysia the word "take" is used as a catch all for eating and drinking, as in "Do you take spicy?" or "Do you take coffee?" or "Oh, you do take garlic." Establishing truth is a concept that seems to be imperative to Malaysia — every day I am asked "Is it true?" of various things I say, and, on the other hand, conspiracy theories have been entrenched in Malaysian culture for years and years.
But nothing has remained as perplexing as the myriad shirts, shorts, and hats I have seen whose English is not unlike that of a drunken toddler's.
Anyone can put words on cloth. A shirt ripped from your childhood memories once donated ends up covering the back of a young boy in Lesotho or Vietnam, where Joey's Bar Mitzvah theme is suddenly irrelevant.* I've seen shirts that just plainly say FUCK YOU. One of my favorite shirt-related impressions from Kuala Lampur was seeing a pregnant woman wearing a shirt dress that said It all happened in a *Starbucks Coffee logo* and I couldn't help but think whether this was a public announcement of the location of her soon-to-be-birthed child's conception or a premonition of where its birth would be or neither.
With this shirt, I tried my best to make sense of it. One explanation is that it could be a poke at how difficult learning English as a second language is. How some combinations of characters are barely justifiable. The "conscious uncoupling" of pronunciation and phonetics.
I even attempted to decode its message with a cryptograph solver. It's possible it means "french rente sacne means chinee thente wan." There are enough words in there with some semblance of a relationship to meaning when stringed together. Perhaps it's a cipher. Or perhaps no one has ever given this particular shirt this much thought.
My only other explanation is that this is a very sophisticated and self-referential response to the pervasive nonsense that occupies space on fabric. With "WHAT," we are offered an opportunity to consider how trivial language can be when it's mass produced and easily discardable. The strings of letters are an obvious articulation of the idea that we can find meaning out of nonsense, which is exactly what I am trying to achieve here. This shirt is performative. It enacts our ability to challenge it, to find significance in the inconsequential, to grant us a moment of perilous gravity in the seemingly safe. Truth or dare.
