Shanghai’s “Kappa Girl” finally hits Italy

Submitted by theforeignexpert on Fri, 2008-11-21 00:57. :: | | |

This article was aggregated from The Foreign Expert - Translations and Review 

Kappa Girl is no longer just a Chinese phenomenon. We’ve received over 200 hits today from Italians searching for bbs.163.com, one of many online forums now being devoured for pictures and video of “Kappa Girl” (NSFW), a young Shanghairen who was fired from her job at the local outlet for Italy’s Kappa brand after she made a porno. The girl, 22-year-old Lu Jiani, was filmed in a 22-minute-long sex video according to chinaSMACK.com, and its ubiquity on the Chinese Internet inspired hoards of glommers-on to flood the Shanghai Kappa store with cameras in hand, hoping to get a glimpse of her (see a video). Shanghaiist reports that she has tried to profit from all of this, charging high prices for interviews, public appearances, and ads on her blog.

But yesterday and today, Italians finally learned the news in massa. What are they saying?

The 22-minute video is now reported as being only 12 minutes — a much more Warholian figure — and this is enough inspiration for Paolo Salom at corriere.it:

Twelve minutes. This is the measure of success in China today for an (until yesterday) unknown young employee of the Italian Kappa in Shanghai. With her nickname, let’s look at the case of Kappa Girl (Kappa-nu in Chinese), the girl who drove websurfers crazy in the Heavenly Emperor. A few days and her image has become more popular than the performance by Paris Hilton. Here, you understand the reference: a galley slave made a porn video. Filmed at home, explicit language, seductive looks and a performance that is all things to everyone. But in the People’s Republic of China, sex makes far more headlines than in the West. So the film with the protagonist Kappa Girl (in the real world, Lu Jiani) has made its rounds on the Internet and was downloaded by millions of Internet users.

Salom’s comparison of this relatively poor shopgirl to hotel heiress Paris Hilton raises the essential point for foreigners looking in on the event. Sex tapes can spark interest anywhere in the world, but in the West it takes some existing level of celebrity to make the tape worth mentioning. In China, where representations of sex are still a black market commodity, anyone can become a top ten Internet search term.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that Italians are apparently going nuts over this story now. If 200 Italians can reach this English-language site (where there was zero “Kappa Girl” content) simply by searching for a forum site that hosts some photos (and that we have linked to for unrelated reasons in the past), then it’s a safe guess that thousands of Italians, maybe in the tens or hundreds of thousands, have joined in the search for Kappa Girl.

The front page of affaritaliani.it features her with this blurb:

She was nobody. She’s now a celebrity in all respects in China and throughout the Internet. All this for a porno video of 12 minutes put on the Net by chance. Lu gave oral sex to her boyfriend, then some sexy poses and dirty talk. Kappa has dismissed her for damaging their image. But in case you missed the boat … She has opened a blog under the name Kappa Girl.”

(See their inside story here).

Both sites have comments disabled on the stories, so alas, no italySMACK to offer. But clearly this story has legs. It makes us wonder, where went those innocent days of iPhone Girl?

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