Language Matters | What John Cena did wrong in ‘bing chilling’ viral meme and how ‘ice cream’ has been adapted into Chinese, Japanese and Singaporean languages

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream. However, in 2021-2022, it was a Mandarin term that became widely known across the meme world.

American pro wrestler and actor John Cena had posted a video on his Weibo account to promote his latest film to the mainland Chinese market. It showed Cena eating an ice cream while singing in Mandarin, “I like ice cream very much, but Fast and Furious 9 is better than ice cream.”

YouTubers picked up his video, creating edits and parodies, with Cena’s pronunciation of the Mandarin bīng qílín “ice cream” gaining particular notoriety, transcribed as “bing chilling”.

Later, the “bing chilling” script went viral on TikTok, with content creators imitating or discussing the pronunciation of the term. Some Mandarin speakers even rued the fact that the popularity of the video had affected their native pronunciation.

Cena had pronounced the Mandarin sound segments more like sounds that occur in English – the consonant of qí was pronounced like the English “ch” sound, instead of the Mandarin “ts” sound (using just the tip of the tongue, and making contact further forward on the roof of the mouth, compared with the English “ch”).