Shougong Geng: The Dadaist in the Village Hardware Shop

Luo Yonghao's voice-over pins Shougong Geng (Handmade Geng) in place: the world loves watching his handmade videos, and for that reason treats him as a purely comic creator. Almost everyone thinks he is deliberately making useless things. He sincerely believes he is creating useful things, not merely entertainment.

Luo says Geng sits, without meaning to, between useful and useless, serious and funny, folk craft and modern art. This is not a persona he designed. It is how he already is: a natural-born modern artist, never contaminated by modern-art theory. That is also why he stays popular, and why he is different from shallow imitators. With the tenth year almost here, Geng finally asked: "Can you name one thing I made that is truly useless?" This is episode 36 of Luo Yonghao's Crossroads, with the well-known folk inventor Shougong Geng. Unlike what a lot of people imagine, this is actually a serious interview.

Geng says, "Let me turn this on first," and the two of them sit down. He is glad to be on Teacher Luo's podcast, and he has brought a meeting gift: made before he came, no stainless steel this time, more primitive, simpler. Luo asks if it is something people used for hunting in ancient times.

Geng says no. The wood was picked up by the river or along the road—especially straight, especially plain. The stone is a cobblestone from the river too. It feels good in the hand, and it is not fully round: it has a flat face, so clutching it and rubbing is a good fidget. As for what the stick is for, he tells Luo to go home and figure it out himself.

Luo's mind goes to meteor hammers and hunting. Geng is thinking more of fidgeting, killing time, massage. At home he will lie there, thinking about things, letting the stone drop onto his chest again and again: "It feels like doing two things at once. Time doubles."

He also asks Luo how long it has been since he last touched wood this primitive, and says it brings you closer to nature. When you are bored you can invent a story for this stone: five thousand years ago it was on a mountain, a thousand years ago it was still there. You can also pretend to fish. The object has no clear name. It depends on how the user understands it.

Then he brings out a stand that took even longer to make, sets the wood upright on it, and says, "Now it suddenly looks like a thing." Luo looks from another angle and says zen, profound. Geng stresses that the cobblestone feels especially good to the touch.

Luo teases that they will talk about modern art later: it is not that theory comes first and then artists. A lot of artists grow first, and the people who do theory assign meaning afterward. He says many of Geng's works fit that pattern very well.

Wood is common, but if you look closely at the grain there is still something to feel. Luo says JD.com, Tmall, and Taobao have few things this primitive and rough; you see them more on the art-object side. "Accidentally art again." Geng hopes the gift can sit on Luo's cabinet.

The talk turns to Yang Village in Baoding. Geng was born and raised there. Walking a loop takes about half an hour. Before coming he asked a friend: the whole village is about 1,500 households. The family used to have six or seven mu of land. What he remembers most is snapping corn, digging sweet potatoes and peanuts.

Later they rented the land to the production team and went out to work. Farming did not make much economic sense: a day of outside work paid two or three hundred yuan, and the time you lost just to go back for harvest cost more than the crop was worth. The land is contracted to specialists now. Drones spray pesticide, and corn is harvested by machine across whole fields, more efficient than household by household.

Luo asks whether going out to work was because of that economic math, or because he hated farming. Geng says as a kid he did not hate it. There just were not that many people needed on the land anymore; it was already semi-mechanized. He failed to get into high school after junior high and stopped studying. There was no work nearby, so he went to Beijing. After you leave school, going out to work is a very normal thing in the village.

He was not a spectacularly bad student. He was average. In a class of seventy or eighty, only five or six, maybe ten, got into high school, and that already counted as a lot. The reasons were on both sides: he was not much of a student and did not like studying, and everyone had long felt that reading further did not mean much.

What classmates remember most is that he was always asleep in class. He was immature then. He thought reading those few books a year was a waste of time, and he wanted to go out and knock around, pick up more knowledge. He did not like the assigned work. He did read a lot of books outside class.

One that stuck was The Dye House—a story about doing business, later made into a TV series. He took no notes in textbooks and took notes in the outside books: be generous, be unexpected. He also read The Legend of Yue Fei and Reader. Not many kids in the village liked extracurricular books. Most just wanted to play.

The only time the school punished him was after lights-out, reading an outside book by candle in the dorm, a blanket blocking the light so the supervisor would not see. Thinking back now it was dangerous. The blanket could have caught fire. When they found him he was sent home to reflect. Luo jokes that back then he still did not know how to block light with stainless steel. Geng says stainless was not common in childhood. What they handled more was iron.

He went to work right after junior high, still underage. Nobody was policing child labor then. The first job was going to Beijing with relatives, adding a floor to a school, as a laborer tearing down parapet walls. They had not sorted out lodging that day. In summer he slept on a board in a big corridor. The mosquitoes were terrible.

His first impression of the site was lifeless: very hot in summer, few people, a handful of older men in hard hats hauling pipe and wood. You did not see anyone looking happy. Before he left, his father told him: do more work, talk less. The work was tearing down walls, tearing down stairs, swinging a sledgehammer.

He worked overtime with a jackhammer taking stairs apart, and at night he dreamed he was still on the job. In the dream a wall next to him needed tearing down, the mosquito net was in the way, and in a daze he ripped it open. He woke up covered in bites. Pay was by the day, about 30 yuan, not a lot, but the first time he earned money he was pretty happy.

He did it for two months. On paper a month was 900. With overtime every day, counted by shifts, it could reach around 2,000. Unloading a truck of wood counted as another shift. It was tiring, but he was young and recovered fast, and relative to the other workers it was not that hard. In junior high he was tall and strong.

Luo says he did blue-collar work when he was young too, hauling sacks at a station. He remembers a foreman like a prison-yard boss. On breaks people would sidle up and offer him a cigarette. Luo had a cousin who was a railway section chief. He did not ask anyone to put in a word. After a few days of being pushed around he hesitated over whether to report it, decided it would look bad, and let it go.

Geng says he was not bullied. A sixteen- or seventeen-year-old is more aggressive, and a foreman would not mess with that. Besides, it was older brothers from the village leading a bunch of relatives. You did the work that was there. He stopped after two months because the job ran out. That pattern—work when there is work, no security—lasted until he quit in 2017 to do social media.

For more than ten years there was no proper company, no contract. The income was enough to feed himself and give his parents a little. He could save 20,000 to 30,000 a year, average for the village. Everyone did construction, plumbing, fire protection, or labor.

Some reports said his welding was so good he made a certain amount an hour, enough to make other welders jealous. He denies it. He always followed ordinary wages. There was only laborer and skilled worker, and after a few years he made skilled. He never became the contractor his mother hoped for—that was the peak of the pyramid their circle could see. They never encountered a word like product manager.

Some men become contractors in a year or two. Some stay laborers their whole lives. A neighbor uncle had excellent craft. When his apprentice became a contractor he still asked the uncle to be crew chief; when the apprentice's apprentice became a contractor he asked him too. Geng thinks the most important things are a business head and nerve.

Ask him to calculate how many days and how much material a job needs, and he cannot figure it at all. He also cannot handle relationships, so he could never be a contractor. The crafts were not something he played at from childhood in order to go out and work. Before he was ten there was plenty to do in the village: swimming, climbing trees, marbles, kites. He also made slingshots and wooden water guns, but he liked messing around in the river more.

Luo asks about the stainless-steel childhood trio—pinwheel, rattle-drum, paper airplane—and why those three: because he liked them as a kid, or because he figured every Chinese child had played with them and there was a commercial angle. Geng says he played with them a lot as a child. They are the most common and also the strangest. They used to be paper or wood. Done in stainless they are very different: sturdy, they last, and you can collect them.

Twenty years later you can still see that airplane. It feels good. "An immortal childhood trio, and it doesn't even rust." Luo prefers the rattle-drum and the pinwheel: a stainless pinwheel still spins in the wind. The rattle-drum does not sound as good as a skin drum, but shaking it still makes a noise.

The two balls were wrapped in rubber, but not fully. When you shake it you get a rubber thud, then steel on steel. Geng admits the design was unfinished: he made it and handed it to his brother to sell. Iron hitting iron beat the drumheads out of round. His brother bought hemispherical rubber sleeves online and slipped them on, so the sound is different from one beat to the next. Later Geng found the soft cups used for acupuncture cupping. He still has not had time to put them on.

The little Taobao shop closed this year. With tens of millions of followers, small pieces should have buyers, but he is no good at selling. In a year there was not much. His brother would not deal with the half-finished problems, so he paused first. Luo suggests finding a partner with a business head, someone who will not eat up his energy. Geng finds dealing with people a hassle. He still prefers to live a little more as he likes.

The trio never sold a thousand sets in total, maybe a few hundred. He asked his brother whether a year made 50,000, or 20,000. About 20,000, his brother said. Last year it was 8,000 in total. That felt like too little, so he shut it. He stopped livestreaming too. Luo says each video gets millions, even tens of millions of views. A five-second ad at the end would sell a lot more. Geng says he will try later.

Luo asks if he is shy about making money. Geng admits a little. In his head a stainless-steel cleaver-comb is worth one or two hundred. The cleaver itself is twenty or thirty. Cut a few teeth and sell it for 200, and it does not sound like something you should sell. But cutting those teeth takes half a day, and in that time you could go work and earn the same. He is called Shougong Geng, not "Machine-tool Geng." Handmade is expensive, of course.

People who get it buy. People who do not get it ask, and then he feels guilty. Early on the nut slingshot sold for 45 yuan. The material was twenty M6 nuts welded together, then wrapped with cord. People said nuts cost two yuan. You are ripping us off. He would talk about kung fu dishes in restaurants—ingredients are not expensive, but they take six or eight hours—and some people heard it. Too many questions and you cannot answer them one by one.

On livestreams he once ran the numbers: materials a few yuan, an hour or two of welding, then grinding and wrapping the cord, seven or eight yuan for shipping. After hearing it the other person felt it was fair. Repeating the explanation is boring. Luo says he still needs a real hustler as a partner.

He got into welding because his father was a welder. In the village his father had a welding stall, and made manual hydraulic pumps for fire-protection pipe. A paternal aunt's husband went out to sell them. Then electric ones became popular and the business died. His father felt the returns were not great and did not want him to learn. He wanted him to do something else.

When he first learned, his hands and feet often blistered from weld spatter. In the videos he blocks it with a bare hand, and the comments all ask if he gets hurt. Properly you should wear gloves and a welding helmet. They were more rustic: just block it so the light does not hit your eyes, a few short welds to tack it, that is the most convenient.

Sparks look like they land on the hand, but they actually slide off. Wear ordinary gloves and the weld sparks stick and burn through, which makes it easier to get hurt. It depends which gloves. His father did not want him to weld, but he still learned from his father. He had not made anything else work. Around 2011 the village was building high-speed rail. At twenty-three or twenty-four he came home to weld molds, felt it was time to have a trade, and after all the circling it was still welding.

In his memory his father never taught him systematically. He shoved the stinger into his hand: "Go weld." A little guidance, then figure it out yourself. An apprentice made the same money as a laborer. He was not at master level yet. Technical content did not automatically turn into higher pay.

As an apprentice he burned his eyes every day. You have to see the molten iron and the flux. Under the glare, if your eyeballs do not contract in time when you focus, tears stream at night, and the next day you put on sunglasses and keep going. At night the surroundings are darker and the contrast is worse. Other people did not have it that bad. He says it was not that he was careless. He was too earnest, always staring hard. Later he learned to block and to close his eyes.

Luo asks: China's most successful welding artist, how does he rate as a proper tradesman? Geng puts himself below average. The beads are fairly flat, but he has never welded pipe that needs inspection for porosity. He also did spot welding in a metal-goods factory, welding handles onto pots. Too light and they broke off; too heavy and the inside wall burned black. You had to get it as strong as possible without any of that showing.

He did more than a year of blue-collar work in a factory in South Korea, less than half of it spot welding. He felt it barely counted as a craft. It was a semi-automatic machine, and you adjusted the heat. In the plant some masters welded jigs neatly and beautifully, and some welded them terribly rough. Now there is MIG and laser welding. The old stick electrodes asked more of your hands.

He still uses stick electrodes for the work, because they take little space and feel solid in the hand. MIG needs a gas hookup, and the gun is long and cumbersome. For short welds, stick is still less trouble. Those machines were designed for long, large-scale welding. They used MIG a lot on steel structures, because you did not have to change rods.

He and his father are a typical East Asian father and son: neither of them really talks to the other. After he learned, he followed his father as crew chief. Later he felt the village paid too little and went looking for work on his own. His father rarely went out. After the plant closed he put up a shed in the village, and only left when there was a job outside. That kind of work in the village was, in the end, getting scarcer.

Geng thinks his father is very capable. He can estimate materials and schedule accurately. Geng himself is not interested, so he can only be a skilled hand, not a foreman. As a child he wanted to be a painter. In elementary school the teacher asked each of them what they would do when they grew up. He could copy Sun Wukong so it looked just like him. There was no wild obsession. Someone asked, so he said it. Later there was no time to think about it.

There were not many electronics at home. The only thing he was curious enough to take apart was his parents' wedding quartz clock. He fiddled it to death, and often got beaten and scolded. Kids by the river made ice boats. Others sat and pushed with a stick. He insisted on swapping the rebar underneath for bearings, wanting to stand and glide like a skateboard, and ended up falling and getting two stitches. There is a gap between imagination and the real thing.

The lucky-cat snowball-fight mecha was like that too: the build was especially thrilling, the effect when you fired was average. Geng thinks the effect was all right. A person getting hit cannot beat you. If they sidestep 90 degrees you are slow to turn back, so they keep hitting you. You are only unhurt because you are hiding in the mecha. It lost on agility, reload speed, and aim. There was no ring of glass, so 360-degree vision was poor.

The scoop that held the snowball still had to be knocked by hand to drop into the slot. It was never made automatic—time was tight, and because the machine's damping was bad, in a real fight it would bounce itself out. Luo, thinking like a product manager, free-associates: heat the scoop a little, squeeze and release, and it drops. Geng never thought of heating. Too much trouble, and you would need electricity.

The real surprise was that two halves of snow stuck to the iron and would not form a ball. After a long study, painting the inside wall solved it, like how your tongue sticks to iron in winter. At first they tried plastic bags. Before he learned to weld he rarely touched stainless. The work was rough—putting up factory sheds. Later, doing stainless handrails, he found it was much better than iron: no paint to keep rust off, and once you polish it it is especially bright. "Just looking at it makes you happy." At the time he already felt it would make a good craft object.

Luo thought he later used stainless for everything. In fact the snowball fight, the big knives, those are steel plate. Stainless is expensive and harder; cutting and drilling are more difficult. Stainless is saved for small objects, so they look good and last a long time. The big knives are ordinary steel plate. He likes steel and iron because he knows them, they form well, they are sturdy, and they look hardcore—not because he was consciously maintaining a style.

Some people say wood is cheaper and less trouble. He says it is not sturdy enough. The videos look like horseplay, but for safety the sturdier the better. Some people say once you have shot it you just leave it there, a few tack welds will do. He welds it even more solid than other people would—new things have a lot of problems you do not expect. Move it a little and the whole machine will not turn. Large ones have to be even sturdier.

Luo asks whether he was a kid with a lot of odd ideas from the start. Luo himself was often told by teachers that he liked arguing crooked points. Geng says he was pretty average, pretty obedient. He never heard comments like that. So where did the wild ideas come from later? The correspondence is fairly thin.

After he got famous, a lot of internet celebrities imitated him. Nobody surpassed him. Luo thinks at the root, what other people come up with is not as fun as his. Ideas have to do with mood. Sometimes there are many. Sometimes they are a little off, so he holds off. Being "number one" in the field also brings pressure. He wants to outdo himself, and if something is a little short the drive is gone. Creative pressure is a good thing. It can make the work better and better.

Besides not wanting him to be a welder, his father had no other expectations. They rarely talked. His grandfather, when young, had a mental shock, and was extremely free: he would not farm the family land, liked repairing roads, planting trees by the river. In that era everyone farmed. This important laborer going off to do "improper" good deeds got mockery in the village, and his father became more inward, even less talkative.

As a child he liked Tang Seng in Journey to the West and Guo Jing in The Legend of the Condor Heroes, feeling they were upright and worth learning from. After twenty he liked Stephen Chow and Michael Jackson. The first time he saw Jackson dance he was stunned. He felt Jackson had an androgynous beauty, and in interviews was very gentle. The long hair is not Jackson's tight curls. It was Nie Feng and Chen Haonan: he thought long hair looked good.

He only ties it up because summer is hot. After a haircut he feels especially ugly and does not want to cut it. Nobody his age in the village wears long hair. He only really started keeping it after he began social media. Before that, once it reached a certain length his parents nagged and he had to cut it. Luo thinks he is quite artistic at the core. Earlier comments rarely talked about him from the angle of artistic taste, and he himself may not have studied those "pretentious" art theories.

Luo asks whether the audience is more city people or village people. Geng knows city people are more. He has seen the platform data. Guangdong and the south more generally have more. Luo says Kuaishou has a lot of rural internet celebrities with over ten million followers, and the audience is basically countryside and county towns. Geng has never left the countryside, but his audience is city people. He himself rarely thinks about this. He guesses country people are used to iron and noise, and city people have not seen it.

Luo has another reading: some original musicians sing about little people at the bottom, and the people who truly love listening are the more intellectual types in the city. Geng can please both high and low, but he still leans toward urban taste, so at the core he is very artistic. He himself rarely reads novels. In film he loves The Shawshank Redemption and Green Book, and science fiction too. Village playmates will ask about Shawshank, "What's there to watch in this?"

This is the same line as not liking textbooks early on, yet reading a lot of books outside class. The commercial result: the audience for product placement is all city people, high commercial value, and he never worked it on purpose. Luo again says find a hustler of a partner. Geng is not that passionate about making money. Enough to spend is fine, and he spends fairly little.

史里芬 went to hang out with him. Forty degrees in the heat, the car A/C was broken and he would not fix it, and he had the kids with him. He says he will only deal with it when the heat is physiologically unbearable. He used to put up steel structures in the sun at over forty degrees. Compared with that, now is much better. The studio is huge and still has no air conditioning. A small unit would not matter; a big one is not worth it. He sees it as waste.

After visiting Pan Shiyi's woodworking studio, a reporter asked why he did not make one that comfortable—over a million yuan to build, and he could afford it now. He said hoping is hoping, and what he has now is also very good. Spend 2,000 on a saw and he cannot accept it in his heart. A hundred-yuan one is better. Those are luxury goods. Quality and price are out of proportion. He likes a bit more value for money.

On livestreams he kept putting on Wutiaoren. Luo likes them too, and says Wutiaoren are a lot like him: the rusticity is surface, the inside is very much art. "Ah Zhen Falls in Love with Ah Qiang" hit Geng immediately. He also often listens to Xu Wei and Pu Shu. Luo says the most impressive thing is being an artist and not thinking you are one.

In 2013 he wrote on Weibo that at thirty it felt like he had not accomplished anything. After he got famous he rarely wrote, afraid people nearby would find it precious, and also like showing off. Writing when you have not succeeded is precious too. Like saying as a kid, "My fate is mine, not heaven's"—you are serious, other people see it as childish. With more fans, pouring out feelings is also easy to over-read.

From 2013 to 2017 he was still picking up odd jobs. In 2013 he was at an underfloor-heating company in Beijing, installing heat in apartment complexes, and had a bit more time. After going home the work was more fragmented. He had no time, and did not feel that pouring it out was useful. In 2017 he went full-time on social media. He says it was coincidence: in 2016 a friend showed him crafts assembled from small parts online, priced not low. He thought he could imitate that, and then he would not have to go out to work anymore.

In 2017 his grandfather fell ill. Geng spent more than a month in the hospital caring for him, and missed the fixed window at the start of the year when crews go out. He told his father he wanted to do this. The first thing he wanted to make was stainless-steel slippers. What other people made were mostly delicate little ornaments. Slippers, the moment you hear them, sound ridiculous. He had bought wooden clogs. He felt stainless slippers would be about the same as clogs, only sturdier and longer-wearing.

It was not about making something niche. It was about making something that did not exist. Things that already existed other people had already improved about as far as they would go. He could not compete. At the time he was extremely earnest. In the reviews of a Taobao clog shop he tallied a hundred people's sizes, noting how many 36, 38, 40, and spent two days on it.

Hand cutting was irregular. TIG welding was too forceful. The weld warped, it was black and grimy, grinding was a pain, and they never successfully went up for sale. You cannot find them anywhere online. He still has not given up. He may yet have to make them. Next he made a stainless wallet, and spent more than a month on the hinge: holding one bill and holding ten are completely different. It looks simple. Making it is a lot of work.

He enjoys the process of making a product, and is very happy when it is done. Not selling is another matter. At the time he did not feel pain either. Being able to eat was enough. The wallet did not work, so he made a slingshot. The slingshot did not work either. He pushed expectations to the bottom: 300,000 people watched, maybe one person would buy—in the event almost nobody asked.

The first video to pass a few hundred thousand views, he remembers, was the nut slingshot. Still nobody bought. It was selling for a little over 100 then. The platform also would not let you sell things. Earliest on Kuaishou he posted a Green Dragon Crescent Blade, and it was throttled as a controlled weapon. He went to Huoshan to post the slingshot, traffic was all right, then back to Kuaishou. The pipe-wrench grasshopper was the first short video that really took off, then the slingshot.

Suddenly one video detonated, and he was very excited. The wallet also had 300,000-plus views, thousands of comments, refresh every minute, reading them one by one. He did not tell the family. His brother did not know either, and he certainly did not tell his parents. Only the friend who first showed him the metal ornaments—he would report traffic and comments to that person. At the time he was not thinking about making money. He was simply happy: people like the things you make. That was enough.

When did he realize he should not be making things to sell, but making things for people to be entertained by? There was no fixed moment. The clearer one was the watermelon-chopping video, about a million views. Like a tennis racket, one chop, six pieces, three of them on the ground, very messy, and people found it interesting. He had also made a stainless comb and a cleaver.

The spinning umbrella also gained followers fast: he was afraid rain would run onto his shoulders, so he made an umbrella that would spin. Luo says, doesn't that wreck other people? At the time Geng was not thinking about other people. He only felt his own shoulders would not get wet. Comments said you could break other people's legs. Once more people were watching, he hurried to make more: the childhood trio, a treadmill, more and more fun.

The turning point felt very blurry to him. 2017 was not full-time the whole year. In the middle he still helped relatives heat-weld roof waterproofing. Only 2018 was full-time. There was no long stretch of misery. After a few months traffic started coming. The pressure mainly came from his mother, who felt he was not doing a proper job, that it was embarrassing. His wife is very laid-back: she does not nag and is not that curious.

In the first half-year he still went to Beijing for a month of casual labor. When he had 20,000 followers a friend called him to Beijing to work again. He hesitated. The friend said forget it, stay home and work on this first. At the time few people were doing social media. In all of Baoding there were not many with 20,000 followers. The nagging stopped at first in 2018, when followers were up and people nearby told his parents their son was impressive—he was not making money, but other people with that many followers were already rich.

He still admires his father now: he said he was done working, he was going to make stainless-steel slippers, and his father did not interfere. A stricter father would certainly have said no. His mother managed more, which is completely normal for that older generation. Luo says his own mother is like that too. Anything that looks a bit off, she manages especially hard.

2017 made no money. At the end of 2018 Joy City had an event. He brought cleaver-combs and slingshots, intending them as an exhibition, at most one of each. He did not expect people to want to buy. In that environment the shame around prices dropped a lot: selling a comb for 150 or 200 used to make him feel guilty. At Joy City an ice cream was 80. He felt he still had value for money.

Exhibition sales were about 20,000-plus, already a lot for him. He came back and started making to order with his brother. Brand deals also started at the end of 2018. After Joy City he was on Tencent headlines, The Washington Post came to interview, then brand deals followed. The first deal was not tacking an ad into a video. It was making an object to the other side's brief, which paid a lot more than pure handmade work.

From feeling he was an internet celebrity to the celebrity identity actually making money was only a little over a year, 2017 to the end of 2018, smooth overall. Luo used to think he had ground through a year or two with nothing happening. The trending-search headline was "How can there be someone this absurd hahaha." He did not find it absurd then, and he still does not. He only finds it fun.

Luo says there are not many fun people, so it gets read all the way to absurd. Absurd here is a compliment. The first time he trended he was not panicked either. He has always been in the village, and outside events do not make him jump much. When he goes to events he only wants to hurry back and make videos: this many people are watching, you cannot let them watch for nothing, and the hardcore fans nag for updates every day.

The village treats him very calmly. The difference before and after is small. People his age at most greet him warmly the first time and then it is over. His social circle is basically one alley. The only thing that truly thrilled him was the first video to hit a million. The first business payment far beyond what he imagined did not keep him up either—a transfer does not hit like cash. A big sack of cash might have made him happy.

Before The Washington Post came, only Tencent News had approached him once in China. The Post brought a translator from Beijing and interviewed him for half a day. Reuters he turned down the first time: too busy, and the name "Reuters" sounded to him like "curbside news," not as grand as The Washington Post. Old cadres in the county went slack-jawed when they heard he had refused Reuters, and told him to hurry and make it right. He thought about it, did not reach out, the other side came again, and he accepted the second time.

CNN was introduced by 史里芬: "This is my friend. I wanted him to interview me and he wouldn't even interview me." Early on there was more foreign press, because that Post piece was very hot on the open web, with decent traffic in several countries. Domestic media then came in batches. He accepted most of them, not wanting to hold up the work too much. After he was on CCTV, his mother was very pleased: in the countryside, making CCTV is a different grade from Hebei TV.

Luo says a large part of the happiness comes from somehow making your parents realize this thing is actually impressive. Kids from small places are all like this: parents have no idea what you are doing, until an authority they already trust also recognizes it. Geng feels even now they do not especially understand. They just grant approval. The older generation's standard of success is contractor, factory director. The internet always feels full of water—not water, they just cannot understand it.

Luo talks about himself: when the company had over a thousand people he took his mom around the whole building at night. She marveled the whole way. Back at the hotel she sighed again, "If only you had gotten into college." More than ninety percent of the company were college graduates. She still regretted that he had never made up the diploma. You cannot argue with the older generation. The stainless wallet Geng gave his mom was insulted at length and thrown in a drawer: who uses this stainless steel.

After 2018 he registered a company, because platform staff said once you get big you will need it, for invoicing. He had not thought of hiring anyone. He found a bookkeeping agent and had his brother go handle it. The company is just the studio: younger brother, father, playmates, a cousin, friends from the alley, none of them especially professional.

He has thought about getting bigger, even fantasized about a creative group of a few thousand, image designers. It stayed at thinking. He never seriously looked. He does not like dealing with strangers, and never thought of opening a company in Beijing. He has no especially strong desire for money or career. At the time things were still going fairly well, so he just went on like that.

Luo says there is chance in this: if among the childhood buddies there had been one with a business head, it might have been different. In northern villages the odds of that kind of person are low. In Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong villages you can at least scrape together a crew. MCNs approached him, saying they would cover creative, business, shooting, promotion, the lot. He did not sign.

On the creative side, fans and friends have suggested plenty, none as fitting as what he thinks of himself, and they have never done welding. On the business side, taking a few deals himself is enough to live on, and he can still be fairly casual. In 2021 and 2022 he thought about hiring a professional photographer. The person said yes, then had something come up and did not come. Geng felt his own shooting was all right anyway. Luo says his objects and his shooting style match pretty well. They do not need to be as polished as a film.

After he got famous there were all kinds of invitations to events, even going onstage to speak. He went to Sanlian Lifeweek thinking he would say a few sentences, and it turned out he had to speak for twenty minutes. He grimaced his way up, did not fill the time, and the host came on to do Q&A. The lights were dark, he could not see the audience clearly. People below clapped first, so the nerves were not that high. In school, when the whole class sang, he was one of the three who did not sing.

He treats a speech as work that has to be finished, and that way he can set aside the introversion in his personality. Luo visited the studio. Summer was especially hot. The toilet was a pit latrine, big flies coming and going. He had not experienced that in twenty or thirty years. At home they have a flush toilet. The studio is rented. He has always been able to get used to it.

After making money he bought his mom a big gold bracelet. When he was doing physical labor, that would have been a strain. His father and his wife did not want anything. Luo still finds not installing air conditioning pretty spare. Geng says he used to put up steel structures in the sun at over forty degrees. Compared with that, now you just tough it out and it passes. As a kid money was tight. There was nothing he "liked but could not afford, and would buy once he earned money." The toy guns and slingshots he liked were all cheap.

The computer he edits on was a gift from a brand, with a 3090, already a high spec. Earliest he shot on a Xiaomi phone. The first time he bought a phone over 2,000 yuan himself, that was the biggest outlay at the time. Later a fan who added him during a livestream saw the footage was blurry and sent an iPhone X. He is still very grateful. Only after making money did he buy shooting gear himself.

He later stopped livestreaming, feeling his personality did not fit. At first it was to add income. Things would not sell, gifts could still bring a little; if people sent too much he felt it was not right. The first time Luo livestreamed, someone chain-sent Carnivals. He was terrified, went off and asked if it was money laundering, and only then learned it was a platform event, other people piggybacking on the traffic.

Early on Geng did not even know what a Piercing Arrow was. Three 288s in a row and he panicked. PK was even more embarrassing, obviously asking other people to spend money. Before brand deals, livestreaming was relatively easy money. In 2017 tips were sometimes a few dozen a day, later around a hundred, in 2018 generally three to five hundred, the highest once a few thousand when two friends dug in against each other.

Four or five hundred in a night, five days a week at most, and it still had to be split with his brother. Averaged out it was worse than the old day labor. People said big brothers are only happy when they send gifts. He can follow the logic. When they actually send, he is still embarrassed. He himself rarely pays for virtual goods. Only recently did he buy video and music memberships. Classmates bought Fantasy Westward Journey point cards. He really did not get it.

He once said "you cannot earn money you cannot handle," which got taken as meaning he made too much. His own explanation is that his ability is not there: traffic is still astonishing, and if he were willing to take more brand deals income could multiply several times, but he cannot think of ideas that fit the deals. Brands come with ideas, and he usually looks down on them. He cannot think of one he is happy with either, so he does not do it.

He takes responsibility for the work very seriously. If both sides are happy with the idea, the more brand deals the better. There just are not many like that. These past two years he has posted less. Luo thought he had gotten slack. In fact at home he has been researching with his older brother and the others the whole time. If what he thinks of and what he can present are not good enough, he does not post. He has passed the stage of urgently needing to prove himself: he has already done so many videos over 100 million views. You cannot get a single one watched by a billion people. Slack is part of it too.

On technique, the hardest things, he says, are all very simple. Anyone who can weld could make them from the videos. If he has to name one, it is the cigarette-lighter case in the shape of a rocket: knocking a curve out of a whole stainless sheet, then fitting several pieces together with no gap. He had never done that. He hammered for a long time. Comments said he truly does not spare himself, that he had trained a qilin arm. He made two.

The most expensive was the giant treadmill. Three TVs were costly, some nearly 10,000 each. Take the TVs out and the steel-plate materials basically stay under 20,000. The expense is labor and time. The car conversion was paid for by the brand, and it was a temporary teardown that could still be restored. The big knife that ran through a car used a wrecked old car. Comments said Brother Geng was spending blood money. In fact cost control was very good.

Old tricycles come in at three or four hundred. Wreck one and you can still sell it for 200, maybe ask for a bit of damage money on top. In the documentary he often goes to the scrapyard, which he calls a treasure house: taking very low-value secondhand things and turning them into what he wants, a real sense of achievement. Sometimes he goes with a need, like wanting a gas canister to make a sofa. Sometimes he just wanders. A radio, an old bicycle, if they look handsome he buys them. Steel plate he buys there too. Small pieces are cheaper.

Luo says "making a sofa needs a gas canister" sounds insane. When he is not taking brand deals, ideas get discussed with his older and younger brothers. In the end he contributes more, and they refine. Purely in time he makes more than he thinks up. Some ideas he cannot get right in two years. Some he thinks through in a day. For a brand deal he will specially think for three to five days, up to a month. If nothing comes, he drops it.

Making time is relatively controllable. Thinking of ideas is not. Sometimes he thinks of something and then cannot make it. For now there is nothing he absolutely cannot make. The presented effect may be worse than imagined. The longest span has been three to five years. The public does not understand: since you do not sell, do not mass-produce, why so earnest? When his younger brother was interviewed he said a few millimeters off does not matter.

Geng says making a video is also making a product. Only when the product is good is the video good. You cannot split them. It is also so shooting goes smoothly. If the thing suddenly breaks and you have to shoot again, that day's spirit and mood are gone. He hopes for one take. In practice a single take rarely works. After shooting for a long time the first one may still be the best. If the talking is not smooth he will shoot extra too.

Luo picks a nit: in the collab opening a huge run of Da Wusu beers, one bottle in the front rows was unopened. Did post not catch it? Geng thought they were all open. They bought several hundred bottles, opened them two or three times, and when it was obvious a few were unopened they swapped the whole batch. They specially bought a tool for recapping bottles, so after opening you can snap the cap and store them long-term.

The alpaca grill roasting sausages: comments said it only roasted one side, would not cook through. They tried the pipe and sausage diameter many times, and specially bought sizes online that were just right, so it could turn and roast all four sides without burning. The newspaper-tearing machine: some people said you should use clips to hold it, it would tear more neatly. They tried. Once it was fixed it would tear halfway and then not go further.

At first they used the kind of serration on baking paper. Too fixed and it jammed. Only after removing the fixture could it tear along into strips, even if they were diagonal. Some things you do not know until you test. No cheating on camera: if there is not enough time or not enough parts, it can be less than perfect, but the principle has to work in reality.

The fun is in actually being able to do it, then going to shoot. It is not shooting something fake and listening to people cheer. After a few months without an update he made trending searches. He posted that he had in fact been building the whole time. Fans are fairly forgiving. Luo says going a few months without posting and being forgotten is the norm. Having people still think of you is pretty warm. On the bookshelf sit A Complete Collection of Xiehouyu and doggerel. Early on he wanted to learn the mouth of a Northeastern standup comic. Memorizing stiffly only made it more awkward. He never got good at it.

The show solicited questions in the fan group. Someone asked: early ideas came from the repression and lostness of youth. Now the environment is better, the pressure smaller—will inspiration fade? Geng says a little, but it is not disappearing. The form of the inspiration has changed. The creative heat is still there. He also gets frustrated, especially when he thinks of something he cannot make.

The demands are getting more complex. His younger and older brothers sometimes cannot follow. They may need drawings now. They still work as traditional craftsmen. It is not that they hate computer aids. They do not know how. To make a hammer, find a pipe, a few hits, done. 3D printing still means entering numbers, learning to model, then taking it into the real world and making it again to scale. Simple things are faster done by hand. Complex ones would be a bit better with drawings first.

Luo suggests: plenty of fans know modeling, pay them; you also do not have to buy metal-powder printers yourself. Geng is stuck on the fatigue of talking to outsiders. He bought a 3D printer. Printing is pretty fun. A completely cost-no-object ultimate wild idea, he says he does not have for now. He is fairly practical. Directions that waste a huge amount of money he does not even start thinking down. At the dream level he has thought about mecha, nuclear reactors, very unrealistic.

Robots now can be bought for tens of thousands, a hundred thousand or so. He has not bought one to take apart: what he knows is a few motors. Chips and algorithms, even if you take them apart, he would not understand. Looking for people to collaborate or learn from for the sake of high tech—he has, rarely. If he cannot do it or does not know who to find, he gives up. Luo says the follower count is so huge that posting would easily find people willing to help, and the communication pressure would be smallest. Geng prefers to think inside what he can control. High tech he cannot figure out, he would not think of in the first place.

Some old fans noticed that a lot of his work is about self-defense and staying alive, fighting aliens, zombie-fighting mecha, doomsday bunkers, even a shoulder bag that has to double as Thor's hammer. Conscious, or did it form naturally? He says it formed naturally. Men naturally like weapons and things that protect you. Rich people abroad dig doomsday bunkers a dozen stories down. He finds that impressive, not absurd. Who knows which day you will need it.

When Luo was young he found those people ridiculous. Later, watching the international situation, he felt that if there really were a nuclear war, the ones buying the human species more time would still be them. Geng says he does not have any special sense of insecurity about the future. He just cannot help wanting to make them. There are not that many directions for ironwork anyway. Repeating is normal.

Luo asks if there have been safety accidents. The upside-down hair-washing looks scary. What if the long hair wrapped into the laundry-tub-like agitator. Geng says he rarely has accidents. Once, making stainless horns for a sheep, they had to pack sand inside and then heat it to bend a little. The sand exploded into his older brother's eye. They went to the hospital. He did not lose his sight. Geng says he leaves a lot of room in the safety margin.

At first he did not realize the hair-washer was dangerous. He thought you just went in, held your breath, and spun. Real trials were very different. They shot for more than a day, mostly adapting. First hang upside down. The moment water covered his nose he panicked. People have a natural fear of water. You cannot hold an inversion long. From the nose to the mouth, the fear deepens, then you adapt.

Once it spun, water drove into his nose and mouth. He had his brother stand by with a big hammer. If something was wrong, smash it. The tub is acrylic, not like glass that shatters at a tap, but having someone standing there made him feel solid. In the end they did not smash it, and he did not choke. Luo only learned to swim in his twenties. The first time he sank his body into a pool he was instantly afraid too.

Geng often bathed in the river as a kid, but burying himself upside down in water was a first. Hair wrapping he had not considered. The interval between forward and reverse was short, and he was somehow confident there would be no problem. Only spinning one way the whole time might yank it out. He felt the water went outward, centrifugal force pinning the hair to the tub wall, not feeding it into the motor gap.

Once he was under, refraction ballooned his whole face into a pig's head. He had not thought of that in advance. The effect was too good. They had to shoot it. Luo says he laughed until his stomach hurt, like something that had gone bad in a lab jar. The tooth was not knocked out shooting a video. It was smashed at work.

He recently got dental work, and chose titanium-alloy crowns, thinking they were cool. The doctor gave him a buffer period. If he changed his mind they could still come off. He put them on without first getting orthodontics. Luo says a rock kid turned into a hip-hop kid. The doctor said they do not look good, but they are sturdy. Only after wearing them did he find the mouthfeel bad: the tongue feels like it is licking iron. Iced drinks make it more obvious. Hot is a bit better. Only three or four days in.

Hip-hop metal teeth are often a layer stuck on the outside. His were the teeth ground down, a whole crown, steel on the inside wall too, so the tongue tip often hits it. He also thought about using a laser to make the teeth light up, a laugh firing a laser. You cannot make a battery that small, and putting a battery in the mouth has leak and health problems. Luo tells him not to force it. You could use fluorescent material that glows under a special light. Do not think about putting a battery in your mouth.

Older people had gold teeth put in too. The cold is a metal problem. Upper teeth hitting lower teeth is just biting iron. The good news is they can be swapped. See if he can adapt in a month. Luo says he has the most metal-tolerant constitution in China. Even the sofa is metal canisters. In the work, small injuries keep happening, no major ones, a bit more than when he was doing day labor: nicks from iron burrs, better in a few days, no real scars left.

He bought a 3D printer. He did not buy a laser cutter. He does not know how, and hand-cutting with sparks flying looks better on video. In real life he prefers laser cutting. Learning it is less convenient than cutting by hand. After he got famous, village kids come to visit. Middle-schoolers bring classmates and call him uncle. Two or three groups have come, mostly for the novelty. Out on an e-bike, two junior-high students hugging watermelons stopped him for a photo, and insisted on giving him the melon.

Luo's strongest impression of the studio is still the lack of air conditioning. He asks what Geng even spends the money on. Geng says he had not thought about it until he was asked. He takes it as normal that a studio should not have A/C. Media have mentioned the eldest son's grievance at home: fighting with his younger brother, mom always siding with the younger one, telling him to yield. Luo says that is, to some degree, also biological instinct.

The 2017 plan was to make little metal gadgets and sell them on e-commerce. Walk a bit and he became an entertainment blogger. It was not planned. It was a lucky accident. He caught the short-video era. In a still-image-and-text era, it would not have spread this well. His father told him: with your personality, without short video and the internet era you would never have succeeded.

He has thought about it himself. If he had missed it he might still be doing day labor, or raising livestock, or doing something else. Successful guests, some feel they would have made it on another track, some feel chance looms large. Geng feels chance looms fairly large, that he was fairly lucky. For other people luck might be bigger. For himself it is luck and effort fifty-fifty. He did work hard.

When he quit in 2017 he had some confidence in his chest. It was confidence that selling little gadgets could make him rich. In fact it could not. Even now he is not very confident. He only feels it is worth trying: it is not illegal, and he is not lying down doing nothing. Stainless can be stored a long time. Labor costs will rise. What will not sell now might sell for more later. It is not a fast-depreciating tech product like a pager. Leave it and it will not rust. The loss is mainly his own labor.

As for today's results, he says he is very satisfied. Doing anything else would not have this kind of achievement. Luo asks: if you could go back to little Geng on the construction site, what would you send, what would you say? Geng rarely thinks about this kind of unrealistic question, afraid of affecting the timeline. Setting that aside, what he most wants to send is money. Back then there really was not enough to spend. Besides money, he wants to send the flag-waving cheer robot he made, a smaller one, for morale.

Luo especially likes this answer: after you grow up and make money, the thing that hurts most is not being able to send that poor kid who used to hesitate over a movie or a meal a sum that mattered then and later does not. Desire to spend is getting smaller and smaller. People online say you can only keep a fortune if you get rich after forty. But later on spending is no fun either, so what are you keeping it for. Only the young are in a hurry.

What he hates most is a boss telling a young person who is doing well, "You're so young, what's the rush"—once you are older there is nothing in particular to spend on. The flag-waving cheer robot was converted from an oil drum. The head is a loudspeaker, a bit taller than life size, waving a flag and shouting "come on" at the same time. Traffic was average. When he sold it, it hit number one on Douyin's trending search. A gas-station owner bought it to cheer people on.

Among peers he likes 何同学. The movable-type printing episode stunned him, shot so well. They have WeChat, have met at events, very sunny. Luo keeps asking 何同学 why he does not take things that cool and actually produce them. 何同学 says the fun of making content is greater than making products. Geng hopes he will later split off a group of people to do that.

Tim has made things too, just not as high a share. With other creators he often only remembers the idea, not the person. Recently he saw a doomsday chain-axe, very cool. Odd inventions suggested by netizens, some have been made. The piano grill was someone else's idea. The moment you hear it you want it. It is one of the few he likes most.

The piano grill has wheels and can roll, playing and roasting at the same time. Comments said elegance never goes out of style. Once it started, smoke blew into his face, and elegance collapsed into slapstick. Execution is repetitive and tedious, not especially hard. Because they were shooting a video he did the rods one by one himself. If they were not recording he would have let his older brother help. The pineapple wooden dummy was suggested by an offline friend, the kind of post Ip Man uses. The more he thought about it the more interesting it got: practice martial arts and peel the pineapple at the same time.

Some netizens suggested a national touring exhibition. More important, Baoding tourism should take this big IP and make a theme park: land is not expensive, two hours from Beijing by car. Geng has never talked with tourism officials, and has not thought about it. Luo feels tourism bureaus nationwide are all competing to be the most extra. The objects are already there. Oil them, restore them. The dangerous ones, hire people to demonstrate, do not let visitors use them themselves.

Geng worries about rust, about wear from running on electricity, and that they look good in videos and less good in person. Luo went to the studio and touched those iron living rooms. They are more stunning than the videos—CG and AI can generate anything. Physical objects are what is magical. If tourism takes them and uses them, he also would not have to smile and greet visitors every day.

Fan nicknames: mudslide of the invention world, Minister of Justice, Baoding Edison, Baoding Fan Siu-wong, Welding Martial Emperor. Young people already do not know Fan Siu-wong much. He himself likes Welding Martial Emperor best. He feels these nicknames are all very talented. The fan base is large, and the ideas added together are terrifying. When he was called Baoding Fan Siu-wong he knew Fan Siu-wong was a martial-arts star. He used to look more like him. Now he has put on weight.

Luo meeting him in person does not think he looks old. Only going back to the earliest videos is it obvious he was a good deal younger. At work he used to deal with people ten or twenty years older. After social media, suddenly everyone calling him big brother is younger. He has not quite adapted. Crueler still, some people call him Uncle Geng. People who watched his videos in elementary and junior high already feel that was many years ago. Someone said, "I grew up watching your videos."

Luo says he has just caught up to kids calling him grandpa. He is not ready inside. He still feels very young. A netizen asked: hundreds of years after you die, stainless steel dug out of the ground, which piece would you hope it is? He has thought about the bath-scrubbing sword. With no video, only the object, later people would be baffled. They might take it for a weapon. Luo suggests laser-etching a small caption explaining the use, as a courtesy to archaeologists. Geng thinks wild guessing is more fun.

The boxing gloves would be easier to preserve intact. They might be understood as training gear for ancient warriors, or weapons for the battlefield. Luo says he may well, against his will, become the founding master of some art movement: it is not that theory comes first and then the work. Someone makes it by instinct, and the people who do theory slap an -ism on it.

Preparing for the interview he talked with GPT, and one line stuck: it is as if a Dadaist artist suddenly appeared in a village hardware shop. Geng does not know Dadaism. Luo explains: opposing reason and traditional aesthetics, using absurd, strange things to overturn them. That line even had quotation marks. He thought it was some critic. He asked, and it was GPT's own summary.

If hundreds of years later a famous school took him as its spiritual ancestor, Geng says first he would be glad: the ideas remaining in some form, later people liking this spirit. Lasting that long would be even better. If they do not last, that would be as it should be too. GPT also said he is a folk artist who never received contemporary-art training and does not need contemporary art's endorsement. Geng asks back: if there is a set of theory, and following it you can become one, is that still called art?

Luo says founding a school is what is impressive. Pure imitation does not count as an artist. Being influenced and then pushing out something new also counts, just not as the founder. Learning 60% from someone else, with 40% your own ideas, is actually fine. Last question: do you think the things you make are useful or useless? Geng says when he makes videos he also wants to make very useful things, with interesting ones mixed in. Mainly he still wants to make useful ones. A lot of people think they are useless. He cannot refute that. Inside he still feels they are very useful. Before making them he was making them as useful.

Fans often joke: Brother Geng, if you dare invent something useful I will unfollow. He takes it as good-natured teasing. By his own understanding, every piece is useful. There is a gap with what the public understands. Luo says this is exactly the most interesting part: imitators play crazy, purely for laughs. He knows the difference. He earnestly thinks they are useful. Among imitators there are also very fun ones. From another angle that is a kind of performance art too. That "purely useless" lane is packed with people.

Geng asks Luo: speaking very objectively, can you name one thing I made that is useless? The fun is that if you say it is useful, it really is not much use; if you say it is useless, it also seems useful. It keeps walking the boundary. Luo splits useful into three layers. First, pure entertainment: an industrial product that sells a few hundred thousand or a million units already counts as a hit. Each of his videos entertains millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of people, and for free. Super useful.

Second, the functional side of entertainment: the lucky-cat mecha snowball fight, there is definitely a use, but it still lands on fun. Even if it were truly useful, you could not mass-produce it cheaply, and if you bought one you would have nowhere to put it, so people say it is useless. Third, serious high practicality, serving as a tool that meets a function: the vast majority are zero. The only one in Luo's memory is helping Grandma's wheelchair up a ramp. If you do not separate the concepts, you talk past each other.

Geng himself counts a few more as seriously useful. Heated toilet paper: at first designed as wet wipes, after heating the feel and hygiene are better. He talked mass production with a neighbor older brother. They thought he was joking. His drive was doused. Inside he still feels it could be mass-produced. The stainless tray that catches watermelon juice, Huang Bo used it, is a real need. Stainless is too heavy, equal to eating half a watermelon plus the weight of another watermelon. Switch to injection molding and it could be a household product.

Luo agrees this is a very good insight. It is just that he still lacks a hustler of a partner to go license it. After shooting so much slapstick, the few serious pieces get drowned. Nobody thinks he is serious. Like a comedy star wanting to make a straight drama. The audience laughs the moment they see him. He is not especially troubled. He just wants to seriously refute "useless."

Making truly useless things is also very happy, and it can make this many people glad. Immeasurable merit. His mother said, "It's not that what you make is not useful, it's that it is truly useless." He does not mind much. He will beautify it himself. If he feels it is useful, that is enough. If some fan fully understood and agreed that every piece is useful, he would be even happier. Now thinking of things is especially complicated, and very contradictory. He cannot even tell whether he hates this tangle. Luo says let the people who study theory have the headache. He should happily make things.

By custom he is asked to recommend three guests. Geng does not know many bloggers: 史里芬, who Luo says he knows well; 天才小熊猫, a coincidence, 史里芬 recommended him a couple of days ago too; and 发条张, who does in-depth film commentary, account 电影最 TOP, very good with language, and who has complained that Luo talks five or six hours at a stretch. The two take a photo, and the interview ends.