About

Get Ready to Learn Chinese, Buddy is a fake Bleacher Report infographic of the NBA commissioner Adam Silver captioned with a fake quote of him saying, "Get ready to learn Chinese buddy" to the NBA player Kyrie Irving soon after his antisemitic controversy. First posted in November 2022, the meme format gained virality online as a joke threat to sports players who have been performing poorly or failed in other ways. The macro implies that due to their performance, a player doesn't belong in a top-tier competition and should instead be playing in a lower-tier league, such as China's CBA. Many of the memes also referenced the Chinese team the Shanghai Sharks, imagined to be the prime landing spot for such players.

Origin

On November 8th, 2022, following Kyrie Irving's antisemitic controversy, the Twitter^[1] account @realnbaquotz posted a fake quote falsely attributed to the NBA commissioner Adam Silver, tweeting an image of him, captioned, "Get ready to learn Chinese buddy" (image and tweet shown below, left and right). The tweet gained over 170 retweets and 2,000 likes in four months.

Spread

Starting in November 2022, the macro saw spread as a reaction image on Twitter, with users replying with it to news of basketball players and players in other sports performing poorly. For example, on November 8th, 2022, the Twitter^[2] account @c--ksources used the image to reply to a tweet sharing that season's performance of basketball player Ben Simmons, writing, "The Nets to Ben Simmons." The tweet gained over 30 retweets and 1,400 likes in four months (shown below, left). On December 21st, the basketball news account @LakeShowYo captioned the macro, "Kendrick Nunn," following a poor performance by the player. The tweet^[3] (shown below, right) gained over 840 retweets and 11,200 likes in two months.

The image maintained its popularity in early 2023, spreading to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook in the following months.

Related Memes

Shanghai Sharks

The Shanghai Sharks are a professional Chinese basketball team in the CBA that became known in memes on NBA Twitter when NBA players who were bad or played poorly in a specific game were imagined to be drafted and scouted by the Sharks, as in, they were going to be out of the league and dropped by their team. The memes mostly centered on two players. The first was Ben Simmons in 2021 and then, more notably, Memphis Grizzlies player Dillon Brooks in 2023 after the Grizzlies were eliminated by the L.A. Lakers in the 2023 NBA playoffs.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References