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| Illustration: Luo Xuan/GT |
Charlie Pembroke has absolutely no idea that he became a global Internet sensation recently. Last Monday, his fame in China had already inspired over 450,000 separate discussions on Sina Weibo. Why would he know? He's just your typical 20-month-old toddler who cries a lot.
One person who does know about this is his father Greg Pembroke, 32, from Rochester, New York. Greg knows because he started a blog called Reasons My Son Is Crying, regularly updating pictures of Charlie crying. Underneath the pictures are the reasons his son is bawling in that very particular moment.
A very simple idea is that a combination of amateur smartphone photography and short, yet unemotional captions, could prove a winning formula with Web users around the world says a lot about the digital times we live in. Even Conan O'Brien did a spoof of it. And you know you're the big tumblr of the week when Conan takes note.
In any case, whether you have seen the blog or not, one thing is certain, it's a universal truth that crying babies can be a handful. We've all moaned at the infantile wails spiking the drones of cabin noise on a flight. That's what babies do. It's natural. It can be annoying sometimes but it can be very funny at other times too.
As a teenager, my mother would jokingly threaten to embarrass me in front of friends with a showing of an early home video of me squealing in despair about something or others. My father shot the footage, which for a time remained locked away on my specific instruction.
I recall the frame jiggling up and down for the entire scene. Initially I just thought that he was a crap cameraman. Later on I came to appreciate that my father was probably laughing uncontrollably in silence. I haven't seen the tape for a while and I won't be uploading it anytime soon but I'm not embarrassed anymore.
But my parents rediscovering their innocence through my temporary flights of fancy only served to make me feel closer to them in adulthood. They were right there in the thick of it every time I combusted with tears of confusion.
There's a certain amount of bonding that happens with that. Charlie's relationship with Greg may be the same. He may come to appreciate his father documenting all these moments in time.
But I was never an Internet sensation. Charlie is and forever will be in the same way Spencer Eldon became known as the Nirvana Baby when he appeared as a naked 1-year-old on the front cover of the band's 30 million selling album Nevermind in 1991. Charlie, in years to come, might be known as "The Son" in that blog we laughed about all those years ago. This could have massive repercussions in the way in which his life turns out.
Like Eldon he might never escape the tag of being "that kid." Greg, on the other hand, will have to answer for his actions at some point down the line. In both cases the fathers are guilty of exploiting their sons' innocence.
In a cruel twist, Greg apparently shows pictures of Charlie crying to stop Charlie actually crying. If that isn't some kind of weird psychotic and emotionally detached parenting, I don't know what is.
Perhaps like me, Charlie will one day see that his father only wanted to document the memories of what he was appreciating about his son in that particular moment.
New parents do this all the time on Facebook and other social media. The only exception is that Charlie became a sensation. No one is in control of that. It just happens. Nirvana never wanted to be that big anyway so Eldon might have been just another naked baby on a not so famous album cover.
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