Terrified grandmother, 80, flees Shanghai home after giant pink bow on balcony below her becomes social media sensation
- The bow, which made the apartment building look like a ‘small Disney castle’, attracted hordes of social media users looking to take photos
- The elderly woman had to eventually move in with her family. Crowds were so big that residents of the building had difficulty getting in and out
An 80-year-old woman in Shanghai is the latest casualty of the internet fad of visiting viral destinations to take photos and post them on social media, known as daka in Chinese.
The woman’s home went viral last week after a huge pink fabric bow was put up on one of the apartment building’s balconies, making it look like a small Disney castle. After the building became popular on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, fans flooded in to take photos of the elderly woman’s home and catch a glimpse of her. She soon found it uncomfortable to live there.
Over the weekend her family members picked her up and took her to live with them and the giant bow was taken down, news portal The Paper reported.
The woman, with the surname Hu, lived on Wukang Road, a 1,500-metre street lined with popular coffee shops, historical sites and apartment blocks. In the 2007 Ang Lee film Lust, Caution, which was set in Shanghai, Tang Wei set Tony Leung Chiu-wai free on Wukang Road. In This Is Not What I Expected, Zhou Dongyu and Takeshi Kaneshiro watched the sun set from the well-known road.
Influencers on e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu say that if you go to Shanghai without going to Wukang Road you have failed to “feel the pulse of the city”. They recommend an itinerary of brunch at a French restaurant, a moment to pose for photos next to the famed Wukang Mansion and then a cup of coffee or an ice-cream from a famous shop.