Since #throwbackthursday became a popular hashtag on Facebook, old photos became a standard feature of social media posts every fifth day of the week. People had fun reminiscing the good old days and how young and thin they were a couple of years or even decades ago.
In Sina Weibo, a new trend in emerging. Chinese netizens do not just resurrect their old photos, they even recreate their childhood photos using the hashtag #Childhood Comparison Pics#, reported What’s on Weibo.
The trend was initiated by Chengdu Business Newspaper as part of celebrating International Children's Day on Wednesday, June 1, when it asked “How much have you changed since you were young?”
On May 13, Tencent News invited its readers to recreate their childhood photos. It then selected the most popular photos, based on readers’ likes, and shared it on Weibo.
Among the photos shared were that of Liang Jin who had a photo of himself as a young boy taken in a Shenyang photo studio in 1960. The 58-year-old is now retired and did a good job of recreating his boyhood photo, down to the facial expression, particularly the gaping mouth.
Another one involved a young woman playing pingpong. The room was slightly different and she had a different dress as an adult, but the facial expression and hairstyle were good re-creation.
In the case of two pairs of a brother and sister sibling, the male child was the younger one and smaller when they were kids. However, when they became adults, the men were now taller than their old sisters that one had to step on a stool to look taller than her younger brother.
But for two male siblings, the younger brother caught up with his older brother in height – now they are equals.
In the case of Zhou Fanglin, it was not only him who changed a lot but also the background, the train station in his hometown. In the first photo, taken in March 1999, he was a young boy that his father had to squat so they would be almost the same height. Seventeen years later, in March 2016, he had the same shot with his dad who was still squatting, but now his squat father is just half his height when standing.
