The following work is inspired by Wang Sijun, who teaches at a university in Sichuan province. Two unfortunate students were given the complex Chinese character “biáng” to write 1,000 times as punishment for tardiness.

“biáng” is one of the most complex characters in Chinese, with 56 brush strokes. It is the name of a noodle dish from Shaanxi province: biáng biáng mian. The word “biáng” is onomatopoeic, and reflexes the banging sound used in making the noodles.

The character is so complex that Chinese receipts cannot print it. Most restaurants opt instead to type simply BB. The character’s traditional and simplified forms were added to Unicode version 13.0 in March 2020 in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G block of the newly allocated Tertiary Ideographic Plane. Nevertheless, the character remains difficult to represent in computer code.

The sound, as each character comes into solidity, is the heavily downsampled sound of dough hitting a bench. The time and frequency distortion makes the sound unclear, and forges a link between the violence of noodle production and the corporal element of Wang’s punishment.