"Cao Ge Mistakenly Typed as Gay" — Reposted After Deletion: How Absurd Was This Blunder?

I finally got hold of my phone on Saturday afternoon, and when I saw this news on the subway, my first reaction was to freeze for two seconds. It felt like finally treating yourself to a coffee on the weekend, only for the barista to write your name wrong—awkward, but kind of funny too. This time, the person at the center of it was Gary Chaw, and the incident itself wasn’t complicated: just a typo in a concert post, except it happened in the spot most likely to attract attention.

According to available information, Gary Chaw recently held his “Open Your Ears and Listen to Me” tour concert in Shanghai. On April 17, he shared multiple photos and videos from the Shanghai concert on Threads. In the caption of one video, he had meant to write his English name, Gary, but left out the letter r, turning it directly into “Gay Chaw.” The original line read, “I am Gay Chaw, pleased to meet you all.” Once it was posted, netizens naturally exploded.

That said, on social platforms, things like this spread faster than a delayed food delivery. After seeing it, some netizens said they were startled, while others immediately started joking, teasing him with remarks like “presbyopia” and “coming out a bit late.” Gary Chaw later quickly deleted the original post and reuploaded a corrected version, changing the name back to the proper spelling, Gary Chaw. As for why he deleted it, his own reply was very straightforward: his presbyopia made him miss the r.

The reason this incident drew so much attention wasn’t just the spelling mistake itself. In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Golden Melody Awards, Gary Chaw had specifically and publicly emphasized that he was not gay, which sparked discussion at the time. On top of that, he had a marriage with Wu Suling and divorced in 2022. With all this old information layered together, it was only natural for netizens to treat this typo as an internet mix-up with a whole backstory attached.

From an “information cost-performance” perspective, this kind of news is actually very typical: the content isn’t heavy, but the spread is incredibly efficient. For gossip-following netizens, it only takes a few minutes to understand the whole story, so the cost is low; for the artist, however, a single typo means spending extra time explaining it—like sending the last email before overtime to the wrong recipient, a small mistake leading to massive attention. Fortunately, public opinion didn’t spiral out of control this time. Most netizens were fairly understanding, and more than anything, treated it as lighthearted teasing.

If you usually just want to use bits of spare time to keep up with entertainment news, this counts as a classic case of “low threshold, high discussion value.” The cause and effect are both very clear, and you don’t need much background information to follow it. That said, Gary Chaw’s current tour kicked off in Shanghai, and he’ll be performing in other cities afterward. More than the typo itself, what interests me is that the buzz around his performances will most likely keep building from here. For an artist, while this wave may be awkward, judging from the results in terms of exposure, it may not be entirely a bad thing.