裂开liè kāi

Cracked (I’m falling apart)

wǒ liè kāi le.我裂开了。I’m falling apart.

裂开 means “to split open”. 我裂开了 says you are so frustrated, shocked or speechless that you have cracked in two, and since 2020 WeChat has an emoji for it.

Took off: 2020
Started in: Game livestreams
Today: Now everyday Chinese

What it means

It is a stronger, funnier way to say your mood has collapsed, close to 心态崩了, “my composure broke”. Moegirl adds that it later came to mean shock or a fright as well.

When the emoji cannot display, WeChat shows its text code, [裂开], so you also see it written that way.

How people use it

It is still common, as the emoji and as words. You send it after a lost game, a failed exam, a plot twist, or a work group chat that will not stop.

More examples

打了一晚上游戏，一局都没赢，我裂开了。
dǎ le yì wǎn shang yóu xì, yì jú dōu méi yíng, wǒ liè kāi le.
I played all night and didn’t win a single round. I’m falling apart.
明天考试，我今天才开始复习，裂开。
míng tiān kǎo shì, wǒ jīn tiān cái kāi shǐ fù xí, liè kāi.
Exam tomorrow, and I only started studying today. I’m done.

Where it came from

It comes from game livestreams around the end of 2019, and sources disagree on who said it first. Moegirl credits the League of Legends streamer PDD, who said it when other players drove him to despair; it then became a catchphrase of the CS:GO player 冬瓜. Dancihu gives the order the other way round.

On the evening of November 18, 2020, WeChat added six new yellow-face emoji. Sina Tech wrote that 裂开, a face split down the middle, seemed to be the most popular of the six.

WeChat's 裂开 emoji: a round yellow smiling face split down the middle by a jagged crack, with the text code [裂开] below it — The original meme image. WeChat's 裂开 (Broken) emoji, drawn by Tencent and added in November 2020; cropped from a news image of the six new emoji. Source

Sources

Moegirl: 我裂开了 (in Chinese) (zh.moegirl.org.cn)
Dancihu: the meme explained (in Chinese) (dancihu.com)
Sina Tech, November 2020 (in Chinese) (tech.sina.com.cn)
The Paper, November 2020 (in Chinese) (m.thepaper.cn)

Checked November 2026. The picture at the top is our own drawing of 灯灯. The original meme image belongs to its owner and is shown to explain the meme. To ask us to remove it, write to legal@dengdeng.app.