09/15/24 - Can such powerful winds send us back to the good old days?
[Thank you to Kenan Jasaveria for pointing out a unit error in the first story. The original text had said hundred pascals, and I missed it and translated it as just pascals instead. The mistake has been fixed.]
“On the 13th, today, the typhoon “Bebeca”’s center has landed in Shanghai, Pudong, around 7:30AM. When it landed, the winds reached a peak of category 14 near the centre (42 metres/second), and the air pressure near the centre reached as low as 955 hundred pascals. Bebeca has exceed typhoon 4906, “Gloria” as the strongest typhoon to land in Shanghai since 1949. Right now, Shanghai is covered by the main body of the typhoon and has reached a peak of wind and rain. Check out Knews reporters in the middle of a category 14 typhoon, facing its amazing destructive power. The iron fences around construction sites are sent into the air, trees have fallen, and even telephone poles are pulled right out of the ground.”
Comments say, “Looks like it’s time to use my magic item.” [Commenter attached a screenshot of an item from some videogame, a “wind-stopping charm”.]
“Keep safe!!”
“Can such powerful winds send us back to the good old days? T_T”
A compilation of how scary it is to be a home tutor:
“I’m too scared to work as a tutor. I watched a Legal Report [Chinese true crime show] about people who specifically con female uni students into working as at-home tutors at their houses. Once they lock the door, you can’t escape. It’s not a public space, so there’s no one you can call to for help. It might only be a 1 in 10,000 chance, but if it happened to me, there’s no way I could get away. I’d just be sheep for the slaughter.”
“Last year, around August, my classmate got a summer job as a tutor. Thank god she got me and another two of our classmates to join, because when we went to the kitchen, there was rope and duct tape there. To be honest, I panicked then. There was one room that was locked the whole time too. Thank god she got all of us to come. I couldn’t imagine what might have happened otherwise T_T”
“I’ve seen a story before where a uni student worked as a at-home tutor, and she was smart enough to call for a takeout delivery. When she got there, she found there was no signs that any child actually lived at that house, so she pretended she had to go to the bathroom and messaged the delivery guy to help her. Thank god the delivery guy got there in time and took her away. Afterwards, the bastard tried to claim that he had no ill intentions, that he and his friends just wanted to chat to a uni student.”
“I got a tutoring job on Xianyu [Chinese craigslist] and I asked him about his child and he never answered anything specific back. All I asked was what grade his kid was in and what subjects he needed help with, and all the guy would say was that I should go over to his place and take a look myself. I checked out his past purchases, and it was all for KTV sound systems. Is this a scam? I’m scared to go by myself.”
“If you’re a female uni student, don’t tutor boys in puberty. They have all sorts of shit going on in their brains. Boys understand boys. I’ve heard my classmates say some fucked up shit.”
“My friend is a fully employed teacher. A part of their job is doing home visits to special, disabled children. She taught middle-school. Since she was a new hire, they only had her go to one family, and the boy wanted to hug her and kiss her and she stopped him. After she got back, another teacher said that that boy had done stuff like that before…not to mention all the healthy ones.”
“Real case, I’ve got a friend who works as a detective. He told me about a case that happened near us. This couple both worked as janitors, renting a house. The guy living upstairs of them was a teacher at a tutoring agency. The couple had a girl in primary school, 5th or 6th grade. Since they’re neighbours, they got to know each other, and they asked him to help tutor her, and he ended up molesting the girl and threatening her to not tell anyone or else he’d murder her. The couple noticed their daughter was acting really depressed and found out, so the guy actually murdered her for real. And she was their only child too T_T”
“I’ve encountered this in uni too. An at-home tutoring job, 6 days a week, and the supposed “dad” wanted to get a trial lesson and told me to come to a hotel. I felt like something was weird, and after I stopped responding, he texted me multiple times to do a trial lesson for him.”
“After landing, Bebeca has still maintained its strength as a typhoon, and has moved into Jiangsu as of noon. The winds reach as high as category 13, 38 metres/second, near the centre.”
“My husband has a cousin. He’s always said his grades were really good. He was in the same high school as my husband (the best high school in town).
One time, my husband saw he held his pen weird, so he said offhand, “Hold your pen straight.”
And the cousin was like, “Fuck off. I’m gonna get better grades than you anyways.”
Now he’s in college, supposedly just a community college.
Is Gaokao in Henan really that hard?”
Comments say, “You hardly even need to take the Gaokao to get into community college. You just gotta spend money.”
“I don’t know why, but a lot of people have been failing out of the Gaokao in the last two years.”
“Henan has a lot of repeat students. I had a classmate attend the Gaokao three times and he was still unhappy and wanted to take it again, and our teacher talked him down.”
A video complaining about how the ice cream OP got wasn’t nearly as nice as what she saw online:
Comments say, “You call this a failure??”
“How is it any different?”
“There’s no difference at all, except that you got a smaller portion.”
A blogger writing about the masses of social media people and tourists showing up to Quan Hongchan’s [China’s diving gold medalist] home. “I thought the people livestreaming her house was disgusting enough. I never thought the villager’s actions are even more gross…”
OP attaches a picture of a road sign they’ve put up that reads, “Right turn for Quan Hongchan’s home.”
“Quan Hongchan’s family is just too nice. They can even put up with this shit? Being surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of people day and night, filmed from every angle by phones, cameras, and drones?”
“I’ve seen a 99RMB tour group that takes you to Quan Hongchan’s house. This Maihe Village is sucking Quan Hongchan’s family dry.”
“What the fuck. Quan Hongchan’s family is stared at all day long, and they don’t get to make any money off of it, and sometimes, they even have to hand out free fruit and snacks…that’s horrible.”
Comments say, “Are these not saseong fans??” [Literally “私生粉”, illegitimate fans, describing fans who are so obsessed with their idols that they’ll perform highly dangerous or invasive actions like digging through their idol’s trash, stealing their idol’s personal items, stalking them, etc. Wikipedia has a page on the term.]
“If she doesn’t want to become the next overcoat guy [early singing competition winner who was exploited by villagers in his hometown very similarly to this case], she should move away as soon as she can. Some people take a mile when you give them an inch.”
“No, I just don’t get it. What is there to see? You think you can get as lucky as an Olympic gold medalist if you hang around her house? Or that your family will get a once in a generation genius too? I don’t understand.”
Question: “Why do so many people on Zhihu think Singapore is a shitty place to live?”
Answer: “My elders have once taught me that, “Look at what cases come up the most often in a country’s legal system, and that’s where that country’s fundamental problems are.”
What’s the most frequent cases in Singapore? The answer is “harassment”.
I live in Singapore, and I’ve noticed from the beginning that Singaporeans love to accuse other people of “harassment” over nothing. Especially if you’re not local.
I’m a foreigner. I like Singapore, so I came here to work and study and vacation. But I’m not familiar with anything, so I had no idea how to do anything in Singapore or how to find my classes or anything. I felt very helpless.
So I tried asking the Singaporeans, and they just glared at me coldly. I kept at it, asked one after another, even as they made fun of me, I worked up the courage to ask. And everyone is saying, “Guys, look, what a retard! He’s asking everyone for help. Doesn’t he ever look in the mirror? He’s a Chinese Malaysian from the mainland. What right does he have to talk to us? We’re proper Singaporeans. We Singaporeans are above you all. How dare you mere Chinese Malaysian speak to us!”
And then the principal told me to come to his office, where an investigator and a whole bunch of police were waiting for me. The investigator and principal and my teacher all tried to keep me steady while telling me, “We’ve got some bad news for you. I hope you won’t get too worked up. All the students in your class have collectively accused you of harassment. They say that you persistently harassed them. They already tried to make it clear that nobody wants to talk to you, but you kept harassing everyone nonetheless. I know you just got here and you don’t know what’s going on, and you have to ask around sometimes, but please keep in mind that Singaporean laws don’t care about your difficulties. You need to prepare to appear in court next, and you need to be careful and don’t get too close to your classmates. As for your difficulties, just try to get through them yourself. To put it bluntly, if you really feel so isolated and helpless in Singapore, you should consider abandoning this major and going back to the mainland, since you came from there to begin with!”
And in court, my classmates very angrily said, “We have the right to not talk to him! We don’t have any obligation to take care of him! Your Honour, please send him away! Please make him leave our Singapore!”
Is this scenario unbelievable?
We’re all healthy, grown adults, but a lot of people have been falsely accused of harassment.
All I can say is, can the Singaporean government do something about the people there? “Singaporean citizens, do you guys know what harassment even means? Do you know that these defendants have travelled a long way to a foreign environment. They’re clueless and helpless and they need help. And yet when they come to us for help, we accuse them of harassment? Then who would dare to come to Singapore?”
And the Singaporean students would jeer and shout back, “It’s be better if nobody came to Singapore! Anyone who’s not Singaporean should get out of Singapore! We should be the only people in Singapore! All those foreigners are rude as fuck! They don’t deserve to be any place as civilised as Singapore!!””
Comments say, “Thailand needs to hurry up and build their canal, so Singapore can stay where they are by themselves.”
“What the fuck. Singaporeans are crazy.”
“The most ridiculous thing that’s ever happened to me was when a Singaporean little girl asked her dad why I was speaking Chinese. And her dad shrugged his shoulders and put on this really resigned expression, like he was watching me eat a steak with chopsticks or something. Like he was looking at something hick as fuck. The problem was, I was vacationing in Hainan at the time. I can’t believe I got looked down on for speaking Chinese in fucking China. I could’ve remembered that for the rest of my life. Thank you, media control, for the magical experience you’ve brought to me.”
“I left the door half open and my dorm mate got super mad.
The red bed is mine, the blue bed is my dorm mate’s. I like to sleep with the door open, but she doesn’t like it, and around 10PM at night, she got out of bed and slammed the door shut super hard. What the hell.”
[The square near the top is the door. The writing at the bottom is where the balcony is, and the four squares along the sides are the beds.]
Comments say, “As someone who sleeps in this position, I fucking hate this bed spot. It’s super loud if you keep the door open! You might not hear much since you’re sleeping inside, but can’t you have some consideration for people who have to sleep by the door? And if you keep the door open, then it’ll be super hot in the summer and super cold in the winter, and I have to keep closing the door for you. Can’t you think about other people?”
“Why the fuck would you keep your door open at night??”
“Are you nearly as unlucky as me? My dorm mate refuses to pay for AC, so we have to keep the door open when we sleep at night since it’s way too hot, and I always feel super unsafe…But the other three dorm mates all want the door open so there’s nothing I can do about it. We slept with the door open for two days, and right outside out door was where everyone left their trash by the staircase. After two days, rats got in our dorm room and started crawling all over their beds. Thank god none of them touched my bed. Thank you, rats. Now they know to close the door before going to bed.”