02/26/24 - You can make up whatever content you want based off of a single picture.
Question: “What’s happened to you that was so coincidental, it’s almost magical?”
A compilation of answers: “Every time you graduate and leave your school, all of a sudden, they’re building new cafeterias, new dorms, new computer rooms, new track fields…”
“Just saw one on another thread, where a guy was playing LOL with his dad, playing support for him. He screwed up a couple of times, so his dad was saying in the chat, “Support is my son [common gaming insult], what a loser.”
And the other teammates were like, “Dude, it’s just a game. You don’t need to get so mean.”
And his dad was like, “No, the guy playing support is actually my son. Tell them, son.”
And OP had to open his mic to be like, “Yeah, I’m his son.””
“My sergeant for my college military training was my classmate back in primary school.”
“I got a QQ account in 2008 ending in 0622, and it got hacked.
I got another QQ account in 2009, also ending in 0622, and it got hacked too.
I started to feel like this must be my lucky number, so all of my phone’s unlock code and all my bank card PINs have been 0622.
And then, in 2016, 06/22, my daughter was born. Turns out, it really was the most important day of my life.
My MIL says every day that my daughter came along just for me. And I feel like she’s so right.”
“One day, in high school, I got a bowl of ramen from the snack shop and it didn’t have a fork inside >: ( So I had a borrow a spoon. After I was done, my dorm mate went and bought one too, and his had two forks!!”
“Back in middle school, my homeroom teacher was this old lady. Every time we have a PTA meeting, she always tells me, “Tell your mom to come in tomorrow. Your grandparents will work too.”
And every time, I was confused. One day, I finally asked her, “Teacher, why can’t my dad come?”
She lowered her head, “Because I taught your dad through middle school too, and I don’t really want to keep telling him off anymore.””
“I went to art school, and got quite skilled in playing instruments, calligraphy, Go [Chinese chess] and all that. I was particularly into shogi.
Right after I graduated college, I’d often play against a bunch of old shogi enthusiasts by the river. Became quite famous in my hometown for it too.
There was an old guy in particular who used to dominate the scene before I came along. Everybody was chafing under him, and yet, he was just such a masterful and unpredictable player, sometimes aggressive, sometimes elusive…
And then, I showed him my firepower. He lost 9 games out of 10. A couple of times, he wanted to regret a move, and I refuse to let him, and he got so mad he was red in the face. He often told me, “Just you wait…!”
And then, I proposed to my girlfriend at the time, and when I went over to her place…that old guy turned out to be my future FIL!
Of course, after marriage, I’ve never been quite as good at shogi. Often, at the most critical of moments, I’ll screw up and end up slaughtered by my FIL.
Sigh…”
“I skipped class once during highschool, and went over to the multimedia building that no one is ever in to hang out, and found a phone hiding behind an electric guitar in the corner.
AS a good, morally upstanding student (not really), I obviously wanted to find the owner, so I opened up the contact’s list, and I saw my mom’s name! Same phone number too! That was definitely my mom! I called, and my mom picked up the phone and went, “Yang Yang?”
Yup, it was my niece’s phone!
(Same school, she was 4 months younger than me and one year below me. Almost never see her, since we’re not even in the same building)
I was like, “Mom?” And my mom was shocked, and asked what I was doing hanging out with my niece instead of studying in class. I had no choice but to tell her the truth.
My mom hung up and called my SIL, and told her that I found Yang Yang’s phone in the multimedia building.
And as for the aftermath…well, we both got caught for skipping class…
See, you never get karma for good deeds.”
“When I was in highschool, the legend of the Wild Goose Pagoda was famous in our class. One of the students at our school took some money at home and ran away, and ran out of money by the time he got to Xi’an. He didn’t have anywhere to go, so he figured he’d go have some fun at the Wild Goose Pagoda [famous historical building]. When he got to the top, he found his mom.
I asked him later, “Have you ever figured out why your mom didn’t bother looking for you and instead took a vacation to Xi’an?””
“My friend once asked me for a favour, and I told him that I wasn’t in Guangzhou at the moment, I was vacationing out of state. He was like, “Oh yeah, me too. I’m in Xiamen right now.”
And then, that afternoon, we sat on our scooters staring at each other across an intersection, a feeling of melancholy growing between us.
You think that’s the worst it gets?
Oh, you’re wrong.
That afternoon, we had the most awkward small talk of our life, and then I said that I needed to go drop by Starbucks.
And he said, “Oh yeah, I got dinner plans at a steakhouse with some friends too.”
And then, that night, in a Chongqing noodle shop, the owner lifted the curtains blocking different tables briefly, and we locked eyes each other again.
The melancholy grows ever thicker…”
“Got a checkup done, and discovered a little problem with my heart. I was going to go see a specialise for further tests, but my schedule and time didn’t really line up, so I had to give up.
The next day, I’m flying home, and the guy in the next seat to me started talking to me about the latest international news. We talked for hours from the Russia-Ukraine War to the 2024 American election. I poured all the research I’d been doing for half a year as a news editor into his ears, to finally discover that he was a cardiologist in the hospital I wanted to go to. So I took my lab results from my luggage and showed it to him, and he gave me a solid diagnosis…
Now, thinking about this, I still gotta sigh that fate has a way…”
Korea’s been trying to increase the number of medical students in order to address their healthcare personnel shortage problem, and this has resulted in a protest among current doctors and medical students, because they feel this doesn’t address the root of the problem. China’s been covering this news closely, and the latest development is that, “The wave of Korean healthcare personnel quitting has been going on for over a week. More than 10,000 interns and doctors have handed in their resignation at over 100 hospitals all over Korea, totally 80.5% of current healthcare personnel. As a result of this strike, Korean ambulances circle for hours unable to find a hospital that is able to provide service, sometimes arriving at a dozen hospitals with no help. Some patients have died as a result of lack of timely care. The Korean government has announced on the 27th that they are going to begin an investigation at 50 large hospitals, and take legal measures against doctors who refuse to return to work.”
Comments has a follow up, “The Korean government has emphasised that starting in March, any intern or doctor who has not returned to work will have their license revoked. No legal action will be pursued against any doctor who returns to work before the 29th.”
“They’ve already quit. Why would they care?”
“Yeah, you just can’t comprehend this using the mindset of a normal person…it’s like the vows they took when they became doctors were worthless in the face of money.”
“This is why healthcare can’t be privatised.”
“This is a college student abducted over 20 years ago, supposedly from Beijing Art College [a lot of people in the comment section seem to think 北京艺术学院 is the name of the college, but I’m incline to think it probably means something like, “from an art school in Beijing”, which would be written the same way in Chinese[, studying singing. The older people around here say that she came in with a book bag, and was drugged by some baddies and became crazy. She just goes around picking up garbage all day, and if she sees a crowd of people, she’ll start singing. She was supposed to have a much broader life. I’m hoping the internet can help her family see this, and she can get home one day.”
Comments say, “I don’t know why all anyone focuses on is that the name of the school is wrong. The people in the village might not know exactly which college she graduated from, but surely, they’d know that this woman just randomly appeared in their village one day, right? Maybe you can ignore this news, but you can’t say that all the news about abducted women are fake, right? Well, I hope this news is fake at least. That means one less person is living in suffering.”
“Beijing has 11 different types of art-based institutions. Not a single one of them is named Beijing Art College.”
“You can make up whatever content you want based off of a single picture.”
“Just sayin’, everyone is against bride price, right?
Let’s say, hypothetically, if we start taxing bride price and dowry. Let’s say, 0% tax for 50K or below, 20% for 100K, 40% for 200K, etc, etc (or maybe set tax rates based on local income, something like that), and at the same time, if you divorce and sue for bride price to be returned, the judge will only rule based on the part that you paid taxes on.
So, for example, if the man actually paid 500K, but he only reported 50K to the government, and the wife didn’t bring any dowry. If they get divorced 2 weeks after getting married, then the judge would only rule how much bride price should be returned based on 50K.
And if you get discovered lying about bride price, then there’ll be heavy fines. So you basically got blackmail material on each other, so that unless both families really trust each other, they wouldn’t dare to lie about bride price, and if they really trust each other, they wouldn’t care about bride price…
If all that happened, would marriage rates go up or down?”
Comments say, “What if the FIL sells a piece of art to the guy for 500K?”
“I don’t think it’d effect anything. Fighting over bride price is just a symptom of low marriage rates, not the cause of it.”
“Lower. Let me put it this way, any policy that doesn’t involve investing actual money into improving the situation will only cause marriage rates to go lower.”