[Yup, it’s that time of the month again! Wow, February is a short month. And we even got one more day of it than usual! Anyway, if there’s any context you feel like you’re missing, or anything you’ve always wanted to know about Chinese society, leave your questions here! I’ll do my best to answer them! I’m currently working on an essay about Chinese household expenses, somewhat inspired by the latest report about how China has the second highest childrearing costs in the world, so look forward to that!]
The fact that Korea has legalised checking the gender of your foetus recently is trending a lot on weibo, and a blogger writes, “The new generations of parents would rather have girls than boys. The newborn gender balance is returning to normal. But the logic behind it isn’t true equality at all…”
She posts screenshots of a a news report covering this issue, about how most Korean parents express they’d rather have girls than boys because girls are more willing to stay home and take care of them in old age, whereas boys marry off and move out and focus on their careers.
Comments say, “Korea’s gonna welcome a wave of Chinese expecting mothers.”
“Basically, boys are all ungrateful bastards who are a drain on their parents, but girls not only care for their parents, but they can help support their brother too.”
“You really think this policy was designed for Korean women who aren’t willing to have babies at all?”
“Most girls can’t realistically independently have children for two reasons.
First: most girls imagine independently having children to be that after they divorce the dad, he’ll continue giving half his income to her just like when they were married, so they can raise their child and take care of themselves with that money. But realistically, it’s hard enough to meet a man financially well off enough to do that to begin with. And even if you did, 99% of men might be okay giving half their income to their divorced wife for the sake of the babies shortly after the divorce. But as soon as he remarries, or she remarries, and they have new children, then there’s no way he’d keep it up. More likely, whatever is the lowest child support fee in the area, that is precisely how much he will give you. Not a cent more.
This is why a lot of girls complain about marriage laws. They think that even after a divorce, a judge should rule the man has to pay half his income, and not just go by average childrearing costs in the area. Most people complaining about this are the sort to be planning a divorce before they’ve even gotten married.
Secondly, if they don’t have a man at all and just have a child without getting married, then women have to rely on themselves. That means they’re solely responsible for the cost of having a child and taking care of themselves. Some girls can’t even afford a house. You really expect that she can pay for her expenses and raise a kid, and play the role of both father and mother? Women with that ability is one in a million.
With these two reasons, we can tell that even if extramarital children are legal now, very few girls can actually walk this path. It’s not that they don’t want to, but they don’t have the money to do it.”
Comments say, “The second scenario isn’t that hard. You just need the support of your parents. Most female only children can achieve it, especially if they’re from a comfortable family. If your parents are up for it, having a child by yourself is just the same as divorcing with a kid. You might be a lot better off than the single moms getting by on 1-2K of child support a month, actually.”
“We’ve got 4 people in my family taking care of the kid, and it’s still exhausting. Independently having children is pretty much just a motto. Kids from single parent households are always gonna be in the minority. You can’t really solve any of the mental problems or prejudices that come with it. Extramarital children is just a green light for billionaires and their mistresses.”
“Most supposedly “single and child free” people will end up getting married by the time they’re 40. How many people really keep it up until they’re old?”
A compilation of comments about why you shouldn’t eat bull frogs:
“Ever since I found out about sparganoids, I’ve never eaten snakes or frogs again. I don’t mind parasites, but they can’t live in my head.”
”Wait, I thought everyone knew that bull frogs carry parasites. That was promoted a lot when they first entered the market. I never dreamed so many people had no idea.”
“I used to work at a barbecue restaurant and slaughtered bull frogs. I’ve seen one-legged frogs all the way to seven-legged frogs. After that, I’ve never even bull frogs again.”
“You guys are all overthinking it. What’s on your table might not be bull frogs at all. It might just be toads.”
“Don’t eat it! Don’t eat it! My neighbours farm these, and he comes over all the time to talk about how disgusting it is. They have to pour buckets of disinfectant into the pools every day to keep them clean. They feed the frogs shittons of drugs and hormones. They don’t let you farm frogs just anywhere because of how much it pollutes the land and the water. He’s always emphasising to us how gross it is. It’s up to you whether you believe it or not, but he grows these things and he’s telling us not to eat them.”
“Our professor said that the legs are where all the parasites are too.”
“I don’t even like eating frogs. It feels really freaky, like eating a headless athlete.”
A tiktok video of Taylor Swift’s latest performance (that I’m not sure youtube will let me post due to copyright). OP asks, “Exact same outfit—actually, I think the one Taylor’s wearing is actually more exposed, but everyone’s only mad about Lisa for being overly sexual?”
But it’s this outfit, for those who are curious:
Comments say, “A healthy fit body is very different from softcore pornography.”
“I saw someone else on the internet say that Taylor is saying, “Look how awesome my body is, I’m gonna start singing. Whereas Lisa is all, “Onii-chan~ do you like how I look?”
“Taylor doesn’t make any sexually suggestive movements. She’s very confident and fit and full of sunshine. Lisa is practically spreading her legs for rich men.”
Question: “Did people in ancient times not know that seafood was edible?”
Answer: “If you ask around coastal fishermen, you’d know, seafood is great when you’re well-fed and healthy and fit. But if you’re already malnutritioned, eating plain boiled seafood to get by is worse than death.
For actual fishermen, seafood is worthless trash. They’d much rather eat rice or bread with roasted pork. Don’t assume things from the point of view of a modern person stuffed to the gills with food. When America was first founded, Boston lobsters were what they fed prisoners all the time, until the prisoners went into revolt. The prison finally had to compromise and limit the amount of lobsters. Now look at how much lobsters cost.
In order for seafood to taste good at all, you have to add grease to them. Stir-fried octopus only tastes good because you’re adding minced pork to it. Baby squid is only tasty because they’re stuffed with ground pork. Not to mention scallion oil clams, buttered lobster, or oysters with chilli oil. With no grease, no pork or lard to accompany it, you’re better off not eating that shit at all.
Same thing with pork or beef offal. When China was first founded, when everyone was literally starving, still nobody wanted to eat it. With no oil and no chilli peppers to cover it up with, when all you have to cook with is water and salt, it’s super stinky and gamey and disgusting. Everyone’s favourite is always going to be fatty pork.”
Comments say, “If not for the fact that I fucking love crabs, I might have believed you. I could eat nothing but crab my whole life.”
“If I haven’t eaten seafood before, I might have believed you. The tastiest way to cook any seafood is just blanched in water.”
“Guangdong IP, I’ve always only either blanched or steamed my seafood. Add a bit of soy sauce, and I can eat until I can barely move.”
A tiktok video of a Dutch young man who made a confession video about how he has AIDS and has been chatting up over 7000 Chinese women since 2019, sleeping with some of them, and filming it to upload to porn sites. In 2024, he’s re-entered China to pick up women again. This blogger is drawing attention to this to warn people to stay wary.
Comments say, “Aren’t there laws about this? Something we can do? I’m just a peasant, I don’t really have any great ideas, but can we all put our heads together and think of how to put a stop to this?”
“In order to ensure there’s plenty of fish in the sea, they’re pushing the feminist movement. There are so many women with loose belts, that the virgins are being looked down upon. 7000 from 2019? Add in covid lockdowns, and that’s 7-8 women per day. Unbelievable.”
“Just stay clean before marriage, and demand health check ups when you get married, and these trash will never be able to marry.”
“A star from a soldier, is this real? [like from the shoulder pad of their uniform, to indicate their rank]. We met through a matchmaker, and when we started dating, he gave this to me. But some people on the internet say that soldiers have tons of these, specifically to trick naive young girls. And ever since I started dating him, I haven’t really felt anything, not happy and not unhappy either.
He’s very proactive though. As soon as he gets his hands on his phone, he’ll send me flirty messages. They don’t make me feel anything though. It all feels like he’s just trying to trick me or something. I don’t know if I’ve just been on the internet too long, watched a few too many tiktok videos or what. Might’ve seen through marriages and romance or something. I feel like my guard is too high.
We only just got together, though. If I keep feeling this way, I don’t know if we can continue or not.”
Comment section: “[Screenshot of that exact bracelet with a star being sold on Taobao for 25.90 RMB.”
“All soldiers sleep with prostitutes.”
“They’re all super sexist, really aggressive, and have violent tendencies.”
“When I was in the military, my sergeant used to complain about other soldiers in my unit, saying that nobody should ever date them. It’s unimaginable there.”
A video of a teacher violently hitting her students has been trending on weibo, and a blogger writes, “My wife is a teacher. I know a lot of friends who are teachers. So I’d like to talk about this topic a little.
A lot of people know that there’s something wrong with our education system, but what precisely is the problem?
Well, there’s a lot of problems. But I think the most crucial one is that the teacher’s interests aren’t aligned with the students.
Maybe some people will argue, “How it is different? Teachers want the students to have good grades, and students want the same thing.”
No, that’s wrong!
What teachers want is for students to have good grades in the specific subject that they’re teaching, in the precise grade that they’re teaching. As for other subjects, or what happens to the students after they move past this grade, who the fuck cares.
So we can see that in every subject, teachers are piling on homework like crazy, for the sole purpose of monopolising the student’s time. Because if they don’t assign homework, then other teachers will give out more homework, and the kid will spend less time on your subject.
And we can see that for a lot of subjects, they just teach to the test. They don’t care at all whether the kids have actually grasped the material.
For example, in English, my kid is currently learning about singulars and plurals. She needs to remember whether half of an apple is a single or a plural. Whether an apple and a glass of water is a singular or plural. Whether a bowl of rice plus a few slices of chicken is a single or a plural.
For example, in English, one of the required reading pieces for 7th grade is Lu Xun’s Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, and there are examples of past years’ questions. One of the questions is, “In the book Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk, how many chapters are there? You can count the table of contents and know, it’s 10 chapters, but that’s actually the wrong answer, because you have to include the preface and postscript. So it’s actually 12 chapters.
For language-based subjects, shouldn’t you be teaching students basic abilities to read, write, and speak? You’re not telling them to actually read the content, but instead spend tons of time (7:20AM to 9PM at school, plus homework at home) to brute force memorise how many ways there are to write the character 茴. Is there any meaning at all to this kind of “knowledge”?
I know that teachers are under a ton of pressure. I know they have their own anxieties. But is this really how things are supposed to be?”
Comments say, “If you can’t take the pressure, you can quit, go into a different industry. Don’t make that an excuse to vent your anger, especially as a teacher. Put yourself in their point of view—if your child was treated this way by their teacher, would you still say all of this?”
“Are teachers the only profession that’s stressful? If you can’t take it, change jobs. There are plenty of talented graduates from teaching colleges waiting to take your place.”
“Bullshit. Public school teachers only pay attention to the top of the class. If you’re in the middle or bottom, who the fuck cares if you study or not? They’ve got an ironclad job.”
“I tutored two kids for one of my relatives over winter break. I only agreed to do this because my mom said I would be paid, and yeah, I was paid, but my parents won’t let me accept it. If they didn’t know, then I’d just take the money. But this relative didn’t know I’d already returned on campus today, so he went over to my house to give me the money. My mom was standing right next to me, telling me to not accept it, but I kind of really want it! It’s not just that I want the money, but this is the first money I’ve earned all by myself. I feel a really strong sense of accomplishment! My internship this winter break too, I did it with an uncle my dad knows, and I was promised pay, but I didn’t get anything at the end. And my dad told me to let it go. I just feel like some kind of free slave labour.”
Comments say, “If your parents won’t let you take the money, then they should pay you themselves. They want to earn a favour, why should you have to put in the work for it?”
“If they won’t let you accept the pay, then you won’t tutor the kid again next time.”
“I’ve got different thoughts about this. It’s better for you to not take this money. You shouldn’t be making money off of relatives, because you have no idea what kind of hassle is waiting for you in the future. Honestly, the best plan was to never agree to tutor his kids to begin with. You could earn money anywhere. Earning money off of relatives is a real test of character. If they’re not totally upstanding, they could seriously screw you over.”
I'm a bit behind on my reading of this blog so I may be too late with this question but perhaps you can answer it in next month's FAQ.
Some years ago I read that many Chinese families had genealogical records going back hundreds (thousands?) of years but under Mao those things were destroyed. Recently I read an article that claimed the destruction didn't happen in rural villages so many families still have the records. What is the truth about all this? Do any Chinese families have records going back many generations? If so, how far back and how common is it?
Some other Asian countries have adopted Chinese characters, like the way Japan uses kanji. Is it possible to understand these languages in writing when they use these characters even if you don't speak it?