Some quick answers to start off our post today:
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? - TwoChihuahuas
Oh, this is definitely true. My family has genealogy records going back 9 generations when I briefly got to glimpse it as a little kid. In a couple of years, when my brothers are old enough to have kids, it’ll be 10 generations. It’s not a fantastic record though, because it doesn’t include any women. I’m not on it, and neither will any of my children be on it. Technically, I’m not even allowed to look at it. As for how common it is, basically each Chinese village has one big surname in it, where 85% of the population of the village has the same surname and is from the same extended family. So there’s at least one set of records per village. And at least around where I grew up, which is super backwaters indeed, I haven’t heard of any village that’s completely lost theirs.
I don’t know about what the longest record is. I think maybe the Confucius family? But whenever you’re talking about records going back thousands of years, there’s gonna be questions of fraud. As a family that was nothing but dirt poor farmers going back 9 generations, though, not a lot of incentive for fraud in my family.
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? - OmgPuppies
If the density of kanji is high enough, then yeah, it’s perfectly comprehensible to Chinese speakers. My family went on vacation to Japan a couple of years back. I’m the only person in my whole family who speaks a little bit of Japanese (basically just enough to order food at restaurants), but my mom and my aunt were able to go off without me and shop for a whole day, and got by by just writing Chinese on a notepad, and having Japanese people write down their responses back and reading the kanji. Apparently, it works both ways. They were able to communicate everything they needed this way.
I think I asked you this one before, but I forgot what you answered and I can't find it in your archives: Do people who grew up using chopsticks have as much trouble learning to use knife-and-fork as I do using chopsticks? - OmgPuppies
No, chopsticks are objectively harder to learn how to use than knives and forks. I grew up never interacting with knives and forks until I moved to a western country at 9 years old, where I was able to pick up how to use them in, like, two tries. Even in China, when babies learn how to use utensils, they typically master using a fork or spoon by the time they’re two or three years old, but they won’t be able to work rubber band assisted chopsticks until they’re maybe 4-5, and it’ll be minimum 6 years old before they can use adult chopsticks, no rubber bands. So, definitely don’t feel bad, chopsticks just aren’t very intuitive at all, compared to, “You stab it with this fork.”
For today’s doomscroll, we have a tiktok video of an interior designer’s suggestions for how to go about furnishing a 3 square metre unit in Shanghai, that someone bought for 1 million RMB:
Comments say, “I feel like you’re better off just sleeping in an actual coffin T_T”
“But once you install the toilet, you won’t be able to open the drawers under the bed?”
“My jail cell in London was bigger than this.”
A compilation of how great it is to be an only daughter in Dongbei:
“Only daughter in Dongbei, I don’t get up out of bed until noon. No matter how busy it gets in the kitchen, it’s none of my business. I just lounge around and play on my phone, with snacks and fruits within reach. Never done housework growing up, don’t know how to cook. I just do whatever makes me comfortable. I don’t need to go into any more detail about what kind of status only daughters have in Dongbei families, do I?”
“Yeah, can’t argue this one. I’m also the same, and I can prove she’s right.”
“Dongbei only daughter + youngest on my dad’s side + oldest on my mom’s side. Who understands how much privilege I have?”
“Only daughters in Dongbei might as well be queens.”
“I used to be this way too, until me and my mom were the only ones left in our family. I felt bad making her work all day, so now I do almost all the housework. Aren’t I great?”
“Only daughter in Dongbei, sit around and wait on food + my mom cooks me ribs and noodles + dad buys me drinks after work + grandparents give me tons of red pockets.”
“I made two dumplings and the whole family praised me for half a day.”
“Dongbei only daughter, the hardest work I’ve done all my life was washing the dishes.”
“Only son in Dongbei, started marinading pig’s feet on New year’s eve, stewing them, cleaning fish, frying meatballs. Get up bright and early on New Year’s day to stew fish, stir-fry veggies, and start in on making dough to make dumplings with as soon as I’m done eating T_T”
“I’m 37. Made myself some salad yesterday, and my grandma, dad, and mom were all saying that I’m all grown up now, I know how to cook, I can make a banquet…”
“I mopped the floor once in the whole year (and I only did the master bedroom), and my husband praised me for how amazing I was…”
“Having kids isn’t a matter of money. My kiddo’s 2, and from when I got pregnant to now, I’ve only spent 120K on her.
I did my pregnancy checkups and delivery at Beijing’s Anzhen hospital (top-tier public hospital). Spent 15K on checkups (because I added in some tests, like an amniocentesis, a DNA check, and a foetal heart scan. If you don’t do these extra options, you can get by with just 10K). Stayed in the hospital for 8 days for my delivery, it was vaginal (episiotomy + forceps, kind of a difficult delivery), and spent 16K. So that’s 31K total.
Giving birth while unmarried isn’t covered by insurance, so I didn’t get any coverage at all. If you have insurance, though, they’ll cover 3400 RMB of your checkups, and 3000 RMB of your delivery fees. If you’re a married badass who’s willing to do a vaginal delivery without an epidural, then you can have a kid for just 1000 RMB, or 3000-4000 RMB if you go with a C-section.
ETA: I hope that childbirth insurance can open up towards unmarried women too. I hear that’s already going on in some parts of Guangdong, but it’s not a thing in Beijing yet. I have to have a marriage license to use my childbirth insurance.
Once the kid was out, I fed with a mixture of breastmilk and formula. Went through about 3-4 cans of formula a month to start with, and it slowly climbed up to a peak of 4-6 cans per month. Stage 1 formula is the most expensive, 3-400 a can. Stage 2 and Stage 3 get progressively cheaper. It works out to roughly 1500 RMB a month.
Went through 10 diapers a day, 300 diapers in a month, roughly 1000 RMB. You need about 5-6 changes of clothes of each size, and they grow out of them in two months. They’re average about 100 RMB per set (I buy from fast fashion, uniqlo, zara, H&M, etc), so roughly 5-600 RMB.
Once they get over a year old, clothes get a little more expensive, but you still only need 4-5 changes in each size. Over the last two years, I’ve probably spent about 15K on clothes?
After 6 months, you can add in baby food, rice powder, pureed fruit, etc. They’re all cheaper than formula, and you can make it yourself. You just gotta buy a little more groceries. So I’m not gonna count these costs, since you have to get groceries anyways for yourself, so it’s just a negligible part of the family grocery bill.
Kids do need a lot of supplements though, like Vitamin D (crucial), calcium, iron, and zinc (not as crucial, but recommended). About 5000 RMB to last them until 3 years old.
Once they’re over a year old, they can drink cow’s milk instead of formula. My baby only switched over at two years old, since she kind of hates cow’s milk. If we go with 4 cans a month, times 24 months, that’s about 100 cans, 30K RMB.
Also, there’s a ton of vaccines you need to get before they’re one. If you’re paying out of pocket, I suggest you do the five shot vaccines, pneumonia, hand foot and mouth, measles, and flu. These are about 10K added together. I never bought commercial insurance. I just bought Beijing’s child insurance for her, for 400 RMB a year, but never actually used it.
For miscellaneous baby goods (crib, stroller, towels, blankets and all that), let’s call it 5K. Plus toys, let’s call it 10K.
Add up everything I’ve mentioned, you’ve got pregnancy and delivery + various baby goods (36K) + formula (30K) + diapers (36K) + toys (10K) + various vaccines (10K) + clothes (15K) = supplements (5K) = 142K. Let’s just round it up to 150K.
That is to say, you won’t spend more than 150K raising a child to two years old. And I went with the high end of the estimate here.
Assuming, of course, that you have someone who can help you take care of the baby. If not, you’re looking at another 100K per year in childcare costs.
As for early childhood tuition or whatever, my kiddo was just raised at home. I’ve never sent him to tutoring or daycare. We did go to playgrounds a lot. You can get a membership card for about 1000-2000, which is just spare change that I’m including in normal daily expenses.
You do gotta watch out though, that having a baby will basically put your career on pause for 2 years. That’s 2 years where you won’t get anywhere, forget about any chance of promotion or raises. Even your yearly bonus might be in danger. This is partly because you just have less energy and you can’t keep up with everything. After all, there’s a lot of big change to your life.
And it’s partly because of sexism in the workplace. Most private businesses assume they don’t need to give any stimuluses to pregnant or breastfeeding employees, because just letting them continue to work there is a mercy. Of course, it’s mandated by the law, that you can’t fire workers for being pregnant.
Then we need to think about opportunity cost. That is, if you went at it with all your energy, maybe you make 300K a year. But if you have a baby, you might only earn 70% of that. So you’re losing out on 100K in pay every year. That’s opportunity cost.
Most kids can talk after 2 years old, so you can send them to daycare. They won’t impact your professional career as much, but there’ll be additional tuition. Until they’re out of daycare, you’re looking at being out a couple grand a month (public daycares are usually 2-3K a month, private wants 5-6K).
The most important part of having a kid is time and energy. You have to really throw yourself into it and give several hours of companionship every day (even a mom working full time has to commit to at least 1-2 hours). I work from home, and I spend all day working, taking care of the baby, and doing housework. I almost never go out and socialise anymore.
I suggest people get prepared before they have a kid. What do you need to prepare?
Savings. You need to have 150K in the bank to raise your child until 2. Just for safety’s sake, you should probably save up 200K beforehand.
Manpower. Each child requires two full time caretakers. If you only have one on hand, you might want to get an hourly maid to do housework. That’s the minimum you can get away with. Any less, and you can only guarantee that the kid is fed on time, and everything else falls by the wayside, because people get tired. They can’t keep up with an energetic kiddo all the time. They need to take this in shifts.
Time. You need to prepare yourself that tons of your personal time is going to go towards your kid. In fact, you probably won’t get to sleep through the night before your kiddo’s 2. Getting up 3-4 times a night is normal. Don’t complain, this is just the price of having a kid.
Professional preparations. You’re gonna be taking it easy at work for 2 years. After two years has passed, can you regain your productivity and earnings? You need to be consciously preparing for it. Keep up with communication, maintain your resources, and work as hard as you can. Don’t slack off at work too much just because you have a baby, because sooner or later, you’re gonna have to return to your career, and you’ll be facing the double discrimination of mother + age on top of that.
This is all the basics among basics. If you can’t do this much, don’t have kids. Both you and the kid will be ruined if you do. You don’t have to hurry a baby into the world just to suffer.”
OP goes on in the comment section, “Childbirth insurance is something paid for by your company. You don’t have to pay for it yourself. They buy it for both male and female employees, but only married people can actually use it. Married women will get their checkups and delivery fees covered partially, and married men can enjoy 10-15 days of PTO paternity leave. Unmarried men and women don’t get these benefits, which I don’t think is right.”
“You can’t have too many kids. Even if you’re hyper-competent and have plenty of manpower to spare (2 full time caretakers per child), you should still only have 2 at the very most, because no matter how many helps you have, there’s only ever 1 mom. If you’re paying attention to this kid, you’re not paying attention to that one, and you’ve only got so much energy and time. Honestly, one kid is draining everything I have. My suggestion is that one is enough.”
Comments say, “Your responsibilities and expenses are pretty similar to what married women have to put in…150K to raise a child…a man can give 100K in bride price and walk away with a title of Great Husband and get to put their surname on the kid. Jesus Christ.”
“Every time I think about how men say housework can be done by machines nowadays, I just want to laugh.”
“I’ve crunched these numbers before and arrived at the same conclusion as you, and there’s just no way I can afford it. Tsk.”
Question: “Why is everyone concerned about China’s industrial shift?”
Answer: “The Great Layoffs of ’98, you can google it online and see how thoroughly fucked Dongbei workers were after they were laid off.
There were similar mass layoffs going on in Shanghai at the time, but things were a lot better there, because there were tons of quickly developing private businesses in the region who could absorb these laid off workers. It basically solved the problem.
Why was Dongbei so bad off? Because they didn’t have many private factories, they can’t absorb that much labour. Dongbei was at a state where men were riding around on bicycles, pimping their own wives out. Isn’t that precisely the “tertiary industries” that some people talk about? Without solid secondary industries, tertiary industries are just like flotsam.
Where did all those factories in Jiangsu and Zhejiang came from? They were born because of the export business. Without the export business, those factories wouldn’t exist, and Shanghai wouldn’t be any better off than Dongbei.
Just look at Foxconn. Hundreds of thousands of people are employed at each factory of theirs. They only have income because they have orders. And these surrounding tertiary industries like food and entertainment can only exist because they have income.
If Foxconn moved their factories away, what are all those hundreds of thousands of people going to do? Are they gonna go manufacture microchips for Huawei or build electronic cars? Or are they all going to go work in “tertiary industries” [read implications of prostitution]?
In a country with a primarily export-based economy, where their own people are being PUA’d into working 996 or 007 hours every week [9AM to 9PM six days a week, or midnight to midnight 7 days a week], and still ending up making only 1000 RMB a month for hundreds of millions of them, that’s all the internal demand that China’s capable of. Now that all the industry is leaving, you’re still not worried? Either you’re an actual spy who took American money, or there’s something wrong with your brain.”
Comments say, “Isn’t industry shift because of their choices? That of the big capitalists? Don’t talk about it like we chased them off or anything. Capitalists pursue profits. We have to get stronger if we want to solve anything.”
“How come Chinese people have to lower their wages so westerners can enjoy cheaper products?”
“That’s why we have to upgrade our industries, make cars and phones and microchips. BYD workers have had crazy raises last year.”
A blogger reposts someone else’s post seeking advice: “My relatives showed up at my door with a box of yogurts, asking that I transfer my school district house under her name, because her kiddo is starting primary school. She said it has to be done within a deadline of the next ten days too, or they’ll be late for sign ups. What’s the most ridiculous thing a relative’s demanded of you? How do I turn her down without offending her?”
OP suggests, “Tell her that you already transferred your house to another relatives who showed up with two boxes of yogurts. She came a bit too late.”
Comments say, “You’re still worried about not offending her? She’s offending the hell out of you.”
“My relative has a son that’s a year older than my daughter. When it was time to start primary school, she said she wanted to borrow my house under some kind of leasing contract, so that her son can go to school, and she swore up and down that it wouldn’t affect my daughter. I refused her right away. Each unit can only be used for one family. Once her son used it, my family wouldn’t be able to. You gotta know when to turn people down. If your relatives and friends are doing this shit to you, how can you keep up relations with them?”
“Sorry, I’ve already bought myself three boxes of yogurts. [Doge]”
Two mentions of Dongbei in a single article today, one about it being poor and another that its daughters are pampered. Is there some relation between these two? Can you explain what this comment means?
> “Dongbei only daughter + youngest on my dad’s side + oldest on my mom’s side. Who understands how much privilege I have?”