A blogger posts a compilation of comments under a girl’s tiktok video, where she films her reaction to checking to see if she got into Harvard, and finding an acceptance letter in her emails. She cries with joy over this, recalling that she was once made fun of by a teacher for saying she wanted to go to Cambridge when she grew up. The teacher said, “Not everyone can go to Cambridge.”
The comments say, “The best university in the world is the National University of Defense Technology.”
“Isn’t the best universities in the world Qinghua and Beijing University?”
“Anyone can get into Harvard if they have money.”
“Remember to come back in China, don’t fool around with white men.”
“Don’t go, girl. You’ll get mind controlled by the Jews.”
“Lol, the comment section here is so jelly.”
“Isn’t MIT the best in the world?”
“The headmaster of Harvard invited me to go personally last year, and I still refused. What’s there to get excited over?”
“Don’t you just need halfway decent grades and a bit of money to go? If you’re talking about the hardest to get into, it’s still Qinghua and Beijing University.”
“Don’t go. You might not be able to come back if you go.”
“She looks almost 30. Half her life is over, and she’s still in school lol.”
“China isn’t big enough for you?”
“Wow, holding onto that grudge since primary school, and you’re trying to look all innocent?”
“Is Harvard impressive or something? Why have I never heard of it?”
“Pretty great acting there. Bet you’ll get accepted by Beijing Film University too.”
“It just means your family is rich. It doesn’t mean you have good grades.”
“What’s so impressive about that? I could buy a Harvard degree for a couple hundred grand too.”
“You can’t even afford to go unless you’ve got tens of millions laying around at home.”
A tiktok video of two kiddos practicing kick boxing together. They look about 6-7 years old? I have no idea if youtube will let me put this up or not, or whether it counts as “violence against children”. Don’t want another strike against me. But according to the description, it’s a set of brother and sister, where the brother has foam pads up and is guarding while the sister practices high kicks. She kicks him hard enough to knock him over at multiple points.
OP says, “Brother: Dad, was I some cheap kid you picked up off the side of the road or something?”
Comments say, “The dad is like some Roman noble watching the slaves fight in his gladiator rings [doge]”
“Whoever survives get their father’s love, right? Hahahahahaha”
“When this little boy grows up to go to school and is kicked around by his peers, he can also be like, “Lol, you don’t even hit as hard as my sister.””
Under the hashtag #why do hairdressers need mics to talk to each other, a blogger writes, “The current state of hairdressers: need a reservation to get anything done, 30-40 square metre store, and they all talk through ear mics.”
He attaches comments of other people talking about the same phenomenon: “My hairdresser’s place has a total of two chairs, and every time I go in, it’s like, “Hello, do you have a reservation?””
“They have five hairdressers, and four of them are executive directors.”
“They need the title to charge you more :P”
“They need an ear mic to talk to each other in a 40 square metre store lol.”
“Cause they have code to scalp you better, and don’t want to be overheard.”
Question: “What’s the most incomprehensible logic you’ve seen from Chinese parents?”
Answer: “What I don’t get the most is that a lot of parents will demand that their children not cry even while they’re beating them. The more they cry, the more the parents beat them. The more the parents beat them, the more they cry. I literally don’t get it. What’s the point of forcing your children to not cry?”
Comments say, “Growing up for most people: bearing with pain —> understanding pain —> creating pain.”
“I’ll answer. My childhood was like this. I got beat by my mom all the time. Every time something went wrong in her life, she’d vent by beating me. I wasn’t allowed to cry. She knew she was abusing me, so she had a lot of cognitive dissonance. If I don’t cry, she won’t feel like she’s properly vented. But if I cry loudly, she’s worried the neighbours will judge her. So she’d beat me while demanding that I don’t cry. But if I actually succeed at not crying, she’ll beat her harder (she used a thin bamboo stick. It hurt a lot). She’ll beat me until I’m rolling around on the floor, until she’s gotten off on it.”
“So long as there’s no noise, the neighbours will think you have a perfect family.”
“Nah, it’s just because crying is annoying to listen to, but they won’t learn anything if you don’t beat them. They’ll learn their lesson after a beating, and you don’t let them cry because you’re already annoyed. Listening to a kid cry will just make you more annoyed.”
Question: “What difficulties will you face if you don’t get married?”
Answer: “I guess I’ll start with your thirties.
When you’re 32, you’re absorbed in work all day. Get take out when you get off of work, watch some reality TV shows at night, and have a lot of fun by yourself. You don’t have to take care of kids, don’t have to cook, and don’t have to worry about mortgages or bride prices. Your parents are freaking out, but you don’t think about it at all unless you’re calling them. You can spend all of your own money without any fights. You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want.
At 35, you’ve let it go. You can start joking around with the married and unmarried girls around you. You’re single, so nobody can accuse you of anything. It’s just a little hard crawling into a cold bed by yourself every night. Other people are talking about their kids, and you’re just sitting around. Other people are complaining about tutoring costs, and you shy away. You have no experience, and nobody cares about your opinions.
At 40, you’re still fairly healthy, just a little stomach trouble sometimes from all the greasy and over-salted takeout. Your work is still the same. Your life is still boring and peaceful. You have almost no sense of time. You travel by yourself and can’t help but feel lonely sometimes. No one watches your luggage for you, and you have no one to share your stories with. You don’t want to go home, because there’s nobody there. It feels cold and empty. Anywhere else is the same.
The same goes for your 50s and 60s. Only retirement brings a change to your life. There’s nothing worth remembering. You have some savings, you think you can take care of yourself. But it’s hard to feel anything when every day is the same.
At 66, you become a grandpa in the park. You sunbathe in the day and go get some dinner at the community kitchen at night. You can barely stomach the food, and you regret never learning how to cook properly in all these years. But you just don’t care anymore.
At 70, your body feels nothing like it used to. You’re very lonely whenever you get sick. You have to drag yourself to the hospital to get medicine. Your savings are disappearing too quickly, everything is getting more expensive. You used to think you can have a ton of fun after retirement, but your social security doesn’t let you travel all over anymore, and your health won’t either. Your neighbour’s already started working as a security guard. He says it’s to “experience life”. You drag yourself out of bed and put on clothes with some difficulty, just to sit on the couch and zone out all day. You count your savings in your head and think to yourself you need to figure something out there.
At 80, you go register yourself at the community office, so that social workers come visit you once a day. You can’t get yourself to the park 500 metres away anymore, but you feel home is stifling. There’s nothing you want to watch on TV, nothing caters to your tastes anymore. Nobody visits you, and you don’t want any visitors. You don’t want to go over to anyone else’s place, because you’re worried about changing relationships, and you don’t want to be a bother to anyone. You want to find someone who can manage your money for you, and you’re worried that no one will arrange your affairs once you’re gone. The community office wants you to register, but you think they won’t do a good job. You think about your relatives, but the people who aren’t greedy for your money don’t want to take the job, and the people who are greedy for your money probably won’t properly take care of your affairs.
Just like waiting for an inevitable and yet unpredictable event, you start to fear.
You often have nightmares at night, because you have too many memories.
You wake up, and you hear your mother’s voice outside the door, “Get up and eat something! You’re almost late for work! How are you still so childish at thirty?””
Comments say, “I don’t get it. Why don’t you just cook for yourself? Why is getting take out or getting married and making your spouse cook the only options?”
“So, does having children make you immortal and unageing or something?”
“Assuming you can even live to your 80s XD”
“My daughter worked hard to get these grades, and she wants to give up on her college entrance exam. When she got into her high school, she got 620/750. She didn’t really build a good enough foundation in her first and second year, so she’s having a really hard time in her third year. I spent almost 10K on math tutoring for her last summer break, and this score (57) honestly is the best she can do. With these grades, if she keeps working hard, can she get into a 211 University? [One tier below Ivy, basically]”
She attaches her daughter’s grades, which are:
Chinese: 102.5/150
Maths: 57/150
English: 95/150
Geography: 77/100
Politics: 67/100
Biology: 68/100
Comments say, “Geography, politics, and biology? What the hell kind of electives are these?”
“If you can’t get above 700 in your high school entrance exam, you’ve got no chance of getting into a 211. This is just a matter of natural talent. You can’t make up for it with hard work. But if you’re in Fujian, you can still get into a shitty uni with these scores. If you work really hard, you might be able to get into a decent state uni in a really niche major or something.”
“Looking at these electives, I’d say she’s either in Zhejiang, Beijing, Tianjin, or Hainan.”
“Lol, with these marks, you can’t even get into university at all in Henan, much less a 211.”
“Forty years ago, this case happened in my hometown. A 5-year-old girl got super curious and asked to hold her neighbour’s newborn son. The mother let her, and she didn’t quite get a good enough hold of him, and dropped the newborn to the ground, and he died.
After the conflict, the local cops and officials showed up to arbitrate this case and explain the law. Basically, that she didn’t have to go to jail, but her parents have to make some kind of economic recompense.
The newborn’s dad didn’t get it. He didn’t understand modern legal philosophy. In his logic, the only way to resolve this issue was an eye for an eye.
So after the cops and officials left, he took an opportunity when the girl’s father wasn’t watching her, picked her up, stood on the tall stone ledge, and threw the girl down and killed her.
(Where we live, farmers build a high ledge between their house and yard, so that the livestock they keep in the yard can’t get into where people live. This ledge is usually built out of piles of stone.)
So he got sentenced to death by firing squad. And until the day he died, he couldn’t understand why the laws would be written this way.
I gotta ask, that moment he threw the little girl down, was he even a human being?”
Comments say, “I saw a similar case, where a dad was holding his newborn son and accidentally dropped him and killed him. Guess what happened? He forgave himself and had another son by the next year.”
“I held a baby girl in my village before, and my chair tilted backwards and I fell. She was in my arms and was fine though, but her mom slapped me in the face without saying a word. A couple of years ago, she committed suicide by throwing herself in the river. Apparently, she floated around for days.”
“Kiddos are so fragile, you gotta be careful holding them. My aunt’s coworker was holding his son on the balcony watching some kerfluffle going on downstairs. The kiddo was restless in his arms and accidentally slipped out and fell over the balcony and died instantly. His hair went all white in a single night. After I heard from my aunt, I called people to come put up nets outside my windows right away.”
The commenters are mostly right. Harvard girl will fool around, have her mind changed and will not return. But maybe she ended up at Harvard because she is really bad at geography and didn't realize that she is going to wrong Cambridge.