“My girlfriend’s cat calls her mom. Is there something wrong with that? My girlfriend’s raised a kitten from one month old to 18 months now, and often time, she’ll be like, “Hey, kitty, mommy bought you some snacks.” “Show mommy what you’re doing.” Or things like that. Is that okay? I don’t really like mixing up animal and humans like this.”
Comments say, “But my cat is my baby. What’s wrong with her calling me mom? I’m not her only mom—she’s got second mom and third mom too.”
“Are you jealous that the kitty has a mom and you don’t?”
“Jesus, for a moment, I thought your girlfriend called her cat mom or something.”
“Once you understand this story, you’ll understand why even rural people don’t want to get married anymore.
A couple of years ago, our company was moving, and there were several big pieces of furniture I wanted to move home, so I called a moving truck.
The driver was really enthusiastic. To save on time, he offered to help me carry the furniture for free. I saw he was pretty old, and was worried about hurting his back, so I turned him down.
But when I asked, he said he was only a little over 30.
There were so many wrinkles on his face, I thought he had to have been in his fifties.
As soon as I get in the car, before we’ve even started moving, he gets this call from a really aggressive woman urging him to wire her living expenses. He gently told her that he was driving right now, he has to finish this order first.
But the woman just kept carrying on, telling him off for being useless.
He hung up the phone, and just kind of wilted in his seat, sighing to himself. I was freaking out, worried he was gonna do something extreme, so I tried talking to him to calm him down.
He said that was his wife, who’s been staying home for 3 years now. She worked as a waitress before, and a couple of months as a cashier in a supermarket, but she can’t keep any job for long. Now she just doesn’t do anything at all, lives in a rental place with his mom, and just sits on the couch to watch livestreams and tiktok videos all day. He’s got a pile of Amazon boxes in his house always.
I asked what about his dad, and he said that his dad was intellectually disabled and went missing when he was 10 years old. He was raised by his mom after that.
He started working as soon as he finished middle school, and saved up 200K on his own for his mom.
His mom was getting worried that he never could find a girlfriend, and found a matchmaker and paid a lot of money and favours to get his current wife—200K in bride price, gold jewellery, matchmaker fees. When you add everything up, it completely wiped him out.
He used to rent a little studio apartment when he was single, and could have 3-4K left over at the end of every month.
That obviously wasn’t going to work after marriage, so he rented a two-bedroom, and pays 1K extra in rent now. His wife doesn’t work but is addicted to shopping, so he’s completely pay check to pay check now.
And he can’t even say anything about it, because every time they have a fight, his wife bullies his mom. One time, she even beat his mom into the hospital.
So now, his mom is urging him to have kids soon, and his wife is saying that she wants 100K in compensation if she has a kid, no compromises.
He’s just feeling mounting pressure, stuck between these two women, so he just works himself to the bone. He works 60-70 hours every week, and he doesn’t see any change to that in the future.
Hearing that, it’s so unfortunate and yet typical. It’s such a classic case of rural young men being reaped by our current marriage system.
In less than ten years since his middle school graduation, he’s saved up over 200K, which means that despite his poor family background and low starting position, he’s very hardworking and capable.
If he hadn’t gotten married, he could’ve paid a downpayment in a small town, and his 7-8K a month would be enough to afford his mortgage and his daily expenses. The 1-2K left over is enough to rent a second hand computer to play some games, or eat barbecue once a week, or fish with friends in his free time.
If his mom hadn’t pushed him into marriage, then she could’ve lived in a nicely furnished commercial unit with her son, and played cards with other retired people, chatted, danced in the plaza, and not be bullied and beaten into the hospital by her DIL.
This marriage has ruined this whole family’s standard of living, and if it continues this way, his family will never climb out of this abyss, and that’s without kids! If you add a kid into the mix, this becomes a bottomless hole.
You might say that he just found a bad partner, and his wife is just a rare, extreme case.
But no, this is commonplace.
Because almost all men in the dating market marry down.
And a U-Haul driver is already at the bottom of society. What do you think a girl even lower than him is like?
She’s going to be worse than him in looks, personality, income, and family background, because if she had even one thing that was exceptional, she could’ve married a higher class partner.
And this causes a downward spiral.
The poorer a man, the more he needs to pay in order to get married.
The more they pay to get married, the harder it’ll be to turn their life around.
And as for the woman, they never had any hopes of turning their life around to begin with, so they might as well wring whatever profits they can out of a man.
And so an unsolvable problem has formed—for lower-class rural man, the only solution is to not play the game.
But to do that, you need to overcome thousands of years of traditional values, and the biological impulses built into your body, and that’s very difficult. But if you can pull it off, you can live better than the vast majority of your peers.”
Comments say, “That last bit was brilliant.”
“How horrifying, this marriage has ruined his life.”
“Hahaha, so long as man can get married at all, they’ll do it at any cost, or else be branded as an absolute pariah in all their relatives and friends’ eyes.”
“Is anyone paying attention to this? In Huzhou, Changxing, this girl got locked in a rear naked choke.
She made a big long post describing how she was strangled into unconsciousness countless times in the elevator at night, even threatened with a knife. The culprit said he didn’t want money or sex, he just wanted her to make a phone call in the store. But she was worried that once she went somewhere private and hidden like a store, she would have even less of a chance of escaping, so despite how terrified and nervous she was, she kept fighting and stayed calm despite being choked out, and absolutely refused to open the door to the store. Finally, she was able to escape by screaming.
Comments say, “Men are pretending they can’t see this again.”
“Oh my god, girls need to protect themselves better! You have to carry a self defense weapon with you at all times!”
“At first, I thought this guy must be fresh at this, he’s still not willing to kill, so that’s why even though he intimidated that he’s killed people before, he always let her go when she got close to dying. But then I read the comment section and realised this actually indicated a lot of practice and skill…how scary…”
“It’s so nice you were able to scream. I got beat every time I cried as a kid, and after a while, I literally don’t know how to scream anymore, sigh…”
A tiktok video of a girl receiving a gift of a solid gold apple from her boyfriend:
Comments say, “Woke up laughing at how poor I am today.”
“Please God, I’m willing to drive Ferraris and live in my own mansion, if only I could meet a boyfriend like this.”
“When I saw how much trouble she had even picking up that apple, I knew something was up.”
“If we really want to tank our birth rate, then not only do we have to force young people to work 007 hours [midnight to midnight, 7 days a week], take away all of their relaxation time, and we have to put them deep in debt, to the point that they have no hope of paying it back.
Not only do we have to keep up the above steps until they’re old, we have to make sure they can never truly retire, and have to keep working side gigs, keep paying back their debt, or make enough money to try to cover their medical expenses.
This way, when they’re old, they can’t come up with any money to subsidise their kids, so their kids have no safety net to rely on to keep having more kids.
Once we get into this situation, then our birth rate will have truly hit the floor.
Look at Japan and Korea. That’s what’s going on here.
So if you want an indication of what’s going to happen with China’s birth rate, you just need to look at two indicators:
Young people’s weekly work hours and level of debt
Old people’s savings amount and spending.
Only when 1 is high and 2 is low that birth rate is going to fall.
Or else, at least in the short term, birth rate isn’t really going to get that low. This temporary lull is only because of the shockwaves of covid.
Anyone who ignores the impact of covid when talking about birth rate are all just spouting shit.”
Comments say, “I’ve seen someone else say that birth rate is falling because the number of young women is getting lower now.”
“I feel like right now, 1 is high but 2 is also high.”
“This is why we need to put an end to 007 and 996. Long term, it’s detrimental to society.”
A tiktok video of if Michelin star restaurant served pasta:
Comments say, “This cook should be glad Italy isn’t a nuclear power.”
“I feel like any Italian that saw this video would dedicate the rest of their lives to hunting down this cook. I was blown away when I saw him bring out a steamer.”
“I was just about to say that this new spin on pizza might be a bit too revolutionary.”
“Recently, a case of buddhist monks sexually assaulting buddhist nuns has been exposed in Japan that has been covered up for 14 years. This 80-year-old esteemed monk guy was working with his 60-year-old disciple to brainwash a 50-year-old nun to sexually assault her, false imprison her, and brainwash her. There’s a lot of scary details in this case.”
OP attaches screenshots on a detailed news report of the case. It’s long, so I won’t bother going into all the details, but if you’ve seen literally any Netflix documentary on cults, it’s that. She eventually escaped her brainwashing and reported the case to the police, but they weren’t able to bring any charges due to “lack of evidence”.
Comments say, “The biggest draw to religion is people’s imaginations.”
“Shouldn’t this be up to the justice system to investigate and prosecute? Sexual assault is against the law. How can they just leave it up to the temple to resolve internally?”
“Wow, has this deepened my stereotypes about Japan.”
“Went back for my grandpa’s birthday, and for some reason, my dad and him started fighting in the afternoon. But then I realised, they kind of don’t need a reason to fight.
They were swearing at each other, mostly about how my dad’s been through three marriages and never had a son, ending the noble lineage of the X family with him. My grandpa kept insinuating awful things at my stepmom, and they got louder and louder, until I heard my grandpa tell my dad that he was an ungrateful bastard and he deserved to die alone.
My ears were ringing and I needed a breath of fresh air, but I ran into my stepmom coming back from the grocery store at the door. Her face was deathly pale, and I comforted her, “Don’t worry, you don’t have to care about anything he says. Old fart is in his 80s. He might not even be around next year.”
And she looked at me in shock and fear.
I was going to apologise about how my whole family is made up of crazy fucks, but then I realised she chose this marriage for herself and it’s none of my business. So I just said I was going out for a smoke and I’m not gonna come back tonight.”
Comments say, “How ridiculous. I’ve never seen anything so well written and yet so utterly illogical.”
“Stepmom: this family’s mental state is so special that I don’t think I can fit in.”
“How can you smoke when you’re a girl.”
Sorry but Amazon and U-Haul don't exist in China. These are American companies, most Chinese people have never heard of them. To see them in a text about China as if it was part of Chinese life is very weird, as if entering an alternate reality. If it's a choice by the translator, it's a big mistake. It would be much better to use the original Chinese names, or just to use generic descriptive terms like "delivery boxes" or "moving company".