04/03/24 - On the train hurtling towards the future, some people are passengers, some people are fuel.
“I saw an unusual area of China with my drone. Is this a slum?”
Comments say, “Isn’t this normal? We’re a developing country. Don’t like it? Then emigrate to America. It’s heaven over there.”
“The housing prices for one of those units sure doesn’t look anything like a slum.”
“They’ve got water, electricity, and internet, and sophisticated infrastructure. The housing might be old, but they’re not dirty or messy or unhygienic. What’s this got to do with slums?”
“I’m confused. My coworker says that we get three days off for Qing Ming [Chinese Memorial Day], but we have to work an extra day, so we basically get two days of holiday. But we normally get two days off anyways because of the weekend. So we don’t actually get any days off for Qing Ming?”
Comments say, “Normally, it’s 1 2 3 4 5 off off. Now, it’s 1 2 3 off off off 7. If they don’t switch the days around to be together, it’d be 1 2 3 off 5 off off. They’re basically pushing out your Friday to Sunday instead. Is that so hard to understand?”
“Ignore everything else, normally you get two days off for your weekend, right? But you’re getting three days off this week because of Qing Ming, right? So you’re getting an extra day off.”
“But you have to work a day extra the week after too.”
“If you take Sunday off too, you’d get 4 days off.”
“Right, you’re supposed to get Thursday off, but your work day on Friday got moved to Sunday, so it’s basically one day off.”
A mother is posting about her 15-year-old son who committed suicide at school due to bullying. She posts her story to the school’s parents group chat, “Fellow parents, my son has thrown himself off of a building due to bullying and has passed away. He was only 15! Some classmates saw that he was beaten up by two students yesterday, causing his suicidal behaviour. A 15-year-old child wouldn’t escalate to suicide after just being beaten once. The security cameras show that he paced in the corridor for over four minutes before he tried jumping, because he has a fear of heights. You can imagine how wronged he must’ve felt to choose to jump anyways.
Because he’s an introverted kid, every time we ask about school at home, he always reassures me that there’s nothing to worry about. He’s not the kind of kid that gets into trouble. He’s very shy. And none of the school teachers ever brought anything up about this. I only found out he was getting beaten up by two classmates after I asked around at school after learning what happened today. His homeroom teacher claims to now know anything.
Fellow parents, my child is already gone, but he needs justice. If you stand by and watch today, then what will happen to your children in the future? It’ll just show the bullies that, look, even though someone died, it’s no big deal at all. They would only get more fearless and proud.
He paced the corridor for four minutes. The first time he climbed over the railing, he climbed back because he got scared. If anyone glimpsed the cameras during these four minutes, could he have been saved?
You can look on the internet and there’s all kinds of stories of bullying at school. Last month, we had the story of the three kids who buried a classmate of theirs. Just a few days ago, a girl in Handan left a suicide note and jumped off a building. We need to start paying attention to this, parents. Don’t just take your kids word for it when they say there’s no bullying. My son is the best example.”
The teacher disbanded the group chat after she posted this story. When she posted on a different group chat platform, the teachers first deleted everything she posted, and then muted her.
Comments say, “I’ve been saying this whole time, all these bullies are just the underlings of irresponsible teachers.”
“More and more people are going to die. The law can’t do anything about it, no wonder the school and the teachers can’t do anything about it either. I guess parents will just have to fight it with their lives. This is a deformed society we’ve got here.”
“They’ll get told off, and after a while, everyone will forget. They’ll keep going to school, keep being bullies, and it doesn’t matter, because all their records will be sealed. This is the bastards that the Underage Minors Protection Law is protecting.”
“This is a receipt a netizen posted showing the price of Chinese food in America, maybe to show that the actual exchange rate between USD and RMB is 1:1. This is just a hole in the wall, and he spent 323 USD there, and only ordered very ordinary food—green beans and eggplants, sour shredded potato, tomato and eggs, mapo tofu, roast peppers, sweet and sour pork.
With a 1:7 exchange rate, this meal would cost the equivalent of 2100 RMB. Look at this restaurant, this decor, this level of cuisine. There’s no way you’d have to pay that much in China. If you take the exchange rate to be 1:1, that looks much closer to normal Chinese prices.
So, it’s not easy to make money in America, but it’s sure easy to spend money. A lot of people run off to America to work their ass off for 2-3K a month, but it disappears from your pockets just as fast as 2-3K RMB. Some might say that iPhones are cheaper in America, but that’s the only thing that’s true for. And you can’t buy an iPhone every day. But you do need to eat everyday, and food costs just as much in America as in China, and you have much less choices.
Sometimes, you have to drive for 15-20 miles just to have some Chinese food, but there’s tons of tasty cuisine just outside your door in China. So, Chinese people really aren’t happy at all in America.”
Comments say, “You ask anybody, and they’ll tell you how much America sucks. But not a one of them wants to come back though. :P”
“Chinese food is meant to be expensive, though. Hamburgers are only a couple of USD.”
“This is basically the equivalent of fast food in China, isn’t it? Looking at the prices and the customers, it doesn’t seem fancy at all.”
“My roommate is keeping a cat in her dorm. She found it after someone else abandoned it (she’s been mentioning since last semester that she wants to get a cat though.)
She sleeps with the cat in her bed at night, but her kitten doesn’t like to be cuddled, so it’s always fighting her. And then I’d start hearing things being smashed and cats screaming until they’re hoarse.
And I found out that she’s been holding her cat and making it watch cat torture videos. She always saying, “[Cat’s name], look, look how some people treat their cats! You’ve got to behave for me, you know?”
Nobody else in the dorm reacted. I dunno if anyone noticed or not. But I just completely froze, like I broke out in a cold sweat.
Maybe she eventually realised this was fucked up too, and mumbled something about, “I hate people who abuse cats.” But the cat still wouldn’t sleep with her and ran off, and now it’s acting all alarmed even when I try to pet it.
Does anyone else get that chilled feeling? Like, it’s not a big deal, and she does take care of the cat really well, but I’m honestly kinda scared.”
Comments say, “She seems like someone who’d abuse cats.”
“My homeroom teacher in middle school tried to talk my family into sending me to rehab school [China’s version of troubled teens camps].”
“She’s treating her cat like an object.”
A compilation of problems with educational resource distribution:
“I remember a news story, like the Antarctica scientific research team ran into a class of primary schoolers going to Antarctica for their spring excursion.”
“This is such a concrete example of “unfair distribution of educational resources” that you read about in textbooks.”
“The first lesson I learned in society was to accept my own mediocrity. My high school classmate went to intern at a foreign-funded corporation in Lujiazui [prestigious area of Shanghai] as soon as she graduated, living in the same building as retired professors from East China University of Science and Technology. She gifted me a Miumiu, and I didn’t know what to give her back, and she said I should buy her some 2 RMB a serving bamboo rice from outside our school.”
“On the train hurtling towards the future, some people are passengers, some people are fuel.”
“Even though they have better educational resources, they also have easier exams <3”
“It only took Ming [generic placeholder name] 10 minutes to walk to the Youth Palace, it took me 19 years and I’m still not quite there.”
“I’ve only seen the words “spring excursion” in textbooks.”
“I just found out that even technical schools in Beijing have coming of age parties. I’ve only ever seen one in anime.”
“Lol, I went to get my passport last week for the first time in my life at age 26, and saw a bunch of middle schoolers in school uniforms waiting in the lobby. Makes me feel bad, that they’re going overseas at such a young age, and it took me until 26 to save up enough money to go myself.”
“I only found out what “student-directed learning” was after I already graduated from college.”
“I remember a line from my geography class, “The main economy advantage of this region is its plentiful cheap labour.””
“When I went to the Forbidden Palace for the first time, I was really shocked. [Attach pictures of primary schoolers in the Forbidden Palace]. They really have classes in here. It was my first time ever going to the Forbidden Palace.”
“Reminds me of a saying. Nothing in this world is fair. Even your heart favours one side.”
“My first time taking my kid to Beijing’s Natural Science Museum was also my first time going myself. What was shocking was that a bunch of three year olds were lining up to look at dinosaur fossils, and the daycare teacher asked the kids why dinosaurs lay eggs in piles of rotten grass. And this 3-4 year old kid went, “Because dinosaur eggs need heat to hatch, and the process of grass rotting emits heat.” I was blown away. I really felt the vast difference between educational resources. Rural kids might never see this their entire lives.”
“There’s a story behind every ridiculous rule. I just want to know what happened in this Qinghua Lecture Hall.”
OP attaches a photo of a rule posted on the wall, that says, “To protect the harmony of the lecture hall, the safety of our instructors, and the order of our business, as of the 28th of December, 2017, we are adding a rule to the Classroom Management Policy.
Do not bring any pets or animals that might affect public order or other people’s mental or physical health into the lecture hall.
We are asking all students to abide by the Classroom Management Policy and inform each other of any new rules.
Thank you for your cooperation.”
Comments reply, “There was someone who was keeping hundreds of cockroaches as feed, and they all got out and ran away.”
“When I was going to school, a classmate in the same building hatched a crocodile in their dorm. By the time they found it, it was already over a metre long and trying to bite people.”
“I’ve seen porcupines and minks too. The most ridiculous one was a Hainan student who tamed a skunk.”
A daycare in Jiangsu has been uploading videos of kiddos there cooking food, steaming bread, keeping chickens, and learning to sew, drawing a lot of attention. On the 3rd of April, workers at the daycare informs Red Star News that this is a part of the daily “labour lesson” at the daycare, for the purpose of directing kids away from electronic products and teaching them practical, life skills. After the videos were posted, it drew plenty of mockery from netizens, calling it, “This isn’t daycare, it’s slave care [辛者库, the department where slaves were raised to serve the imperial palace.].” The daycare worker claims that, “I had to look up the term to see what it means, and I disapprove of putting such derogatory names on what we do here.”
Comments say, “Look what great jobs they’re doing! And they’re making real food that can get eaten too! This is all genuine skill!”
“What kind of a gross scumbag do you have to be to say something like that to such little kids?”
“Kids who know how to do housework are especially smart.”
I can't quite make it out, but it looks like there's something strange in the windows of that big yellow building in the bottom left -- do you know what that is?
I feel like food in particular is a poor choice for comparison of prices, because America has much stricter food safety rules, which make food significantly more expensive here.