Yaya the Panda has arrived in Shanghai today, along with the dead body of Lele, another panda. A lot of people have gathered at the Shanghai zoo and piled the door with bouquets, bamboo shoots, and buckets of milk, leaving messages of, “Welcome home, Lele!” “We’ll take care of you, Yaya!”
Comments say, “We should have a livestream of Yaya 24/7, so everyone can keep an eye on her and make sure she’s treated well. Don’t forget, we still need to rescue Meixiang and her family too.”
A doctor writes about three cases at his hospital this week, “First, a young girl with heart failure who shat out 18 litres of water over the course of two days. Samsca is really a miracle dieting drug.
Next, we had a end-stage cancer patient whose family is asking for a Do Not Resuscitate, and even wanted us to pull the plug on him. That is, remove the feeding tube we’ve put in. I told them that I’m not allowed to do that, but hinted that they could withdraw him from the hospital. But his wife said that she didn’t have the heart to starve him to death at home. As though I have the heart to starve him to death at the hospital???
Finally, we had a man who injured his back, and went to a shady traditional medicine place to do blood letting and cupping. He let out an entire 1000 ml of blood, and had gotten an injection in his spine of weird purple fluid. We never could figure out what it was. After that, he fell unconscious and began having a seizure. We ran his blood work, and it came back with a Staph infection and MRSA. Day before yesterday, his heart stopped after seven days of treatment. Such a shame…”
Comments ask, “Wait, wait, wait, WTF? A traditional medicine doctor did an injection directly into his spine??? With a mysterious fluid that wasn’t even sterile? Directly? In his spine? Are we sure this isn’t premeditated murder?”
The doctor replies, “This is actually the third case I’ve seen of the exact same thing.”
“It’s only after I had a kiddo that I’m finding out just how crazy the tutoring industry is in China. My baby was a little over three months old when I got a call from a tutoring agency, asking me, “Hi, does your child need tutoring?”
I practically laughed in his face. But someone in my friend group is also a new mother, living in a small, middle of nowhere town, who took her kid to tutoring classes and saw kids here as young as just two months old. There were five babies in total in that class, and two of them slept through the whole entire session. These classes require full parent participation too. Not like you can just drop your kid off and play on your phone. There was a three month old baby there who hadn’t eaten beforehand, and spent the first 20 minutes crying and the last 20 minutes sleeping.
I was like, this is some fucked up shit. This whole society is fucked. We can’t stand to let anyone just chill. We have to push everyone to the brink of their sanity.
Honestly, I haven’t even bothered to read my kid baby books, and she still knows how to say mama at five and a half months. Thank god I didn’t sign her up for any classes, or else I’d be siting here thinking that it was all because of them. Instead of giving credits to my awesome genes.”
Comments reply, “My kiddo was eight months old when we got a call from a tutoring agency saying that babies this age should know how to say mama. I told him that mine knows how to say both mama and dada. So the sales agent asked, “Well, does he know how to say grandma and grandpa?” And I was like, “Are you even listening to yourself right now.””
A tiktok video of a mother yelling at her daughter for ordering too much takeout and not finishing it.
“Look, look, look, what the fuck is this? If you can’t finish it, just don’t fucking order it. Look at what you’ve tossed away!”
“These are all single servings!” the daughter protests.
“These are single servings? So just buy one of them! Don’t buy three!”
“I wanted to try them all.”
“You want to try them all? What about when you can’t finish them?”
“I can save it ’til tomorrow.”
“Then why did you throw it in the trash?”
“I didn’t put it in the trash?”
“Fucking say that again! Isn’t this the trash? This is our trash bag. That’s the paper I threw away. That’s your sausage, your cornbread.”
“God, stop nagging! You’re always nagging all day long! None of my friend’s moms nag like you do.”
“I’m nagging?? So it’s fine to throw food away? If other people’s moms are so good, go live with them! Stop calling me mom then!”
Commenters say, “Rebellious, selfish, lying, this is the kind of person your daughter is.”
A blogger asks the comment section to come up with a good city for living, with the requirements, “1. House prices below 10K per square metre. 2. Good transportation network, with high speed rail and an airport. 3. Four distinctive seasons and no extreme temperatures. 4. Good food. 5. Good hospitals. 6. Has mountains, beaches, and nightlife.”
The comment section could come up with no such thing.
An author writes, “I heard a story. In this story, even though it was the man who lost a bunch of time and money, because I’m a woman, I still can’t help but think that it was the girl who got the shorter end of the stick.
The boy went to uni in America and stayed to work in the states. A new Chinese family moved into his neighbourhood, with a girl a little younger than him who’s going to uni. He fell in love with her at the first sight.
She was young and wanted to have fun, so he spent all of his money and every free minutes after work having fun with her. She said she doesn’t want to marry and doesn’t want kids. He fully agrees with it. But after a few years, the girl and her family decides they don’t like life in America and moves back to China. He decide to abandon everything and follow them back.
The girl went to Shanghai, so he went to Shanghai too, and spent half a year finding a job that he liked. They never lived together, because she said that she wanted her own space. They don’t hang out all the time though, only seeing each other once or twice a week. She’s an independent girl, she has her own work, but it’s nothing super skilled, just boring data-entry type mindless office work. But she pays her own rent and buys her own take out. But she goes to Europe every year to buy shoes, and spends 200K+ on it, and that’s all his money.
I asked a friend who’s also into shoes how many pairs 200K can buy. The friend said, “Well, it depends on the brand, but probably about a dozen pairs?” The friend added that usually, you get sick of shoes once you have a couple hundred pairs.
They spent another five years in Shanghai like this, when the girl’s family decides to immigrate to Hong Kong. Of course, she’s going with them. For the first time, the guy hesitated. He’s over thirty now. He’s wondering if he has to start over again. He knows how well his colleagues in America have done. He knows how much potential he has in Shanghai. This is the most important period in his career. Can he abandon everything again?
The guy’s family is very frustrated. They want to talk him down, but he’s not willing. Every time they open their mouth, he insists that he knows what he’s doing and this is his private business. His mother is worrying herself sick. She said that, “I’d rather that they’d just gotten married. The millions he’d spent on her shoes could pay the down payment on a house. It wouldn’t be enough for a place in Shanghai, but both the girl and him are from a second-line city. It should just barely be enough. Even if they got divorced and the girl walked away with half of it, it would be better than this. What can you do with millions of RMB’s worth of shoes?”
But he won’t listen to her advice. Young people who are throwing themselves at the flame like moths never listen. But his hesitation showed them a ray of hope.
I understand this young man, and I understand this young lady too. She’s keeping him on as a safe back up. She likes how good he is to her, but she thinks she can do better. He’s not tall enough, or handsome enough, or rich enough. He’s just a white collar worker.
For the guy, this is cruelty, is failure, is erosion of his determination every day. And anyone who can cut their losses is a true legend. But he’s still too young. He can’t make himself do it. He’s willing to make a bet, to wait for her to figure out that he’s the best option for her.
But the girl never expected one thing. Perhaps from the moment she was aware of herself, she’s been beautiful, cute, pursued after. In her teens, in her twenties, in her thirties, it’s always been true. But she doesn’t realise that she is leaving this peak of attractiveness. She is on a downward slope. Now that she’s in her mid-thirties, the loyalest of her dogs are hesitating.
She has shoes worth a million RMB, but other than that, she has no professional skills, no long-term career. She has lots of experience with fun, she knows every colour nail polish comes in. But these experiences aren’t going to be useful in the rest of her life. There are certainly men out there that she’d marry in a heartbeat, but when she was at her most beautiful, in her mid-twenties, she didn’t meet them. Or they didn’t want her.
They’re bound to break up. The guy has a great education and a great resume. If he made himself cut it off and focused on making money for a few years, he can still marry and have kids and live happily ever after. For the man, this is just a small obstacle in his life, a little regret.
But what about the girl? She’s had ten years of her life wasted too. But she can’t even complain about it to other people, because she’d caused it herself.
So, at the end of the day, I still think she got screwed, even though a lot of people might think that she’d won.”
Comments agree, “Another beautiful girl who fell into the same trap.”
The news that a primary school is showing their students PSAs on why there should be no bride price is going viral, with people commenting: “Men who are handsome wants the whole world to be filled with women that are turned on by looks. Men who have a great voice want the whole world to be women that get turned on by sexy voices. Men who work out want all women to have a muscle fetish. Rich men want all women to be gold diggers. Gentle, sweet, nice men want all women to care about personality. Talented men want all women to be into talent, to care about soul. Smart men want all women to be turned on by high IQ.
Men who are absolutely worthless are the greatest of all. They want all women in the world to not want money, not want looks, not care about voice or muscle or soul. To have no consideration for the next generation’s IQ. They want women to blind themselves and marry into their family with her own house and her own car and birth him a whole litter of kids who all take his surname and then immediately go back to work and support him with her money while he’s typing on the internet, “My wife doesn’t want cars or houses or the kids to take her name, she works and cleans and that’s what kind of feminism I respect. No man would want you farm feminists.”
“I support zero bride price. It’ll finally show people why they can’t get a wife.”
“Yeah, it’s better to cancel bride price and make everyone actually compete with their capabilities. That way, better genes get to continue on. Truly great men don’t need money to get married.”
“I support genderless marriage price. Whoever pays the money works, the other stays at home full time. Whoever pays the money gets to dictate how many children they have and when. For holidays, they go to the family of whoever paid the money. The children take the surname of whoever paid the money. Whoever took the money does all the housework. That way, I can get a male wife as a woman.”
“My husband complained endlessly about bride price when we married, and now that our daughter is older, he’s saying that she absolutely has to have a bride price. God, men can be absolutely shameless. He gave me 40K of bride price and told everyone that he spent 200K. I asked him if he’s counting what the rats in the attic eat on my tab too, and he said that if the sum is too low, his friends will look down on him. Ha.”
“My best friend and I agree on this—desirable men have never needed a bride price. It’s only low-quality men who need to pay.”
“Guess why they show it in primary school? Cause if they showed this to adults, they’d get flooded with so much hate they’d have to close the comment section.”
“Even fifth and sixth graders are smarter than this nowadays. We just covered a short story about how great mothers are the other day, and my entire class was asking me, so where’s the dad? Is he dead? Why doesn’t he ever help out? Why does the mom have to do everything?”
“You know, if you really don’t want to pay, you could just marry another man, right?”
“I just want to ask men, without bride price, what else can you put up as a reason for women to marry you and have children with you? Paying money is the easiest way to get a wife.”
Someone complains, “My neighbour built a huge shoe cabinet in the common area of our apartment floor. The tiny wooden shelf next to it is my shoe cabinet. I’ve talked to them, and they refuse to take it down, saying they paid a designer for it. I’ve called the apartment managers, and they won’t do anything about it either. Could I build a bigger shoe case like this?”
Comments say, “That’s a lot of effort. Just put up a string between his house and yours and start hanging up all kinds of ratty-looking men’s underwear, so they have to walk through your underwear to get to their shoes.”
A fashion blogger posts a video saying, “I want all mothers to know that you child at least has to look this pretty before they even have a chance of being a child model.”
Comment section says, “Yes, but all mothers think their babies are exactly as pretty as that, so there’s no point in talking to them.”
Tutoring with full parental participation, and starting with babies? Absolutely wild
Also just wanted to say thank you for doing these every day, I look forward to them and always learn something new!
Also can't think of any city globally that meets those requirements. Maybe Beirut?