05/03/24 - Hu fled to his hometown in Jiangxi, and withdrew the ATM daily limit every day to transfer the savings away.
““It’s always women lining up in boba tea cafes, while men are eating 10 RMB bentos.”
Sometimes, I really don’t get why men like to swap concepts so much. Bottom-class women live much harder lives than bottom-class men. And upper class men live much better lives than upper class women. But they love to compare underclass men to middle-class women.
Why?
Because in their eyes, bottom class women don’t exist. They can’t see it, so they vent all of their frustrations at the closest target—middle-class, or even upper class, women.
Then again, they can smoke and drink and it’s all because of the stress of life. But they’ll freak out if women drink a cup of boba tea, even if she’s not spending their money, because they sincerely think that these women drinking boba tea are taking their money.”
Comments say, “I’ve seen people hurl abuse at lesbians, at Chongqing girls, at Yunnan/Guizhou/Sichuan girls. Even girls are worried about being slandered…we just have too high of a moral line.”
“If the Soviet Union was anywhere near as unified as men are, it wouldn’t have fallen.”
“Oh, another really annoying line, “Roses appear in trash cans all the time, but you never see carnations.” [Carnations are traditional mother’s day flowers in China.] How many men confess their love by force or try to force kisses on girls? Throwing away their flowers is being nice. Now they think about their mothers?”
A video of a man hitting his wife over the head with a brick and kicking her while she’s down, supposedly because she didn’t make him lunch. There’s no way youtube will let me post this, but in the original video, an older and younger woman are driving back home on their scooter, with a kid squatting in the floor in front of the scooter, when a man in a blue shirt runs up and hits her over the head with a brick, causing her to fall over and pitch the scooter over on its side in the process as well. She gets stuck under the scooter, while he runs around and kicks her several times.
Comments say, “This is murder. Domestic violence doesn’t exist. It’s just a way to hide violence behaviour with the law.”
“What kind of life has this grandma been living? T_T”
“These two should smother him with a pillow over night and just tell everyone he had a heart attack. This kind of bastard is better off dead.”
A blogger posts an old piece of news, asking, “How come we never got an update on this?”
The news story reads, “#Man marries intellectually disabled woman and cons 4.5 million out of her. Ms. Fu is 33-years-old this year, and was born with a slight intellectual disability, and lives with her grandma in Putuo, Shanghai. In 2015, she moved with her grandma into an eminent domain compensation house worth 3.5 million and was also given 1 million in cash in compensation. Ms. Fu was later introduced to Hu, who was coming to Shanghai from out of state to work. After their marriage, they never lived together, and Hu constantly demanded money from her, and even threatened her grandma to force her to sell the house for 3.5 million. After obtaining the bank card to the account with 4.5 million in savings, Hu fled to his hometown in Jiangxi, and withdrew the ATM daily limit every day to transfer the savings away. Ms. Fu’s grandma passed away early this year, and Fu wants her husband to return her money, but Hu was utterly shameless on the phone, “Even if the courts and the cops came after me, I still don’t have any money.””
Comments say, “Even if there’s aftermath to that case, we’ll certainly track the latest case of the girl who conned a couple hundred thousand out of some guy to the end.”
“This is only news when it happens to a guy. This sort of shit happening for a woman is just every day life.”
“If the genders were switched in this, all women in the world would get judged to hell and back.”
A compilation of “A trope you really love that no one’s used in a novel yet”. Think of it as a compilation of writing prompts:
“I don’t remember where I found this, but god, I want to read something like this. I’ve saved this screenshot forever, but I still haven’t found any fics like this, so I ended up having to write it myself.” [The screenshot reads, “Do you guys know how snipers are worried their breath will show in the air when they’re conducting a mission in winter, so they’ll hold an ice cube in their house? It’s super sexy, right? I wanna see a newbie sniper keeping the bad guy in his sights, but suddenly, his target vanishes. Just as he’s panicking, the bad guy grips his hair from behind and kisses him and takes the ice cube from his mouth. “Who were you trying to shoot, rookie?””]
“The protagonist and sidekick are all looking for the truth to some conspiracy. They go through hell and back, only to find out at the end that the protagonist is the big bad. I just want that moment when, “Oh, it was me all along?”, where the protagonist, the sidekick, and the readers are all lost and confused.”
“Two rivals who hate each other and yet fall in love with each other, it’s love mixed with killing intent, flirting on the edge of a blade. One second, they’re kissing passionately in the dark. The next second, they’ve got a knife at each other’s throat, their blood on each other’s hands. You can never tell who betrayed who first, they’re covering up their love with hate, but they’re also showing their love with hate.”
“The male lead is entirely incapable of getting erect, and can only satisfy the female lead with his hands and toys. He’s absolutely loyal and loves the female lead with all of his insecurities.”
“I want a beautifully tragic fic, where the female lead’s crush sacrificed himself for his country or something. She was always in love with him, she never forgets him throughout the whole fic. It doesn’t matter if she’s in love with the male lead, better if she’s not. But nobody can actually write a crush like a perfect crush, and nobody can write how much pain the male lead feels. I don’t want to compromise on what I want.”
“A pair of twins who are both tops with awful personalities. When they meet their bottom, they can’t help but want to play pranks on him. So the older brother confesses his love and goes on dates with the bottom all the time, but in actuality, sometimes, it’s the older brother who goes, and sometimes, it’s the younger brother who goes. The bottom looks really naive, like he never noticed anything was up. Until one time, the younger brother goes to a dinner date instead of the older brother, and finds the bottom ordered a certain dish that his older brother was allergic to. So he’s like, “Don’t you know that I’m allergic?” And the bottom gives him a confused look, “I thought it was your brother who was allergic? Since when did you become allergic?””
“Fake Death trope. I want the protagonist to reach his climax, where he’s beloved and adored by everyone, and suddenly get assassinated by the big bad. But actually, he’s just started over, and left everyone to mourn him in grief.”
“I just thought of a great trope for a real/fake princess story. [Where the daughter of some rich family got swapped with the daughter from a poor family at birth, and this is found out when they’re both grown up, and drama ensues.] The real princess grew up with a lot of hardship, and ended up a very cold and hard person as a result. Even after she went back to her birth parents, she might have more materialistic resources, but she’s still not close to her birth parents. The fake princess is kind and sensitive, and can feel the subtle uneasiness between the real princess and her parents, and she feels guilty and doesn’t want to be abandoned, so she does everything she can to be nice to the real princess.
The real princess knows she’s a lesbian, and uses the fake princess’s guilt towards her to demand all kinds of stuff. God, that sounds like such a sexy premise. Anyone got any recommendations?”
“Back in the day, female teachers were really popular. To be precise, a lot of female teachers have really badass spouses.
But actually, that’s getting the cause and effect backwards.
Back in the day, a lot of workplaces and institutions will help their elites settle their family. Since most elite men married educated wives, a lot of them got put to work in schools. So the reality is, the wives of accomplished men are more likely to become teachers, not that you’re more likely to marry wealthy if you’re a teacher.
(The same goes for the children of elites, for the same reason.)
This phenomenon is especially common in associated schools [a thing in China, where famous universities like Beijing University would have associated high schools and middle schools and primary schools and even daycares, where you more or less have a straight track to getting into Beijing University if you manage to make it in.]
Back in the day, a lot of different workplaces had their own associated schools, for educating their workers’ children, and they’d hire their workers’ family as teachers. That’s how all the various University of Blah Primary School, University of Whatever Middle School comes from. Though they don’t necessarily say so in the name.
Even a lot of really ordinary schools now might’ve been the associated school of some important project back in the day, and you never know what connections the people inside have. There are some families in there that have a lot of pull in the local area.
As for Beijing, it’s covered with associated schools at every street corner, and the institution they’re associated with are very high level too. The concentration and power of elites is on a different tier.
But a lot of people don’t see the cause behind it at all, and raise their dating criteria to absolutely ridiculous levels, so of course they absolutely fail at dating.”
Comments say, “But that’s like literally decades ago. Nobody becomes a teacher because of their spouse anymore, you need the actual license, and you need to study and work hard for it. And nobody marries well because of their job (we’ve got a lot of old maids at our school working as teachers).”
“It’s true, there’s a lot of people with deep family backgrounds and connections in the education system, and some people think they got their status because of their job, but they actually got the job because of their status.”
“Teachers are government workers. They make average money, but have good benefits, and two big breaks every year. With the economy as it is, it’s at least a guaranteed stable job. It’s honestly not that weird for teachers to have high standards. That’s how the dating markets work. Some jobs might not get you in touch with the elites, but it at least means you never have to date down.”
One story I've always wanted to read is one where two characters are constantly sniping at each other and it's played like it's repressed sexual tension and building up to the point where they eventually realize their true feelings -- and then it turns out that no, they just genuinely dislike each other.
By way of comparison to the bentos, how much does a boba tea cost in China?