Today, 12th of May in China, is the 15th anniversary of the Earthquake in Wenzhou, Sichuan. People’s Daily News posts a mini-documentary in memorial to the event, covering the survivors who had lost limbs and became successful athletes, the children who were saved by soldiers who joined the military in turn, and so on and so forth.
Comments say, “It’s been fifteen years in the blink of an eye. When I see some of these images, I still want to cry. Fifteen years ago, some people left forever, some people stayed behind. Those who stayed, are you doing alright? What about those who left? The children in Wenchuan, the mothers who protected their kids with their bodies, the teachers, the sacrificed soldiers, are you alright in heaven? Do you see how we’ve rebuilt below? Remember history, fight for the future, that’s how we continue on.”
A blogger reposts a post by a mother, “Just got ear piercings for my one-month old baby. According to the instructions, I need to wash her ears with soap every day, but I’m too lazy and haven’t done it once. Thank god the baby was strong.”
Comments say, “Back in the day though, women do get ear piercings as soon as they’re born.”
“This is super normal.”
“We’ve got a saying around here that getting ear piercings will prevent near-sightedness. And yeah, after I got my ears pierced, my eyesight never got any worse.”
“Kids don’t feel pain, and it won’t grow shut as easily. I got my ears pierced three days after being born, and never wore studs in them all through primary school, and the holes were still there at highschool.”
A mother posts, “For my daughter’s school excursion, I prepared an awesome lunch of a muskmelon, an ear of corn, and an egg. But all she had all day was a carton of milk. What, does she have a problem with this food?”
Comments ask, “Excursion? Do you have some kind of vengeance against your daughter? There are tons of snacks at the supermarket, why do you insist on humiliating her during her excursion? Corn is hard as a rock once it gets cold. Cold eggs will stick to your throat and choke you to death if you don’t have water. She only goes on one excursion a year, why do you have to ruin it?”
“Dude, you didn’t even peel the muskmelon and cut it into pieces. What the fuck is she supposed to do? Bite through it with her mouth?”
“To save all of you time: she’s from a rural village, no money, has a crown prince son, preparing for a third child.”
“Oh, now it makes sense. She’s just finding an excuse to justify hating her daughter, so she can justify treating her daughter like shit.”
“All of this is heavy as shit too.”
A mother seeks advice, “My 9-year-old kids is saying super inappropriate opinions about comfort women. How do I go about educating him?
I’ve got a 9-year-old son who’s always been very smart and unique, with a strong personality. He often says very bizarre things, and as he’s gotten older, his weird, inappropriate opinions have only increased and brought a lot of headache to our family.
He’d previously said some bad things at the Sino-Japanese War Museum before, so we thought we’d use this weekend to teach him patriotism and increase his reading comprehension, so we had him read an article about comfort women.
A quick summary of the article is something like, “During the Sino-Japanese War, Japan tooka lot of Chinese women and forced them to sleep with Japanese soldiers. In order to prevent the spread of STDs, these women were injected forcibly with Medicine 606, which contains arsenic. As a side-effect, it’ll cause severe kidney damage and sterilisation, but will quickly kill syphilis and other bacteria. This type of medicine was never meant to be used on humans, but the Japanese used it on Chinese women. They were treating them like animals.”
And then the article goes on to talk about how, due to the cruelty of the Japanese, almost all comfort women lost the ability to have children. They wanted to be mothers so bad, but as women, they wouldn’t fulfil their destiny of being mothers. These women are truly pitiable, blah, blah, blah.
After he was done reading, we asked our son to share his feelings, and he first expressed his sympathy for comfort women, and how he was against wars of invasion, and then he started saying some weird stuff.
“Our teacher said in class that you don’t have to marry or have kids.It’s a personal choice. Boys needs to respect girls. Not every girl wants to have kids. So, I feel like you can’t say that all comfort women were devastated by this. For those aunties who never wanted kids to begin with, all they suffered was the kidney damage. They don’t get any damage out of not being able to have kids.
And back in the day, people were all poor, and couldn’t afford surgery to have their tubes tied or anything. So, the Japanese soldiers were actually doing these child-free women a favour. I’m not saying they meant to help out or anything. They’re terrible people. But it’s like they were unintentionally doing some good.
It’s like when we watched the Shawshank Redemption. Andy was locked in prison and tortured every day, but he made a group of good friends. It’s the same idea. It’s a tragic fate to be a comfort women, but if you do it for long enough, some good things end up happening to you. There’s a silver lining to everything. It’s like how being put on cleaning duty at school sucks, but sometimes when you’re sweeping, you end up finding some change.
So, not all women want to be mothers. You can’t say that they were harmed by not being able to be mothers. Some women don’t want to be mothers. If someone happened to sterilise them, that’s a good thing to them. Sure, it’s harmful to women who don’t want it, but we can’t generalise and say that people shouldn’t be subject to sterilising medicine. Some people can’t wait for it.”
We were absolutely shocked when we heard this. No idea what’s wrong with this brain.
A couple of days later, he made more inappropriate extrapolations. It started when we were eating out, and talking about how Wang Sicong (famously wealthy trustfund brat) had to pay 2 million RMB after hitting some guy in the streets, and now a lot of people want to be beat up in the streets.
Suddenly, our son said very seriously, “Being comfort women sucks for women, but for a lot of them, the reason it sucked is because they weren’t paid enough. If they were paid nine figures, ten figures to be comfort women, or arbitrarily high amounts of money, there would definitely be people volunteering to do it.
I’m not saying everyone would be willing. I’m sure there are women who wouldn’t do it even if a gun was to their head. But there would be more people that would do it if there was enough money. There are a lot of people who are willing to risk the death penalty for money. For those types of people, it wouldn’t be traumatic to be comfort women.
It’s like how no one wants to be beaten in the streets. But if you gave them 2 million RMB for it, there would be a lot of people who are eager for it. It’s the same idea. And everyone used to be super poor and didn’t live long. There are places so poor that people ate people, or sold their children, or died of starvation. There are girls who get abused to death by sexist families. Maybe they’re better off being comfort women. Maybe they’ll still die anyways, but at least they won’t be starved to death.
I know that no one volunteered to be comfort women, but most marriages weren’t consensual back then too. And no one volunteered to be poor or to be abused. You can’t assume that every woman we’re talking about was born in a good family. There were so few good families back then. If being at home was even worse than being a comfort woman, if you’d be abused to death by your husband anyways, maybe being taken to be a comfort woman is saving your life, even if it’s just for a couple of days or a month.”
I just don’t know what to say to him.”
Comments ask, “Look, even if you don’t have rolling pins in your house, surely you have a broomstick?”
“If his father a Japanese soldier?”
“Hey, kid, do you want to get hit by a car and become a vegetable? I’m sure we can get some money out of it. That makes it okay, right?”
A tiktok video of a Chongqing high-sped rail where a kid was kicking the seat in front of him. The lady in the front seat turns around to yell at him and gets into an argument with the kid’s parents, which then escalates into a slapfight.
Comments say, “The mother claims that she’s apologising, but there’s no tone of apology in her voice. They taunt and jeer the girl in the front seat, the dad never stops swearing at her, their friend in pink is filming the girl get angrier and angrier to use as evidence against her. The kid started the whole thing by kicking her. The husband began with the swear words first. The mother started hitting first. It’s obvious at a glance who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong.
“They’ll kick you and bully you and force you to the edge of an explosion, and then seize on your mistake of engaging with them and exaggerate it to for you to apologise. But they won’t mention their fault at all. This family is really good at trapping people.”
“Everyone knows how people’s blood have gone cold, how people have become distant. If this continues, there won’t be any more good people left in society.”
A childcare blogger posts a fan’s submission for advice, “My son finally started going to daycare. I thought things would get better, but we’re running into new challenges. Now we have to figure out how to send him to daycare and pick him up again. Grandma still has one more year before she can retire, and she doesn’t live with us, so she’s in no position to help out. My own parents have their work too and can’t help. In order to send the kid and get to work on time myself, I’m having to wake him up from deep sleep. He’s only two years old, so he’s very grumpy in the morning, and doesn’t get enough sleep. And I don’t want to wake him up just to send him to daycare. But if I don’t do this, I’ll get to work late. I need to pick him up by 4:30 pm, and aside from taking him to my mom’s, the only place I can take him is work. But there’s a lot of people at work, and my boss is there too. If I do it too often, people will get upset. And he’s curious about everything. He’ll want to play on the computers and press the phone keys. If I take him to the office, I don’t get any work done at all.
From before this year, I’ve been thinking about quitting. It’s too stressful at work, I’m not happy at all. Going to work is like facing torture. With this scheduling problem, I just want to quit ever more. But reality tells me that if I quit now, I’ll have a hell of a time finding work again. No company wants a mother who has to work around their kid’s schedule all day. Can you ask your readers, for double income families, how do you solve the problem of daycare scheduling?”
Comments are universally some version of, “Use your salary to hire a nanny.” or “Go to a different daycare. I’ve never seen a daycare that closes completely at 4:30pm. Most places will let you leave the kid there until 6pm or 6:30pm, sometimes for a little extra money.”
A man prepares a dish of ~*~Love~*~ for his girlfriend, which involves many Chinese puns that are very difficult to translate.
Shrimp with stretchy eggs (虾扯蛋, xia che dan) is pronounced exactly the same (tones and all) as the Chinese expression for “bullshit” (瞎扯淡, xia che dan). At the end, he decorates the top of the dish with cilantro, not just as a joke of how people hate cilantro, but also that having the top of your head be green is a very common expression for being cheated on. The cuckold hat in China is a green one. Basically, the dish is, “A bullshit love, with a little bit of green on top.”
A blogger posts screenshots of a legal drama filmed in Hong Kong 30 years ago, which covered a case of a prostitute being raped, where the lawyer argues that just because she had provided sexual services before, doesn’t mean she cannot refuse sexual services now. She had expressed her unwillingness to sleep with the accused clearly in this case, and he used violence to subdue her and rape her. And in the end, the jury found him guilty.
And says that, “Thirty years ago, Hong Kong TV shows are talking about how even sex workers have autonomy over their sexuality.And today, in 2023, male influencers are still saying that if a woman went to a pub or club, then she has no right to complain about being sexually harassed.”
He posts screenshots of the influencer in question, talking about the famous screenwriter accused of sexual harassment, saying, “For accusations of sexual harassment, I feel like it’s inherently in reference to contexts which don’t involve male-female intimacy, such as in workplaces, schools, public transportation, etc. In these spaces, women are intending to normally go about work, or their studies, or travel, and encounter pervs being all handsy. This is definitely the type of sexual harassment that we need to severely punish.
But in some contexts, like pubs or clubs or private spaces, it’s a little funny to talk about sexual harassment. You could’ve just not went. Honestly, normal, upstanding people don’t go to these places. I never go.
You’re a grown ass woman. He’s a forty-something old man. He’s got no house, he’s got no assets, he doesn’t even have a boss. At night, you’re gonna go home with this single old man with nothing to lose, alone, and you’re claiming you never thought about what was going to happen next? What, do you regularly go with men back to their houses at night to talk about Aristotle or Kant or Hegel?”
Comments say, “I remember this TV show! I recall an episode where a husband and wife had been living separately for a long time and were going through divorce, and the husband tried to keep the wife prisoner to rape her repeatedly, and she ended up cutting off his penis with a pair of scissors. And the jury ended up declaring her innocent or something.”
“Hong Kong TV shows 20 years ago are better than anything we have now.”
“Our country’s laws are definitely not complete enough yet.”
I am incredibly curious as to just...why a parent would pierce their kid's ears for them. Is it simply that 100% of girls get piercings nowadays, so parents don't think about the child's choices at all?