05/30/23 - It became necessary to block his mouth with a piece of apple, to prevent him from sticking out his tongue.
“The blog post about how ob/gyn departments can’t make it anymore? I’m pretty sure it was completely made up. My reasons are as follows: a pregnant lady says right off the bat that it cost 20K before even having a kid? Most pregnant women would never say something like that. First, if you did your checkups at a public hospital, it wouldn’t be this expensive. Second, it’s really hard to categorise which expenses are for the baby, and which ones are just demanded by the mother, and which are normal daily necessities. I’ve seen plenty of childcare bloggers list their expense sheets, and they include everything from getting a bigger house to how much it takes to sit the month. Everything can be included as “baby expenses”. Normal people would just count off the particularly large expenses, and how much it costs to deliver, and how much it costs to sit the month. That’s how normal people talk. So, this faker is probably a guy who has no idea where any of this money actually goes to.
Then, the blogpost talked about how newborns getting a cold costs over 1000 RMB, half a month’s salary…if you’ve had a kid at all, you’d know what the average kid’s immune system is like. Every time the seasons change, they get a cold. Going to a big hospital in Beijing and getting the most expensive cold medicine would only be 3-500 RMB at most. There’s no way a normal cold costs 1K. In Guangxi or Henan, where I’m from, colds only cost 200 RMB. So, I don’t think I’m wronging him by accusing him of lying.
Final reason, just based on people I know and walking around on the street, there’s plenty of pregnant women out and about.”
Comments say, “20K on checkups is super realistic though. I’m a normal pregnant mother who works at a hospital myself, with up to date health insurance, and even not counting what insurance covered, my checkups added up to over 10K. DNA test was over 3K. Ultrasounds and 4D ultrasounds are 1-2K. Mini ultrasounds are done every two months, and are 1-2K. Blood draws happen about 3-4 times and break 1K easily. Plus the costs for seeing the doctor and measuring heart rate and all. And that’s assuming a perfectly smooth, complication free pregnancy, and not including all the supplements you have to take, like folic acid, calcium, iron, vitamins, and DHA.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty fake. I didn’t spend any money on my checkups, just went through birthing insurance, which covered delivery too. All I spend money on was the epidural. As for extra nutrition during pregnancy, sitting the month, and raising the baby, I don’t think that counts as pregnancy costs, does it?”
“That’s easy for you to say. Are you gonna take folic acid or not? Are you gonna take iron supplements or not? Are you gonna buy maternity clothes? A blood draw or ultrasound is easily 700-800 RMB. A paediatric check up is 300-500, and there’s no telling whether they can fix him in one check up.”
Under the trending topic #if a kid is diagnosed with problems during pregnancy checkups, do you keep it or not?, a blogger writes, “Don’t put your burden on the shoulders of China, or society, or other family members. Nobody should be responsible for your decisions, especially not your family.”
Comments say, “I just saw someone telling people not to get checkups. It’s ridiculous! These people are the risk factors in society!”
“Don’t let a moment of mercy let you push a kid out into a doubly cruel world.”
“If your checkups don’t look good, you can choose to not believe in this hospital and go check at other hospitals. If everyone says it doesn’t look well, and the doctor suggests not keeping him, then don’t keep him. Once he’s born, it’s not just a matter of money, it’s a demand on your energy too. And you have to face the stark comparison between your kid and a healthy kid.”
A long blogpost about Chinese history, “Kangxi is such a fucking psycho to his son. I’m talking about his second son, Aisin-Goro Yinreng, the only Crown Prince in the entirety of Qing Dynasty, and probably the only prince in the Qing Dynasty to have been raised by his father personally. It looks like he got the highest tier of royal privilege—although he lost his mother young, he got to enjoy the deepest of fatherly love from Kangxi and the highest of his expectations. But Kangxi wasn’t just his dad, he was also the Emperor, and Yinreng was his heir. When those two types of relationships become mixed up, it created the most twisted, strange result I’ve ever seen.
Kangxi had a scary level of obsession and possessiveness when it came to him. The Crown Prince was raised in Qianqing Palace, Kangxi’s own residence, until he was well into his teenage years, when he finally moved just across the street to Liuqing Palace. The servants around him were changed once every 6 months, and every detail of his every day was reported to his father without fail. When he began attending school as a small child, he had to show respect for his elderly teachers by listening to all of his classes on his knees. When his teacher specifically granted him permission to stand up, Kangxi still thought he was being too disrespectful and fired his teacher as a result. He only got married at 21, and even after marriage, he still lived right under Kangxi’s nose, and his wife had to live all the way across the palace. Every time he saw his wife, he had to walk across the entire Forbidden City to do it. This means that the entire palace knew exactly every time he slept with his wife.
The Crown Prince enjoyed a level of luxury that was second only to the Emperor, including being kneeled to by other princes and all Ministers. His living standards were even higher than Kangxi himself. When the budget got tight, Kangxi would rather cut his own expenses than short his precious son.
But on the other hand, when all the other princes moved out into their own places and began to actively participate in politics, the Crown Prince still lived under Kangxi’s watchful eye, unable to relax for a moment. He had no friends. He had no companions. He was very distant with his wife. His uncles and grandparents were all outside the palace and could rarely visit. Aside from his uncle and grandparents, he didn’t have any opportunity to have any contact with court ministers. It seems that in Kangxi’s opinion, ministers being disrespectful to the Crown Prince is a crime, and ministers being close to the Crown Prince is an even higher crime. There have been honoured old ministers who were fired and exiled from the capital for discussing poetry with the Crown Prince. Under this atmosphere of spoiling love and yet suspicion, the Crown Prince began to take on a greedy and cruel personality, and even began to dabble in homosexuality. Kangxi’s reaction, of course, was to kill every single man around him, whether it was a distant family member, or his guards and carriage drivers. No matter their rank, they all died.
This father and son duo went from the closest people in the world to each other to the edge of breaking down, and the Crown Prince’s mental health became more and more unstable. He went from a “elegant and gentlemanly Prince, the handsomest man in China” as described by missionaries, to a cruel and heartless monster. After he was abolished as the Crown Prince the second time, he completely went crazy. Perhaps only insanity or death would offer him release from the despair of being a pawn in a game he never controlled. But he and his family were kept prisoner in a few tiny rooms in the Forbidden City. When Kangxi loves him, he can send him the best of the lychees offered in tribute. When Kangxi hates him, he can have their chamberpots cleaned only once a month. But whether Kangxi loved him or hated him, his possessiveness never changed. After the Crown Prince went crazy, his daily life was still reported in meticulous detail to Kangxi, who recorded everything. When he was building vacation homes for when he retired, he even circled out rooms set aside for continuing to imprison the Crown Prince next to him. But he passed away before that palace was completed, and Yinreng passed away three years later. No one knows how he felt about finally being free from Kangxi. Supposedly, he finally gained lucidity and began to recognise people, and he would hold his son’s hand and teach him to be loyal to the new Emperor, Yongzheng. Maybe.
After we’re done talking about the extreme love Kangxi had for his son, let’s talk about this Crown Prince.
The Crown Prince loved his father once too. In 1693, when Kangxi fell sick and nothing seemed to help, Western missionaries offered up Quinine, but there’s no way that the Imperial doctors would let the Emperor take such an unknown and untested western medicine. Finally, it was the Crown Prince who made the decision, to allow the ministers (including his uncle) to test the medicine to ensure it wasn’t poisonous, then feed it to Kangxi. And that saved his life. If he hadn’t made that decision, Kangxi probably would have passed away, and he would have became Emperor and gotten free of his father.
I don’t know if he ever regretted this decision.
When he was abolished as Crown Prince the first time, he said, “If you had accused me of anything else, perhaps there would be some ground to it. But I have never once thought of usurping you.”
There’s some sweetness here too. Here’s a sample of the letters that Kangxi sent his son while he was out and about.
Once, Kangxi was in battle, and saw some rocks by a river or by a road, and he sent them to the Crown Prince, saying, “This is a pretty rock. I saw it, and remembered that you’ll never see it, and got sad. So I sent this to you, and now we’ve both seen this rock.”
The Crown Prince replied back, “K.”
Another time, Kangxi was in battle, and the weather turned cold, so he sent people to bring the Crown Prince in Beijing warm clothes, saying, “It’s cold where I am, and it made me remember you in Beijing. I don’t know if you feel cold too, so I sent you this.”
The Crown Prince replied, “Thx.”
35th Year of Kangxi, November 1st, Kangxi writes, “I’m very healthy. How about you? All my letters to you are written in bits and pieces across a whole day, so they often read a little disjointed.”
35th Year of Kangxi, November 21st, he writes, “I’m very healthy. How about you? I’m worried that you’re missing me since I’m gone so far away, so I wrote about all the fun things that happened on this trip. I rambled for pages and pages, but why don’t you send me any replies? You write reports for me to review, but you can’t find time to express some worry and concern for your father? What is the sense in that? Now I’m never going to write to you again!
PS. I sent you a small dagger and some pincers that I made myself. Next time you send me something, check the packaging yourself. The deer tails you sent me were horribly packaged and there was fluff all over the place. They looked terrible. I package everything I send to Beijing myself.”
On the 27th, the Crown Prince replied the reason he hadn’t written back was, “I had a headache that day and a sore throat, so I didn’t write back.”
He even asked for the Crown Prince to send him some shirts that the Crown Prince had worn, so he can miss him less.
“While I am commanding the army, I have plenty to deal with and no time to think. But now the battle is settle and the enemy is in flight and we are giving chase. Soon, we will make our triumphant return. I began to miss my Crown Prince terribly. It is getting hot now. Send four sets of winter coats, jackets, and cotton robes you wore, and four vests. Make sure they’re ones you’ve worn before, so I can wear them when I miss you.”
Comments say, “He was truly a pet.”
“Obviously he’s go crazy. If you had to take the college entrance exams for forty years in a row, wouldn’t you go crazy?”
“It’s probably all because Kangxi was never loved by his dad, so he thought this was the correct way to love a son. It’s just going from one extreme to the other.”
“I was just reading my daughter’s history textbook, and found this unbelievable segment: “In the Qing Dynasty, people suffered under heavy taxes. Aside from the normal state taxes, some regions would require that farmers give their landlords New Years money at New Years. They had to pay for a village gift when they married their daughters. Sometimes, even dead people had to pay a death fee.”
The segment talks in detail that, “Landlords and merchants used ruthless methods to take over people’s land, and the farmers who had lost their land had to rent from those very same landlords, and had to turn in 70-80% of their crops as rent every year. A lot of farmers left to become beggars. In Jiaqing’s reign, Beijing had over 100,000 beggars. The First Year of Jiaqing saw 8000 people freezing to death in a single night in winter.”
Comments say, “History repeats itself.”
“Qing Dynasty had the lightest taxes of any dynasty in China.” Below are people replying, “So where did all the money they paid to the western colonialists come from?” “When just a couple of families own all the land, what does it matter to farmers whether taxes are light or not?”
“It’s laughable that some people say the reason I can fill my stomach is because I work hard. What’s it got to do with the Red Army?”
Economics expert Liang Jianzhang has gone viral suggesting that daughters should take their mother’s last names. He believes that lineage isn’t something that only involves sons or grandsons. Daughters continues on their mother’s lineage, and pass it down to their own daughters. In the modern day, women have just as many accomplishments as men, and women are the final decider when it comes to childbirth, and they pay the highest price for it.
Comments say, “Finally, an expert who makes sense.”
“Parents should be able to freely decide the last name of their children, whether son or daughter.”
“Isn’t it already legal to give your kids the mother’s last name? What the hell is this expert talking about?”
A Chinese-medicine obstetrician and paediatrician writes, “Kids with ADD or Tourettes can consider going to traditional Chinese-medicine doctors, instead of western medicine. You have to be cautious with western medicine, as there are too many side effects.”
They also attach an excerpt from a Chinese-medicine textbook, talking about how “Gypsum is often used for treating heat-related diseases. It has the ability to cool heat, release fire, relax muscles, and remove frustration. It can be used to treat an overabundance of Yang energy. For example, many mental patients who take anti-psychotics report various negative side effects such as teeth grinding, teeth biting, cheek biting, tongue biting, lip biting, chewing, pursing their lips, rhythmic shaking in their limbs, slurred speech, dry mouth, and reluctance to drink water. But using gypsum, great results were achieved. The best dosage is 60g to 100g. For example, after taking Haloperidol, one patient would keep sticking his tongue out of his mouth for a month. And it became necessary to block his mouth with a piece of apple, to prevent him from sticking out his tongue. It was very painful. He began taking gypsum, and after 8 days, his tongue went back to normal. Once, gypsum dosage was lowered to 20g, and the next day, he began poking his tongue out again. Once dosage was raised, he was cured again.”
Comments concur, “Massage therapy totally works too.”
“I’ve seen kids with Tourettes, whose parents say it was caused by him taking Loratadine. Is there anything to that?”
“What’s the theory behind this? Is Tourettes caused by too much heat?”
“A couple of days ago, I saw someone complaining on the internet that a sales agent had low EQ. The screenshot showed a conversation where the sales agent said that this particular model of sofa would be the quickest to ship. OP says that wouldn’t work for him because he had cats at home. And the sales agent replied, “Do you have to keep the cat?”
OP was totally shocked and replied, “What, I have to give up my cat just to own this couch?”
Under this post, everyone was marvelling at how, “Can you really become a sales agent with that low of an EQ?” But honestly, this has nothing to do with EQ. This has nothing to do with him not being able to communicate well.
If the customer had said, “This model doesn’t work for me, because I’ve got old people at home,” would the sale agent have said, “Do you have to keep the old people around?” There’s no way. No normal human being would ever reply this way.
The reason the sales agent would so naturally and obliviously ask the customer, “Do you have to keep the cat?” is because he honestly can’t understand. Cats and dogs, aren’t they just livestock? Why would you keep those things around and waste your money on them? See, just because of a goddamned cat, you run into all kinds of trouble shopping for a couch. Just throw it out. It’s just an animal, after all.
He never thought that that sentence could be taken to be offensive. He probably thought he was sincerely trying to help his customer. These people’s problem isn’t low EQ. It’s that their baseline logic and way of thinking hasn’t evolved to be in-step with civilised society.
But this type of people isn’t even “abnormal” in our society. If you look at society as a whole, there are far, far, far, far more people who think the exact same way as him, than people who think he is barbaric and ridiculous.
There’s still no legal protection for the lives and safety of pets. Killing someone else’s pet still results in a very minor financial compensation at the most extreme end. There are plenty of people throwing away living beings who have accompanied them day and night for years. There are people who hack pets to death with machetes. Psychos who tortures cats to death are never punished, so they have the courage to keep venting their anger out on cats.
Every time stuff like this happens, people call for laws to be made. And after so many years, have they been made? Perhaps, the higher ups who are listening to these calls also feel like, “Well, do we have to keep these cats around?””
Comments agree, “It’s abominable. All the people who torture little animals are twisted psychos.”
“Yeah, ten years ago, a senior in my uni went to do a homestay program in America. The little old lady who was his homestay mother got along with him fantastically. One day, it was raining, and the old lady’s cat hadn’t come back. So the old lady started looking all around town for it. My senior helped her for a while, and then said, “Let’s just go back. It’s just a cat. Maybe it’ll come back some day.” And the old lady got super mad and said, “How could you say that about my family!””
“I feel the same way. Just because I didn’t get pregnant immediately after being married, my in-laws tried to kick my cat out to the yard and not let them stay in the house anymore. And all the relatives would gossip to my face, being all like, “What’s the point of a cat”. I cried all night long and almost got a divorce. Thank goodness my husband took me and my cat out of there.”
For a while I've been wondering why there are so many pregnancy and child-rearing posts compared to what we see on the US-centric internet. Part of it is surely cultural difference, perhaps Chinese culture is more concerned and talkative about these things. But I also wonder if the mainstream Chinese internet may have more "average" people with "average" concerns than the mainstream US-centric internet which seems to be skewed toward a particular type of person, perhaps they could be termed as "terminally online" or something.
Maybe it could also be that a lot of these children-related posts are in more niche Facebook groups that I don't see in the US, but that in China they spill into the mainstream because the nature of their social media algorithms.
I was talking to someone about this the other day, and they wondered if posts about children are promoted by the Chinese authorities because of fears of low fertility. Could this be the case? Are these posts about c-sections, sitting the month, etc. perhaps promoted?