06/10/23 - Children need to look like children, and adults need to look like adults.
Someone posts screenshots of her MIL’s texts to her at 5 AM, teaching her how to be a “good wife”.
“In a little bit, or tomorrow, you have to take care of the tasks your husband gave to you. A wife cannot be cold or uncaring towards her husband’s needs. Chores and cooking needs to come first.”
“You need to take care to ensure balanced nutrition. Do you best to avoid foods that are too sweet, too spicy, too bitter, too sour, or too salty.”
“The job of a wife is to help her husband, not tie down her husband.”
“When a husband talks, a wife needs to listen with her heart. Don’t argue back, don’t be too strong. You have to go along with him.”
“If a husband requires something of his wife, the wife needs to do it immediately. If you’re tired or you just can’t do it, you can tell your husband 1. I’m tired right now, I’ll do it later (or tomorrow). 2. I’m tired, can I rest a bit first? I’ll do it later (or tomorrow). 3. I’m tired, may I rest a bit first? I’ll do it later (or tomorrow)”
“Can I? May I? Don’t accuse or make demands. Remember to show respect.”
“We love our husbands. When we see something he needs, avoid using commanding language. You can use these kind of sentence structures. For example, if he’s too busy with work or studying to remember to drink water, we can remind him like this: 1. Dear, won’t you drink some water? 2. Dear, it’s time to drink some water. 3 Dear, haven’t you had some water yet?”
“Won’t you? It’s time to…? “Haven’t you…yet?”
“A wife carries the household on her morality. The tone of voice that she speaks to her husband in is very important. A husband is a wife’s world, so you need to respect him in both your words and actions.”
“Although you have to work very hard both in and out of the household, and sometimes, you’re certain to be in a bad mood due to exhaustion, but no matter what, you have to adjust your mood and speak with respect to your husband.”
“If you’re tired with your housework and need your husband’s help, don’t order him around. For example, if the electric kettle is done, you can tell your husband: 1. The water’s boiling. 2. The water’s boiling, could you put it in a thermos? 3. The water’s boiling, would you put it in a thermos? If the husband doesn’t go do it, there must be a reason. Remember never to demand too much from your husband. Never blame him. Just rest a bit and get to it yourself.”
Comments say, “Ask her, Dear, won’t you shut the fuck up?”
“Respond to her, “Got it, mom. My husband and I will make sure to supervise whether or not you’ve been fulfilling your duties to my FIL.”
“Qing Dynasty people truly have the longest lifespans in the world. Should you get a few concubines for your husband to? Oh, wait, an uneducated family like this could never afford concubines.”
A blogger reposts another PSA post about how, in a C-section, they don’t cut your tummy all the way open, but cut a small incision, and pull it open with brute strength by hand. Some comments clarify that this is to prevent bleeding, and to ensure that your flesh is tearing along the natural splits of the muscles, so it heals more quickly afterwards. And another comment says, “For vaginal deliveries, if labour takes too long, chances are, a nurse is gonna end up sitting on top of you and pushing down on your stomach to help the baby get born.”
Comments say, “Lol, women have to take on all the pain and risk of giving birth, but the kid belongs to both the man and the woman. I said that after a couple is done having kids, the man should shoulder the contraception responsibility (getting a vasectomy or always wearing condoms), instead of demanding that women get IUDs, or get their tubes tied, or eat pills. It’s the only reasonable or fair option to me. But men tell me I’m a radical feminist.”
“Words can only convey so much, people still can’t imagine how it’s actually done. I’ve watched actual videos of deliveries.”
“As a mother who’s given birth, it’s not that scary. Please don’t go around engineering anxiety.”
Chinese Steel has issued a statement that rumours that their CEO was shopping with his mistress are rumours created by random internet citizens with the intention of damaging the reputation of their CEO. It has not only harmed the CEO’s reputation, but also the reputation of the company, and caused harm to their operations and bad influences in society.
They declare that the photos and stories online are purely made up information, and they stand against this attempt to bring negative publicity. They’ve reported the incident to Taiyuan and Chengdu police.
Comments say, “So where’s the photos? Show us the photos! We’ll decide for ourselves if it’s real or not!”
“I hope reality doesn’t slap them in the face the way it’s slapped so many celebrity public announcements in the face.”
A blogger posts a video of a little girl out walking with her dad, asking, “Do you mind children dressed in outfits too mature for them?”
Comments say, “First of all, I think the girl in the video is dressed up super pretty and cute. But I insist that children need to look like children, and adults need to look like adults. If children are dressed too maturely, wouldn’t they be targeted by pervs more?”
“I wore spaghetti straps and short dresses all the time as a kid, and nobody said a thing. What’s wrong with girls these days wearing a skirt?”
“Is this not a normal outfit?”
“It’s gross. Children need to look like children. It’s not like we’re okay with grown adults walking around in diapers either.”
“Although I’ve always known that pillows used to be made of porcelain and were hard and cold, but when I saw this at the Nanjing museum, I was still shocked by the middle one shaped like a flower petal. I have wondered for literally years:
Would you not wake up every time you tried to roll over?
Is it really not to tall?
Is this actually better than just rolling some clothes up and putting it under your head?”
Comments answer, “Actually, this is just the centre of a pillow. Rich people like to use a hard object as the centre or base, and then put cotton or silk padding on top of it or around it. Sort of like your idea of just sleeping on top of clothes.”
“There’s another theory that pillows were actually a sex toy back in the day? That in ancient times, people liked to hear hairpins ping against the porcelain pillow rhythmically. There’s a line in the poem “Pipa Xing” about this, “A head full of silver pins shatters, as blood-coloured robes are stained in spilled wine.” Think about it.”
“It’s a great question, but why do you need to roll over while sleeping?”
A blogger reposts someone else’s PSA, saying, “I just found this while scrolling. This person posted footage from their security cam, saying that a little kid was knocking on his door wanting to come in. He wouldn’t agree to it, and the kid kept finding various excuses to come inside. The comment section was all telling him to never open the door in this situation and just call the cops, because they were scammed out of 30K like this. This is an organised criminal group using a kid to scout locations.
It sends chills down my spine thinking about it. Remember to stay alert, people, especially if you have old people at home. Always remember, if the situation seems suspicious, get the cops first.”
The original post reads, “A little kid kept ringing my doorbell this evening. I asked her what she wants, and she said she needed to borrow something I couldn’t make out. She asked several times. She seems to be on the verge of tears, so I opened the door a crack and asked her what she needed to borrow. She asked if I had a piano in my house, and I said no. Then she asked to come inside to play. I got scared and closed the door again, and now I’m looking at her through my camera. I told her to go away, I don’t know her, but she continues to hang around my door. I tried to shoo her off again, and she says she’s looking for someone. She’s still staring at my neighbour’s door. I hope she just has the wrong unit.”
The original comment section says, “I opened the door and even gave the kid some water. Then he started complaining about a stomach ache, and his parents showed up in no time and insisted we all go to the hospital. It cost me 30K over all.”
“If you open the door, then supposed parents are gonna show up looking for the kid and get into your house.”
“The kid’s just here to find out how many people are in your house at night, what stuff you’ve got around, to tell their leader.”
Comments say, “Scammers drain people’s kindness. If the law doesn’t even do anything about it, people’s kindness and willingness to help will fall to zero.”
“What 30K? Just call the cops and have them deal with it. You won’t have to pay a cent.”
“Do we have any evidence of any of this whatsoever? How did they get into the apartment building to begin with? Or are they exclusively scamming their neighbours in the same apartment building?”
“I just encountered a very complicated case of marriage, involving some very cutting-edge chore-splitting. I’m pretty sure most people will run into these kinds of problems once they have a kid, so I’ll explain the situation in detail. Currently, there’s nothing we can do about this situation because of insufficiencies of the law. So I hope young women will read this carefully. It was the lady’s lawyer who explained the situation to us. She approached this case from the angle of money, and I think that’s a very good way of looking at things.
The guy is a highly-paid IT guy who is a local resident of a first-line city (NY, LA), and makes over 40K a month. He has a marital house under his parent’s name. The girl married from a second line city to a first line city, has a great degree, makes over 10K a month. Over six years ago, she got pregnant and they had to get married, and according to the girl, the guy gave her a verbal promise at the time that he can’t add her name to the marital house, because it’s under his mother’s name. But he makes a lot of money. He’ll save up all his money and buy another house for her. If they can’t afford another one in a first line city, they can buy one in her hometown.
At the beginning of this year, they got into conflict again over the question of houses. The girl wants him to follow through on his promise and buy a house. Partially, this is because the girl thinks her hometown’s real estate market is very volatile right now, and is worth investing in. After the guy refused, she brought up divorce to try to threaten him. The idea is, so long as she’s going to divorce him, then she’d be getting half of his money anyways. He’s really better off throwing it into a house.
Little did she expect, as soon as she brought it up, the guy adamantly insisted on divorce. Normally men who make a lot of money and work a lot of overtime are fat sheep on the divorce market. You can kill one at random and make at least a million for the girl to buy her own house with. But once they actually got into the divorce process, they discovered that the guy didn’t have a single dollar in savings in all these years. Making just over 10K a month, the girl had been able to save up 150K over the years.
From the point of view of the finances, at the end of every month, his mom would take whatever was left of his pay check. Theoretically, he was paying for his parent’s expenses entirely out of his money, and the 20K or 10K that was left over at the end of the month, he would wire over every month like clockwork to his mom.
So does wiring your money to you actual mom count as hiding marital assets? The guy’s lawyer said that this is him paying his mother back for helping with the baby. All young people in first line cities work all the time—when are they gonna have time for the kid? The guy’s mom was taking care of the kid, and she’s not a free nanny. It’s normal to want some money every month.
So at this point, you may not realise yet how frustrating such a case is. But everyone who was participating in the case was totally lost at this point, because this has hit a blindspot in our marriage laws. It is truly a completely unsolvable problem, using our current legal system. Hear me out here.
We’re all about sacrificing everything for your kid. Taking care of a kid is something that the parents and grandparents all throw everything at, without asking for anything in return. But in the past few years, we’ve imported the western idea that “babysitting isn’t free”, but we haven’t borrowed their systems for child subsidies. Like, western nations believe that people should be compensated for raising kids, and the government gives out subsidies for that. They just straight up give the mother money. So that’s why you see so many single moms in the west, who can live on government money with a lot of kids.
Our subsidies happen internal to the family. Most of the time, in a Chinese family, it is the woman who’s the full-time child rearer, because they make less money on average. We’ve been pushing the idea of “housework compensation” in divorce cases, to help marginalised women get more of the shared marital assets in a divorce. This caused a new societal common sense, that everyone thinks whoever takes care of the kid deserves a bigger cut of the divorce, usually by looking at what nannies are paid locally. Most people in China don’t make more than 5K a month after taxes, but everyone thinks 10K a month for raising a kid is too little.
The biggest problem is the unique cultural position of China, where it’s still very common to have the grandparents taking care of the kids. Especially in bigger cities, where dual-income families are more common, it’s always the grandparents taking the kids. We’re pushing that women should be compensated for their role as housewives, but the money doesn’t come from the government. It comes from their own family. So shouldn’t grandparents get money too for taking care of the kid?
Does the family have enough money to split?
If we adhere to the principle of housework compensation, and believe that it’s reasonable for a man to wire his money every month to his mom, then what would happen in this divorce case?
The house is the guy’s mom’s. She can’t take it. The man has local hukou, and the kid is primary school aged, and has primarily been raised by his grandma. There’s no way she can get custody. Since the man has no savings, then he hasn’t made any contributions to the family finances, so chances are, he’ll be splitting away half her savings, and she’ll be paying child support every month.
What can we do?
Taking care of a kid is housework. Housework should be compensated. But there’s only so much money in a family. There’s not enough for everyone. We’re showing this problem to people because currently, there isn’t a solution. We just want people to be aware of problems like this.”
Comments say, “So, from another point of view, that means that the man’s salary has been spent in daily expenses and childrearing costs, while the woman’s salary has just been spent on herself? If that’s the case, I don’t feel like she lost out too much.”
“Have two kids. Have one be raised by the paternal grandparents, and one be raised by the maternal grandparents. Pay for the guy’s parents’ living expenses, and pay for the girl’s parents’ living expenses too. But honestly, the girl in this case was just a blind fool who was conned from the beginning. He’s been doing this since the day he married her, because he was planning on this from the start. He’s always been digging a hole for her. What’s the point of a marriage like that?”
“This is a beautiful boomerang. If moms can get money for taking care of their kid, then why not grandmas? XD”
A reporter interviews a girl just after she’s done with her college entrance exams, and asks what she wishes for. She begins to recite Chinese labour laws fluently. “The primary principle of China’s labour law is to protect the legal rights of the labourer. A labourer should not work more than 8 hours a day, or 40 hours a week. Overtime pay must be 1.5 times normal wages, weekend work should be double normal wages, and public holiday work should be three times normal wages. It also requires that employers need to pay social security on their employees’ behalf. I’m saying this on behalf of everyone on the internet, and to protect my rights when I enter the workforce.”
Comments are all admiring, “What an angel!”
“She should be worshipped in our highest temples!”
“Healthcare workers will literally never get to work only 8 hours a day.”
A compilation of college entrance exam memes.
“This is my little brother after his exams. It’s the 21st of June, and he slept until 10am.”
“Guys, are you allowed to wear a Daoist costume to your exams? This might be the last prank I pull for my schooling career. I really want to do it. But I’m kinda scared.”
The banner reads, “Tearing three thousand books to shreds, finally flying free—happy graduation, Butterfly Princess Zhang Suting!” And the poster writes, “Social death right outside of the exam location hahahahahahaha don’t mind me, I’m just too happy to be graduating.”
“Jackson Yee (actor?) sat behind me during my exams! Here’s the seat arrangement chart to prove it! It’s been so long since the 2018 exams. When I stumbled onto an “unforgettable college entrance exam story” thread today, I remembered this story that I always tell my friend hahaha. It’s still amazing to this day. Do you have any unforgettable college entrance exam stories?”
“A random lower grade girl gave me this note. I’m super touched.”
The note reads, “Hi, senpai, good day! I’m guessing that with the exams just a few days away, you must be super excited yet uneasy. Congratulations, you’re about to embark on a brand new journal after your exams, getting ready to have fun as much as you can! I’ll hope that you can score high, reach your goals, and get an admittance letter from your dream university! You’ve gotten through the struggle! You can reward yourself with happiness now! Relax, and face the exams at your best! Ganbatte! Ganbatte! Ganbatte! I hope my cheering has made your happier!”
“This is some amazing shit in the whole world of college entrance exams.”
“Confucius be all like, “You’re trying to pay me off with half a cup of boba tea?” Half a cup of the cheapest boba tea on the market is a bit too much hahahahaha lmao this is pretty fucking amazing in the whole world of college entrance exams. I hope Confucius will still make sure you have a great score!”
“If it wasn’t for the mirrored windows, I would never have guessed. You really need to look to Songbai (I think the name of the school?) for frugality.”
“I feel like I’ve been nervous every year of the exams except when I actually took them. Back in 2018, I didn’t feel like the college entrance exams were that important at all. I didn’t know if would decide how high I can climb in life, or how far I can go. I felt like I was walking through a dream until the exams ended. Now I’m about to graduate university, and I’m sitting in a private room in the library, across the street from my old high school. The people inside there might not be feeling much, just like me back in the day, but I’m super nervous.”
