07/23/23 - I don’t even understand how you can wrack up 40 RMB a month in water?
A sports stadium’s rooftop collapsed inside Qiqihar’s 34th Middle School, while the Girls’ Volleyball Team were inside practising. Currently, 10 people have passed away. The parents of the victims are angry that after their children were sent to the hospital, 5 hours went by and no one came to explain the situation to them. Some parents were only informed of what had happened after their child had died.
Comments say, “This is the reality of our society.”
“Yeah, business as usual.”
“To put it bluntly, it’s a lot easier to deal with if they die. If they live and get paralysed, that’d be even worse.”
“I’ve never seen anyone collect rent this way. Got texts from my landlord that ruined my whole day. It’s the first month I’ve moved in, and the electricity bill here is absolutely crazy. It cost as much as half my rent! It’s 1.7 RMB every 1 kWh. I knew electricity was expensive, so I never turned on my AC, but I never expected I would still wrack up 300 kWh of electricity. I asked to see the receipt itself, but the landlord refused. I don’t know if it’s legal for him to do that or not.”
She shows the texts from her landlord, which reads,
Landlord: “Rent for July: 1000 RMB (including management costs), Electricity: 494.7 RMB, Water: 40 RMB. Your total is 1534.7 RMB.”
OP: “Okay. Could I see the receipt?”
Landlord: “What do you want a receipt for? This is how I’ve always collected rent.”
Comments say, “Why do you pay your electricity to your landlord?? When I rented, my landlord just had me make an account with city utilities and pay it on their website.”
“There’s no way your electricity is that much. There’s six people in my house and we have the AC on all day and all night, and it’s only 800-900 RMB in the dead of summer.”
“I don’t even understand how you can wrack up 40 RMB a month in water? Do you never close off your faucet??”
A blogger writes a transcription of a teacher’s Chinese TED talk, “She says, “The kids in my classroom are quieter and quieter with every year. Boys have stopped pursuing girls in their class. The liveliness and recklessness that comes with being young, the impulses that come without any second thought, has been tied up by something invisible.
I’d rather my students stand up and argue back, to voice their silly theories out loud. I don’t want to see them just quietly making notes with their head down.
I feel like education is like a slow, terminal disease. In primary and middle school, we give them the strongest medicine we can find, whether it’s hormones or antibiotics or chemo, and by the time they come to university, they become silent, uncaring, unthinking, and inactive.”
Comments say, “She’s only see what she’s seeing. Her central values are still American western ones. Kids today hardly listen at all in class. It’s probably just because it’s been too hot lately. You know what kind of bullshit she’s going to spew as soon as she opens her mouth in videos like this.”
“This is because feminazis are oppressing men. Requiring that three year old boys be completely silent on a train is just inhuman. As soon as boys in puberty have any kind of sexual impulse, they get expelled, and that’s just as inhuman. Of course boys become less active and stop pursuing girls. The whole process of education for boys is just endless obedience training and being emasculated.”
“You can go teach at a tech school. You’ll feel how lively and free young people are then.”
“My friend’s kid is going to a private kindergarten, and she says that one of the kiddos there has a “Crown Prince Mom” (her words, not mine) who kept complaining to the school about keeping the AC off, demanding that fruits have to be steamed or boiled before being served.
The teachers finally had enough of her and opened a separate classroom, where AC is never turned on, fruit isn’t served, and milk is always served hot, and parents have to pack their own snacks. What’s scary is, that class is actually full right now.
I can’t understand sending your kids to a 10K kindergarten to not get AC, not get fruit, drink hot milk, and eat snacks from home. I have no idea what these parents are thinking.”
Comments say, “It’s pretty simple. If you have AC on in the classroom, and kids are going outdoors to play and coming in again, they could catch a cold. And it’s so hot these days that fruit can go bad really quickly, and kindergartens all pre-slice their fruits and then pass it out. You don’t know how long the whole process takes. Some kinds are lactose intolerance. And snacks can have a lot of food additives in it. Kids are still growing, they should eat as little food additives as possible.”
“Do they assign a maid to every Crown Prince to fan them? Otherwise, I have no idea how they’d survive in this weather.”
“When he’s grown up, he’ll still eat at night markets and holes in the wall and mala tang, and go around reporting fanfiction or anime cons or manga for having sexual content or his female neighbour for walking around in a backless top. In just a few years, he’s gonna be secretly looking at porno sites with his friends. :/ “
“All of a sudden, I feel like it’s horrible to be married. I have to run tattooing my eyebrows by my husband. I have to get his opinion, even though I’m not even spending his money. We’d only just had our wedding and we’ve got no kids. And I’m just imagining having to ask him about everything once we do. It just all sounds so tiring.”
She shows texts with her husband.
OP: “I’m just letting you know, so you’re not wondering where I’ve disappeared to.”
Husband: “Don’t you think you’ve got the order wrong? If you’re gonna tattoo your eyebrows, shouldn’t you ask my opinion first?”
OP: “Why, are you gonna send me money?”
Husband: “? You don’t even ask my opinion, and you still want money from me?”
OP: “If you’re not giving me money, why would I have to ask for your opinion?”
Husband: “Fine.”
OP: “I’m not getting plastic surgery or anything. It’s just an eyebrow tattoo.”
“Husband: “Do what you want.”
Comments say, “Back in my mom’s generation, whether they were getting eyebrow tattoos or eyelash implants or professional nails or perms or dyed hair, they didn’t have to tell their husband.”
“What, you’ve turned from a person to merchandise as soon as you’ve gotten married?”
“Does he ask your opinion first before he goes for a smoke?”
A tiktok video compiles kids making insane stuff up, saying, “Kids may not lie, but they’ll make shit up.”
The first segment is a recent tiktok video which has been reported for featuring a kiddo in the 3rd year of kindergarten (6 years old) taking his little brother (3 years old) home on a bicycle “by himself”. In the video, the little kid says, “My dad’s working, my mom’s back in our hometown.” The police clarifies that they’ve investigated this situation, and they were followed the whole way by their grandpa, who takes them to school every day and picks them up again. The police have checked in with the kindergarten too, and they never release kids without a guardian to pick them up.
The second segment is a dad saying, “My kid came home from kindergarten one day and told me the teacher said he was a dog. I was about to go fight the teacher, when I thought to myself, it’s not the first time he’s made up bullshit, so I asked him exactly what the teacher said. He said that he made a pinky swear with the teacher, that if he didn’t keep his promise, he would be a little dog. And he didn’t keep his promise.”
The third segment is a little girl telling a story about how a bad kid hit a bunch of kids in her class, and they were all crying, and the teacher came and beat up the bad kid. They all beat up the bad kid together. Only to reveal after much questioning that the bad kid is, in fact, a bat.
The fourth segment is another little girl proudly declaring that she doesn’t like to eat shit, because it’s too bitter.
Comments say, “Their world is built with imagination XD”
“So, really, can some parents stop imagining that everyone’s out to get their kid? At least ask what happened first. And kids are great actors sometimes. So many teachers have been screwed by them.”
“After much questioning, my child’s finally admitted that he was the one who burned down Yuanming Yuan.”
A compilation of Chinese-medicine stories, with the blogger asking, “So is it supposed to be a school of medicine or magic?”
“I’ve seen a comment before that a Chinese medicine doctor told someone they like to hold onto grudges, and he’s remembered it for five years hahahahahaha. I was all like, lol, no wonder the doctor said that.”
“My Chinese medicine doctor showed pictures of my tongue to all his students and told them I was the textbook example of anxiety.”
“I was really depressed, and I was going to a Chinese medicine doctor for bad period cramps, and I was really quiet when I answered his questions and not really interested in anything. And it’s not like he said anything, but he told me that there’s a lot of social events in college, and I should go attend. I had tears in my eyes. I feel like he saw right though me. But he didn’t say anything else.”
“If they’re good, they can tell how many exes you’ve had, and what they were like.”
“Every doctor has told me I have a bad temper. Every friend I have says I have a great temper. How do they know that I like to hold it all in?”
“I’ve seen a younger girl talk about how you can still have romance without money—what’s important is a person’s values. She’s pretty idealistic. I used to be like that too.
How to fix this? Find a super poor man and date him. You’ll be all cured once you’ve lived through a bit of poverty.
If he doesn’t have money, he’s not capable of loving you.
If you’re walking down the street, and you want to buy a 10 RMB soft serve cone, he’ll check in his wallet and say that he still needs to pay rent this month, could you settle for a 50c popsicle?
You’re dating, you’ve moved in together, and every night, you don’t return to a big, warm house, but his cheap rental apartment. You have no elevator in the summer, so you have to climb the stairs. Once you’re home, you still have to save on air conditioning. You can never eat anything nice. He always says that so long as he’s with you, he can be happy just eating instant noodles.
You’re talking about marriage. He says his family is poor, he’s under a lot of pressure, he still needs to buy a house and a car, so could you go without a Bride Price? A five-figure Bride Price might as well kill his parents. They haven’t had it easy raising him. Couldn’t you be a little more understanding?
If you’re poor, love is just bullshit.
Love has always been something that’s very, very, very expensive. You’re not a student anymore, where people can still have romance with the support of their parents. Or they can still enjoy school life even as a poor uni student.
As soon as you’re in society, you feel the barrier between classes. You’ll see the cruelty of reality towards people who’ve made different choices. Everyone else gets flowers for Valentine’s day, and you get 5.20 RMB. Are you really happy?
You don’t need love if you’re poor. You need to spend your time on how to make more money. You can focus a lot better without a man dragging you down. You can have your dreams, your career, your future, that’s all something you can seize hold of. And even if you didn’t, so what? At least you’re the only one who screwed up your own life. There’s no one else to blame.
But if you got together with a failure of a man, you’ll blame everything in your life on him. “If only I hadn’t dated you, if only I was a bit smarter about who I chose…”
There’s no ifs. Either find someone who can help you up, or climb up by yourself.”
Comments say, “Managing a relationship is costly in energy and time too. If you have that much free time, spend it on yourself.”
“When people are full and warm, they think of sex is a famous line of poetry, but a lot of people don’t know the next line. I just learned it the other day myself. It’s, “When people are hungry and cold they think of robbery.” Nobody has morals when they’re poor.”
“Reminds me of a line in an old TVB show, “Without love, what does it matter if you’re good-looking and talented? Without money, how can you enjoy romance? Without money, what you love the most is going to be money. Money is always going to be number to you, and not me.””
whole by by -> whole way by
idealised -> idealistic