A tiktok video of how ice cream bars are made:
And the very first comment is, “These sticks are being inserted like Jia Baoyu’s first time with Xi Ren.” [from Dream of the Red Chamber.]
“So they’re all lopsided from the moment they were made in the factory! I thought they just got beaten up while being transported.”
“The stick-inserting machine, if you can’t do this job, then just quit. There are other machines lining up for this opportunity, you know.”
A blogger writes about a webnovel, “Concubine in a Noble House, by Daodou, is about a wealthy man fleeing from disaster, with his son, his daughter, and nephews and nieces. But there weren’t enough spots on the carriage, and it couldn’t drive smoothly, so he threw his daughter off the carriage. His son watched all of it happen, so his son’s always hated him.
Then later, a good friend of his introduced a beautiful concubine called Zhou Yu to him. Although there was a big age gap between them, once they got to know each other, they fell in love quickly. And then he found out she was his long-lost daughter.”
Comments say, “It’s probably based on the story of Deng You from the Wei-Jin era. He and his wife were fleeing disaster with his son and nephew, but they couldn’t keep going anymore. So he ended up deciding to abandon his son and continue fleeing with his nephew. Because he believed that his brother had passed away early and only left one son in this world, and he can have plenty of sons in the future. So in the end, his son went missing, presumed dead, and his nephew lived. Once they reached somewhere safe, Deng You found employment as a high-ranking official. But perhaps due to overwhelming grief, his wife never had another child again. So Deng You thought to get a concubine. He really loved this concubine, until they talked about her past at one point, and he found out she was actually his niece. He never got another concubine after that, and died without any children.”
“Reminds me of the historical story about the sailor who loved to gamble, who sold his house, then his wife, and finally his daughter. He lost all his family, and that was when he changed his ways and managed to save up some money as. As he was doing better and better, he started visiting the brothel. And once, when he asked the prostitute where she was from, she said, “I don’t remember much of my childhood, except that I grew up on a ship.” He looked closely at her face and recognised it was his own daughter. Bereaved, he threw himself into the sea.”
“The story of Deng You was high praised at the time. He was thought of as honourable and upstanding, with impeccable morality. The story got passed down as a classic. No one accused him of abandoning his own flesh and blood. Nobody cared that he completely ignored his wife and his children’s pain at being separated from each other. It meant that society at the time approved of this kind of behaviour. Wives and children were the property of a man. He wouldn’t ever be criticised for wielding power over their life and death.”
“I got a submission from a lady working at a pharmaceutical company, who makes 350K a year, 28 years old, asking me if she could just have a kid on her own without getting married.
I replied that I didn’t suggest it, and got a lot of criticism.
A lot of girls are all like, “Why can’t she have a kid on her own? I don’t even make 350K a year—only 100K. I work for the government and I have a kid on my own, and plan to have another. It’s great to have kids.”
Yeah, this comment is exactly why I said what I did.
Because you have a government job. So you can have as many kids as you want and not worry about the stability of your job.
But once you’re done having kids, women in private corporations won’t be able to have kids anymore.
You people’s existence is precisely why someone who works in a pharmaceutical company can’t have kids on their own.
This is the basics of the Conservation of Energy.
When someone is struggling to get ahead with a mountain of burdens—it’s always because someone else is sitting on their back, getting carried along.
Because most people in private businesses face a cruel amount of competition and don’t have stable careers. It’s only on the backs of these people’s income and you can stay in your government job and do whatever you want.
You’re the source of other people’s misfortune.
Every debt has a debtor. Don’t yell at me.
There are so many tragedies in this society, and you all think it’s because other people are at fault. Nothing is ever society’s fault.
Look in the mirror, and you’ll find that the source of misfortune is you. Of course you think society is perfect.”
Comments say, “If she’s really a civil servant and had kids on her own, there’s gotta be a shitload of gossip about her between her coworkers and her bosses.”
“Why bother having a kid? Is 350K a year before or after tax? If it’s before tax, that’s like just enough money to keep one person comfortably alive. Keeping a kid alive at the same time will make you throw up blood.”
“What’s the difference between having a kid by yourself and being divorced with no child support?”
A Deputy Director General of somewhere [it’s not specified] went on a vacation with his family to Mount Simeng Canyon, and accidentally lost his glasses there. The tourism park has already promised to compensate him for it, but in the course of negotiations, the Deputy Director’s family threw three cups of hot water in the employee’s face, causing severe facial burns. It’s hard to imagine that there are still leaders whose family is so arrogant in a day and age with so much information flow.
Comments say, “They’re so arrogant because they’re used to always getting their way.”
“I want to see the aftermath so much! Can’t wait to see the video of her whining and crying while apologising.”
“You can imagine just how much special treatment he’s gotten for him to assume that other people should pay him back for him losing his own glasses.”
A compilation of old timey names in China:
“My neighbours are a set of three brothers, called Big Steel Egg, Second Steel Egg, Third Steel Egg respectively.”
“My uncle is called Mom.”
“I’m called Brow Pencil, because my mom couldn’t afford one at the time, so she named me after it. @_@“
“There’s an old man in my village called Shit Pile. His brother is called Shit Fork XD XD XD.”
“There’s an old man in my village called Dung Beetle.”
“My oldest aunt is called Osmanthus. My second aunt Lotus. My mom Loves Flowers. And my third aunt Flower Vase.” [Flower Vase is used to describe someone who has good looks and literally nothing else. An object that is useless except for its decorative value.]
“My oldest uncle is named Stinky Smell. My second uncle is called Stinky Thing. My third uncle is called Stinky Kid. My dad is called Piglet.”
“I have a customer who’s named Chamber Pot. Every time I have to talk to him, it’s awkward as fuck.”
“I got in a fight with my boyfriend over Qixi [Chinese Valentine’s Day]. He said he’s not gonna get me a gift, and told me to do what I want. What should I do?
I’ve just graduated from uni for a year. I make about 4-5K a month. My boyfriend dropped out in high school and opened his own store. He makes 5 times what I do. We’ve been together for six months, and in the last six months, for my birthday and 20th of May [Chinese Valentine’s Day also], and two other holidays, he gave me a gift under 10K and over 5K. Because I make so much less money than him, he usually pays for all our dates and movie tickets and stuff.
For 5/20, I bought him a couple hundred RMB razor, but I’ve never seen him use it. He said that it’s not very good and doesn’t do a clean shave.
For Qixi, I prepared for him a cologne about 800 RMB. He told me outright he didn’t want it, and he won’t be buying me anything.
I talked with him more and found that he feels like I’m too stingy with him. All the time we’ve been together, I never spent much money on him, and he’d spent 50-60K on me already (including eating, hotel fees, gifts, etc). I have about 10K in savings. I worked really hard on saving it. Should I take it out and buy him a really fancy gift for him?”
Comments say, “What, you worked hard on saving up your money, but he didn’t to save up his money?”
“But you are totally stingy, though.”
“Why not find someone who makes the same amount as you do? Do you not like them?”
“Men in Dynastic China would never bother inventing birth control. Why? It’s just like how a lot of people insist that menstrual pads shouldn’t be allowed to be sold on trains. If he can’t use it, then it’s not necessary to invent.
You think that pregnant mothers are taken care of in the past? Even in Emperor Yong Zheng’s day, his beloved Consort Nian, one of the most prestigious women in the land, has to perform all kinds of ritualistic labour while pregnant. After having a premature birth, she didn’t even sit the month completely before she had to go play the part of a good DIL again to her sick MIL. You think working women have it any easier?
Lower class women would work the whole way through their pregnancy, and just deliver in the field or in the kitchen. And after they’re done, they’d get back up and keep working. If it’s a boy, then they’ll figure out a way to raise the kid. If it’s a girl, they just drown it.
Men never have to go through a pregnancy. They never suffer from the woman not being able to work as a result of pregnancy. If he doesn’t want the kid, he can just throw it away or kill it after it’s born. What does it cost him from beginning to end?
And rich people still killed girls back in the day. In the Northern and Southern Dynasty, the Yan Family Rules write, “Many nobles do not raise the daughters they have…I have a distant relative who has many concubines in his house. Whenever they are about to give birth, squires are set to wait by the side. They stand by the window or against the door frame. If it’s a girl, then they take it away right away and kill it. The mother cries and wails at that. I could not bear to listen to it.”
Comments say, “So you need to thank the CCP, thank China, thank the Women Hold Up Half the Sky movement, thank our new societal allowing women everywhere to have education and participate in work.”
“Viagra has always been around though :) “
“I’ve seen a documentary about a tomb they excavated from the Qing Dynasty. It was a Manchurian woman about twenty years old inside. She was very sickly, so she’d been taking medicine all her life, which was slowly poisoning her over the long term. A lot of her teeth had fallen out. After she gave birth, the placenta was stuck and couldn’t get out. She bled a lot and fell unconscious. Her family thought she was dead and buried her. She woke up in her coffin underground and couldn’t get help, and suffocated inside. The inside of the coffin lid was covered in her scratches. After she died, the placenta was still hanging out beneath her. Even such a sickly and frail woman was being forced to have children.”
“Lu Shengmei did volunteer medical work in the rural countryside in the 60s and 70s, where she found people delivered babies on dirty hemp bags so they wouldn’t dirty their beds. But this was causing a lot of mothers to die of infection.”
“I asked for a Qixi gift from my boyfriend, and he broke up with me instead. He’s a postgrad at Qinghua, and is currently in his internship to become a civil servant. Makes only 2K a month, but he’s from a pretty comfortable family, and he has a lot of savings from before. Because he’d always been generous to me, I just kind of got used to it. I feel like, I really don’t actually care if we don’t even do anything for Qixi, but at least I need a gift.
While we’ve been together, he’s always ate at his own house, while I snack on whatever after work. Sometimes I want to take a walk after dinner, and he won’t agree to it. We almost never go out for a date, because he’s a bit of a shut in. I’m a big diploma fetishist. He’s really good all around. I don’t know what to do now. I’m already 26, and he said he hasn’t thought about marriage.”
She shows screenshots of her texts with her boyfriend, which is very short and brief, but the gift she wanted was a butterfly necklace costing 4K RMB.
Comments say, “Well, um, I don’t really know what to say. You know he makes 2K a month, but you’re demanding a 4K gift? He told you he doesn’t have money. The gift you want is just too much for his economic situation right now. And honestly, have you prepared a similar gift for him? I guess you’re just not right for each other, and it’s inevitably you’ll break up anyways. He hasn’t done anything wrong. He even gave you the money at the end.”
“I don’t like to owe other people. I let my boyfriend pick up the bill when we eat out together, but we always gift each other things, or I’ll find an opportunity to gift him back. I don’t like to just demand things one-sidedly.”
“It’s easy to tell he doesn’t like you at all. He was probably only together with you because, well, it’s better than being single. And you just spent more of his money than he expected, so he quickly gave up and went bye-bye.”
Under the hashtag #Scientists estimate Japan’s nuclear run off will reach China in 240 days, Sina News reports that Hong Kong and Macao have banned the import of Japanese seafood from Tokyo, Fukushima, Chiba, and ten other provinces or cities, including any live, frozen, chilled, smoked, or dried seafood, sea salt, or processed or unprocessed sea week. Macao is also banning fruits, vegetables, milk and dairy products, water and other beverage, meat, and eggs from Japan.
Comments say, “They need to ban it all. The Japs aren’t stupid. They’ll just switch the label and send it out of a different harbour. It’s just a little extra on shipping.”
“What’s the point of banning when the whole world’s oceans are gonna be contaminated? They’re better off trying to shut down the release of the run off to begin with.”
“We need to cut off diplomatic ties with Japan, and kick out all Japanese funded corporations and schools in our borders.”
Under the hashtag #accused of rape by fiance after having intercourse 4 days after engagement, a blogger writes, “Beforehand: Mentioned that she was on her period and didn’t want to have any sex.
During: Did her best to resist and fled to the thirteen floor and was dragged back by force, causing injuries beneath her armpits over her ribcage.
Afterwards: Called the cops right away, and when negotiations failed, she pressed charges.
Suspect: Admits to what happened and is willing to take responsibility.
Police: Explicitly stated they pressed charges because there was more than sufficient evidence, and to not listen to his mother’s bullshit lies.
How is she not the perfect victim?”
Comments ask, “Do you know where I can find evidence of injuries under her armpit? I remember seeing hte video, but I can’t find it now.” and OP replies, “It’s in the news report. The man’s mom said, “Yeah, there’s a little something under her armpit, but it’s because my son is 70kg, and was worried she’d be in danger, so he dragged her back.”
“Aren’t we all about gender equality? Now we’re only listening to the woman’s side of the story?”
“Men can only see the words “fiancee, “engaged” and “rape” and start flipping out.”
As proof of how hard humour is to translate, the first comment underneath the first video, with the reference to Dream of the Red Chamber? Literally made me laugh for 25 minutes nonstop. I still can't think about it without starting to laugh again. It's the funniest thing I've seen in the last five years on the internet at least.
"And the very first comment is, “These sticks are being inserted like Jiao Baoyu’s first time with Xi Ren.” [from Dream of the Red Chamber.]"
I am literally wiping tears from my eyes. Do you have it in the original Chinese?