A compilation of the responses to the question, “What do you guys think is the industry that’s doing the worst this year?”
“Customers aren’t even getting haircuts anymore, can you believe it?”
“I’ve lost my job myself. Before, I’d get 6-7 haircuts a year. This year, it’s been three months since my last haircut. And sure, it’s gotten a lot longer, but I don’t plan on getting it cut. I can always just tie it up in a ponytail this way.”
“I’ve been working as an international shopper for ten years, and I’m not even making my money back when I go overseas anymore. Every time, I fall in love with a whole bunch of stuff, and my customers don’t give a shit at all.”
“Who has money for makeup anymore? I used to buy three cases of CPB highlight at once. Now, I feel bad just using one case. I don’t even use lipstick anymore, or put on skincare at night.”
“Are people not wearing underwear anymore either?”
“Ob/gyns. XD”
“Or weddings. This year is a widow year.” [A superstition that this is an unlucky year to get married.]
“We don’t have any weddings at all in some months of this year.”
“Wedding photos. I made over 40K last year, and so far this year, I’ve only made a little over 10K. I don’t have work at all.”
“Eyeglasses. We’re down to 19.9 RMB eye exams.”
“Clothing. Why is nobody buying clothes this year?”
“We only got three students in the youngest year in daycare.”
“Boba tea. We’re past the days when everyone has a cup of boba tea.”
“Boba tea is just getting too expensive. I used to think that 20 RMB is okay, but the day before yesterday, I got some ChaPanda on Tiktok for 8 RMB.”
“I can’t afford boba tea on my salary.”
“How are restaurants doing?”
“Terrible. So much worse than last year.”
“Definitely construction.”
“Is it true? I’ve got a friend in this industry. His company went under and he can’t find anyjobs in Shanghai.”
“Jewellery. I’ve about to starve to death.”
“Gold’s just too expensive these days. Unless it’s absolutely essential, most people are holding off and waiting.”
“Second-hand car industry.”
“The brand new cars are cheaper than second hand cars.”
“If everything’s doing so bad, why are all the tourist destinations so full?”
“Everyone’s going on cheap vacations. They don’t actually spend any money.”
“My family owns a car wash, and nobody’s washing their cars anymore.”
“You get free car washes when you go get gas though.”
“I used to wash my car once a month, but it’s been 8 months since my last car wash.”
“Furniture. There’s no customers in any furniture stores anymore.”
“Nobody’s buying houses, so of course nobody’s buying furniture.”
“It’s so hard to survive in the ice cream industry this year.”
“People care more about their health, and a lot of girls on diets don’t dare to eat ice cream.”
[Lately, a traffic accident occurred where a big group of people were biking down the street because it’s safer to bike in large groups. One of the bikers was a 12 year old kid, who accidentally fell over on his bike and fell onto the oncoming traffic lane, where an oncoming driver was unable to stop in time and ran him over, killing him. He has now been arrested.]
“To say something cruel, the driver’s wife’s leukeamia has at least gotten them some sympathy and attention from netizens. And every single bit of sympathy and attention is another bit of hope for their situation.
But just the fact that the boy’s family refused to take the 200K the driver’s family offered and refused to see the driver’s family, you can tell that they don’t intend to let this go. I’m very worried for this driver’s future.
If I was the driver, I would also think I was innocent. This was just an accident. But now the driver’s been arrested for “manslaughter”, and that’s at huge conflict with everyone’s instinctual moral values.
The driver was driving normally. He wasn’t speeding. He wasn’t going down the wrong side of the road. Who could’ve predicted that when a big group of bikers are coming in the other direction, one of the kids would suddenly fall into your lane? In such a short time, there was no way you could demand a driver come to a complete standstill stop in all of 0 seconds.
Honestly, that situation wasn’t anything the driver could’ve predicted.
The driver didn’t intend to do anything wrong, and he wasn’t at fault. The whole tragedy was entirely out of his control. This should’ve been ruled an “accident”, not “manslaughter”.
Just so you know, “manslaughter” carries criminal responsibility. According to China’s penal code’s number 233, manslaughter carries a sentence of 3 to 7 years. In special cases with extenuating circumstances, it can carry a second of just up to 3 years.
This is just a disaster out of nowhere for someone who never had any ill intentions.
I hope the law doesn’t become something used to bully good people.”
Comments say, “The people at fault are the parents. The actual murderer is the person who knocked the kid off his bike.”
“Why would you even pay them 200K?”
“This is the same as the Kunshan case. [Where two men got into an argument in a road rage incident—one of them pulled out a knife to stab the other and accidentally dropped his knife. The other guy picked it up off the road and stabbed him 5 times, chasing after him as he attempted to flee. The case was ruled “self defence”.] If outside forces don’t interfere, with the way things are going, local powers are in control, and nobody cares about law or morality.”
A debate over a plot point in the latest TV show: “The latest Chinese TV show: Song of Ordinary People. There’s a woman in it who drained a man of everything he had just to turn around and reject him for being poor, and go abort his child.
Her mom was sick and the guy spent hundreds of thousands on it. Her mom needed buried, and the guy spent another hundred thousand on it. As the daughter, she didn’t spend a cent herself. After the man ran out of money, she starts accusing him of being poor, and even went and got an abortion on her own. The man found out and got angry, and she went, “But you can’t make any money.”
And all the women are celebrating this, like you should never marry a poor man.
And when the man in the show wants to take care of his own mother, he gets called a mommy’s boy.
Chinese TV is fucking scary.”
“According to the TV show, he could’ve abandoned his pride in his ideals and asked his boss on his wife’s behalf if her family could get transferred to a better hospital. He could’ve chosen to put his heart into finding a good burial plot, instead of a garden burial where you don’t even get to keep the ashes. [Where the ashes are scattered into a garden plot, possibly alongside other people’s ashes.] Money is important, sure, but attitude is a lot more important. It’s about whether or not you’re trustworthy or reliable.”
“Yeah, a conflict of values is a big problem here too. I want to be buried at sea, but I would definitely have to give my parents a proper burial (unless they asked me not to). Whether in life or in death, I want to give them the best. I don’t care so much about myself. So I guess I get Xie Meilan. She’s more upset about Shen Lei’s obsession with his pride.”
“The fight between Xie Meilan and Shen Lei about her mom’s death seems to be all about money, but honestly, a bit part of it is because Shen Lei is too “rational”. It means Xie Meilan can’t feel that he loves her with all he has. He’s the type of person who was protected well by his parents and his sister growing up, never ran into any trouble at school or at work, never suffered stress and doesn’t have too much ambition, like a big, grown boy. He’s willing to spend all his savings because he rationally decided that was what he was supposed to do. But if you ask him to go into debt for hopeless treatments, he would just calmly think that’s unnecessary. He wouldn’t go into debt for something useless. But he’s never put himself in Xie Meilan’s shoes and thought from her point of view, out of love or concern for her. Like, he never thought, “I love you, and I know what your mom means to you, so even if this treatment only has a 0.0001% chance of working, I’ll still do everything I can to make it happen.” Or “Even if this medicine doesn’t work at all, I’m willing to go into debt just so you don’t feel any regret later.” It’s just 400K. If they work hard, they could pay it back in a couple of years. He just doesn’t want to take on more stress for something he considers unnecessary. But for Xie Meilan, that was everything to her in that moment.”
“Just 400K?? A couple of years? That’s easy for you to say.”
“It’s not wrong to be rational. I’d give up treatment at 200K.”
“It’s not about women or rationality at all. It’s just that he doesn’t love her enough. What if it was his parents who were sick? In the same circumstances, who doesn’t want to do everything they can for their parents? If he’s able to maintain rationality, it’s because he’s not in love to begin with.”
“I said that because in the original novel, the author said Xie Meilan could make that money back in a year. Cutting out her daily expenses, according to Xie Meilan’s current income, she can save up 200K in a year and pay back the debt in 2 years.”
“But 400K isn’t even enough. She’s already borrowed 400K and still can’t afford the drugs. Even if she could afford one round, it’s just another argument about whether or not to continue treatment. This is a bottomless pit.”
“See, that’s why I say, it’s seemingly about money, but actually, it’s a condescending rationality. From an outsider’s point of view, sure, that attitude is no problem, but when it’s someone who’s closest to you, this kind of bystander rationality is the most disappointing of all.”
“Are you putting the same demands on a SIL as you would on your own son? The people accusing Shen Lei, if you’re mad at him for not pulling connections and not having enough empathy, sure, I get it. But if you’re accusing him of not borrowing money, not spending 200K to buy a burial plot for his MIL, that’s expecting a SIL to act like a son. And honestly, if the female lead has a boss who’s willing to lend her 400K, then why not just keep borrowing money from him?”
“Xie Meilan just wanted Shen Lei to show he cares. If Shen Lei went to borrow money, did everything he could, and couldn’t get enough, then that’s good enough. But he’s not even willing to try. He just said it was terminal stage cancer, it won’t get better, and he’s not close enough to his boss to ask. Isn’t that what Xie Meilan cares about? Xie Meilan’s boss was willing to lend her 400K, and I’m sure he wouldn’t mind lending more. But Xie Meilan had to beg for that money, and it’s not an excuse for Shen Lei to do nothing.”
A compilation of the ridiculous stories behind ridiculous rules:
“Not allowed to bring boba tea on campus. Because a new boba tea place opened up across the street from the school and they’re having a BOGO deal. Our homeroom teacher loved getting free stuff and drank it for a month straight and gained over 10 kilos.”
“I singlehandedly changed the “boys and girls are not allowed to date each other” in the school rulebook to just “students are not allowed to date.””
“My high school banned people from sitting on the grass and talking, because people liked to randomly pull up grass while talking.”
“Our nightshift bans eating Luosifen [a type of stinky noodle] and drinking boba tea, because someone had to call for emergency backup because of severe diarrhoea during a shift.”
“Our school banned funny poses in the bathroom, and I was there for that. My friend and I were competing while going to the backroom. I lifted my leg up and peed with my foot in the air. My friend hiked his left up on the wall to pee and accidentally slipped and fell right into the urinal. To reiterate, I WAS NOT THE ONE TO FALL IN THE URINAL. IT WAS NOT ME. IT WAS NOT ME.”
“Not allowed to hit people with the disabled student’s prosthetic.”
“The most ridiculous rule at my high school was that collecting empty bottles was banned, because one year, a guy stored up empty drink bottles for two semesters and crafted a raft out of them and rowed his way out of school. His story went down as legend. People call it our very own version of Cast Away.”
“It’s pretty normal to get snow days in Dongbei, but precisely what day counts as a snow day is entirely dependent on when our principal slips and falls.”
“Our school bans instant noodles because a student spent a whole semester eating nothing but instant noodles and passed out in the bathroom shitting himself.”
“Eating poop is banned. 200 RMB fine.”
“Not allowed to find internships on your own, because a senior got conned into a pyramid scheme and our principal had to watch and wait for 7 days before he found an opportunity to grab her out of there.”
“Our school banned farting in the classroom because the last couple of years of students destroyed the chairs by farting on them.”
“Jilin Institute of Art requires that you take off your shoes for your exam, because they’ve accidentally admitted students who were 10+ cm off from their actual height.”
“We lock the public bathrooms at night because someone’s drowned in there before.”
“Our school cafeteria bans throwing food at the student cancel’s head.”
“Students are banned from fishing in the lake. And you have to register to go to the bathroom during evening study. Because some senior apparently secretly caught fish in the lake with his jacket as a net and grilled them to eat in the bathrooms.”
“There’s a kid in my school who loves eating plaster. He’s chewed off practically an entire wall. Our principle had to add a new rule that you’re not allowed to eat the walls.”
“Our school strictly bans taking utensils into the bathroom, because the principal once found a load of shit with three chopsticks stuck into it.” [sticking three incense into a burner is making an offering to the Gods.]
“Not allowed to build basements on your own. T_T”
“Before, you could secretly smoke in your dorm room, until someone accidentally set the curtains on fire. Now, they’re so much stricter about checking, and you’re only allowed to smoke in the public bathroom on each level. Until someone was smoking while pooping and exploded the bathroom. Now they don’t let you smoke in the bathrooms either. What’s scary is that these two events were caused by the same person.”
“We’re not allowed to cross our legs while we eat, because someone’s crossed legs tripped the principal over and he fell into someone’s food.”
“Not allowed to date employees, because some badass started a relationship with the janitor lady.”
“I found this sign right after covid lockdowns in the hospital corridor.” [The sign reads, “Do not place corpses here. The hospital is not responsible for any lost bodies.”]
“I just saw someone saying their school doesn’t allow you to hang curtains up on your bed, because someone used to keep pigs behind their curtain.”
“I remember one day, our dorm manager lady suddenly announced that we’re not allowed to sleep anywhere other than our beds at night, because one night, she was checking dorm rooms, and someone crawled out from beneath their bed. And there was a girl sleeping on top of the wardrobe to dry her hair.”
“Our school banned all Jay Chou songs because our principle couldn’t get an autograph with him.”
“I’ve seen a school with the rule, “You are not allowed to dissect other students.””
“When I arrived at the school, there was a rule, “Do not throw other students into the swimming pool.” When I graduated, the rule had become, “Do not throw others into the swimming pool.” Because we threw teachers in too.”
“Our school doesn’t let takeout delivery, because a delivery guy ran over the principal.”
“Our employee handbook bans two married coworkers from dating each other. That’s the exact wording it used.”
“Our school bans setting off fireworks inside dorm rooms.”
The discourse surrounding that TV show is painful. Nice to know that having ridiculous expectations of your significant other transcends culture.