09/29/23 - I was scared my mom would find out, so I ate all the mercury that spilled out.
The Asiad buffet is 20 RMB a person, and everyone is getting super sarcastic online, like, “Why don’t we feed China’s kids this way.”
I am fucking amazed at these people’s skill at making a big deal out of nothing. I am constantly shocked by the degree of their retardation. They can always force two completely unrelated, entirely different things together and force some kind of comparison with it.
The Asiad buffet is meant to treat VIPs, of course it’s going to be super nice and fancy. And the price is only symbolic anyways—it might as well be free.
What do you want us to do? Segregate out the buffet at the Asiad, and make poor countries’ athletes eat bread and pickles for 20 RMB, and rich countries’ athletes eat fish fin and abalone for 20K?
Everyone complaining online, do you treat important guests to the same food you eat every day?
Fucking insane.”
Comments say, “Why are they VIPs? If they don’t want to come, they can stay out.”
“You’re right. How can VIPs and peasants be treated the same.”
“If they’re VIPs, why charge them 20 RMB? I don’t charge guests who come over to my house.”
A tiktok video of a simple, lazy dinner in Japan. The meal consists of thinly sliced cabbage and pork, heated up in the microwave, with sweet vinegar on top. Seaweed and fish flake soup. Rice, with raw noodlefishes and a raw egg yolk, with oyster soy sauce.
Comments say, “Feels like I’m going to throw up.”
“That’s disgusting. Why don’t they eat normal human food?”
“See, this is why some housewives in Japan can take care of three kids full time, because all of this stuff is super convenient. The kids could make it themselves. China needs to raise the standard on a lot of things, especially food safety, to help people get access to more convenient and easier food. But I don’t like what Japan is doing. I hate Japan too.”
A compilation of the times people survived dangerous stuff as a kid:
“You ever sucked the nectar out of a morning glory? That shit’s poisonous, apparently.”
“I was playing with water when I was 4, and accidentally fell into the well. Nobody discovered it, so I ended up stuck in the well for a whole day. I’d stopped breathing by the time they rushed me to the hospital, and my grandpa put me in a basin of boiling water and burned me alive again.”
“I was cutting up veggies for dinner when I was little and the knife wouldn’t go through. I got so mad that I hacked right now, and forgot to move my hand, and hacked into my own hand.”
“Went swimming by the river, except I didn’t actually know how to swim. Almost drowned, and managed to crawl back to the shallow area with my last breath. My stomach was absolutely distended with how much water I drank.”
“Got stalked by some guy when I was in primary school, and only discovered him about four flights of stairs up my apartment building. And I just asked him straightup, “You live here too?” And he startled and was like, “…Yeah.” And I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna go up then.” Then ran up the stairs to the fifth floor and yelled for my mom to open the door. Except I actually live on the sixth floor and nobody was at home. I was a latchkey kid.”
“I was playing with a thermometer as a kid and accidentally broke it. I was scared my mom would find out, so I ate all the mercury that spilled out.”
“I liked to stick my finger into outlets as a kid, and pull it back once I got zapped. Then I’d recover for a bit and do it again.”
“I accidentally cut off half of my pinky as a kid. It grew back though.”
“Got ran over by a scooter. My mouth was filled with blood. But I still crawled up and told the driver, “I’m fine, you can go.””
“I ate a lot of heartbreak grass as a kid.”
“When I was little, my grandpa was worried I’d fall into the outhouse, and put a layer of cardboard over the hole. And I stepped right on it and fell through anyways.”
“I was five or six and ate an entire bottle of pills thinking they were candy. I don’t remember what medicine it was, but my mom said I was foaming at the mouth while crying about how the candy tasted back. Ended up hospitalised for half a month.”
“Anyone still got pencil lead stuck in their hand?”
“Who’s sucked the ink out of ballpoint pens?”
“Stapling my fingers and pulling the staples out one by one.”
“I accidentally broke out of those glowy sticks, and whatever liquid was inside it shot into my eye. It was really painful, but I didn’t think anything of it, but when I went to bed at night, my eyes glowed.”
“I was cutting watermelons and stabbed it with a knife, and the knife went right through my hand. I nailed my own hand to the cutting board. Then I just pulled it back out and kept cutting watermelon.”
“When Fei Xiaotong graduated in his early twenties, he went and performed sociological studies in the mountains of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. He ended up accidentally stepping on a hunter’s trap and breaking his leg, so he begged his newly-wed wife to climb down the mountain and go seek help. But his wife ended up slipping off a cliff and dying.
He ended up being discovered by the hunter later and surviving as a result. While he was recovering from his injuries in his hometown, he wrote the must-read book in the field of Chinese sociology: “The Economy of Rivers and Villages.” The first title for that book was, “Life of a Chinese Villager”.
He’s a genius of sociology. The very first book he wrote became a classic.
He wrote a chapter in the book once about local women.
At the time, the custom of drowning daughter was very common. If the baby is a girl, then people would throw her into a water tank and let her drown.
Fei Xiaotong’s sister, Fei Dasheng, opened a silk-spinning factory locally, and only hired girls. The girls made more in a month in the factory than farming families made in a year.
And so the custom changed. Nobody drowned daughters anymore.
When I read that passage, I was really moved. I can’t imagine how many girls he saved.
This is why the best way to end poverty or promote education is to help people fulfil their own values. It’s so much more complicated than just giving out money.
Si Chuan’s Daliang Mountain is the poorest region in the country. Every year, they get a lot of government subsidies, but the area is still rife with drugs and gambling. If you’re helping someone with the wrong methods, it could end up worse than not helping at all.
This lead to another story.
Due to western imports, the Chinese domestic silk industry was heavily impacted, because hand-making goods just simply can’t compete with industrialised goods on cost, efficiency, or quality. So a lot of villages lots their main form of income.
Back then (and also even today), villages can’t support their population on farming alone. Farmers had to have a second job to get by. But western goods meant that farmers lost their second jobs, because people in the city stopped buying things produced in the countryside. There stopped being an economic cycle between cities and farms. Everyone’s buying western goods, and rural farmers couldn’t survive anymore. And that’s how the “import boycott” got started.
At the time, boycotting was very different from nowadays, because back then, imports were pure imports. Everything was purely made and produced and manufactured outside the country. It has nothing to do with China. They’re just here to make money from China, and can’t actually bring any gains to China.
Now, the economy is all globalised, and a lot of “western imports” are actually made in China to begin with. A lot of big western brands have their factories in inland China, solving the employment issue for a lot of Chinese villages. They always pay a lot more than what farming earns.
Anyone who boycotts imports now is just retarded.
But that’s fits China’s societal structure quite well. No matter what we hate, the people we beat up first is each other. The people we hurt the most is always each other.
No matter who we hate, it’s Chinese people who end up getting the short end of the stick, and only Chinese people.
Well, I’m done now. You can beat me up now.”
Comments say, “They just hate their powerlessness and cowardice in real life, and use the name of patriotism to vent their frustrations on other people. They know what they’re doing—they’re just evil and cowardly.”
“I bet 90% of people have no idea who Fei Xiaotong is.”
“Opening up the economy has brought such tremendous changes to China. Whoever opposes it is the enemy of all Chinese people.”
The 30th of September is Veteran’s Day in China, and Xi Jinping and other CCP leaders will be offering bouquets to veterans on Tiananmen Square today.
Another askreddit question, “What did you do to get the worst beating of your life?”
The top-voted reply is, “Around 8th grade, I bought a lolita dress online, a JSK. I had to save up my allowance for the longest time to afford it. But the dress had a very thin strap, so I can’t just wear it on its own, so I found an old shirt from my cousin and wore it inside, and happily went to my tutoring class.
The lace undershirt I wore exposed about 5cm of my shoulder. It’s not super exposing at all. But I had no other clothes to wear inside that dress.
That day, for lunch, we’re supposed to go to my grandma’s for lunch. The whole way, my mom was talking about how my dress looked ugly, that I don’t look like a proper girl. I don’t understand why she would say something like that. It ruined my mood for the whole day. I was forcing a smile on my face to go see my grandma.
All the way through lunch, she didn’t stop nagging, and her words got worse and worse. She’s saying I look like a prostitute in a nightclub, that no other girls dress like me. Even grandma was getting embarrassed and trying to say, “Well, young girls like pretty dresses.” But my mom just ended up swearing that if I ever wore it again, she would tear the dress to pieces.
My emotions got to me, and I ended up running outside. I ran all the way from my grandma’s house to the riverside. At the time, I thought about throwing myself into the river.
Why am I so weak, that I would kill myself over some words?
I’m an only child in my family, we usually live in a small town. But my mom and dad both have stable incomes, and my mom made 8K a month roughly at her peak. But she always lied to me and said she only made 2K a month, so she never bought any clothes for me. I had to get whatever clothes my cousin didn’t want to wear anymore. She’s 6 years older than me, and had completely different tastes than me.
My mom would give me her old clothes too, because we’re roughly the same build. That way, she doesn’t have to buy new clothes. Standing next to my classmates, I look like some middle-aged lady. I don’t fit in at all.
I only get two new outfits per year, bought for me by my aunt. One for spring and summer, one in the winter for Chinese New Year.
I felt super insecure, but I never looked down on myself, because my dad and mom taught me from childhood that we were super poor. That they were already working super hard just to keep me alive. So I never eat any snacks. I give them all my red pockets. I wear the same shoes all seasons of the year.
But I bought this dress myself. I’m wearing my cousin’s old clothes under it. You didn’t pay a cent towards it. Why would you say I look like a whore? Why would you use such mean words? Because I didn’t wear your old sweaters when I left the house today?
I sat by the riverside and kept crying, feeling sorry for myself.
But I heard that people who drown end up super swollen. And I’ve got really good grades right now. If I managed to get into a good university, could I afford more pretty dresses for myself?
I thought for a long time and eventually decided to come home. At the end, my grandma ended up seeing me from the balcony. She lived in the last building in her development, right next to the river. When she was hanging up clothes to dry, she saw me squatting by the river. She called me back and phoned my dad to bring me home.
What happened when I got home makes me cry to think about as I’m typing right now.
As soon as I entered the door, my dad kicked me to the ground, and the two of them started beating me together with the belt, with their slaps. They pulled all my clothes off of me, even my underwear and bra. At the time, I was already 14.
I lied on the floor naked, my mom pulling my hair as she used a pair of scissors to cut my dress up. She was moving so quickly that I felt like all I could see was light and shadow. Or maybe that was from the slapping. My head was filled with stars.
“This is what you get when you’re vain! This is what you get when you dress up! Who told you to dress this way!?”
They took turns beating me until I was dizzy. And then my mom used the scissors to cut my waist-length hair to ear-length. This was something she always threatened me with—if I got bad grades, she’d cut off all my hair.
Later on, my dad said that I gave my grandma the fright of her life running out like that. If something happened to my grandma, he’d make me pay for it with my life.
I knew it was my fault. I shouldn’t have worried my grandma by going to the river.
But I’ll never forgive them for the rest of my life.
Every answer I’ve written on here isn’t for someone else to see how bad my life is and feel sorry for me. I’m not trying to get other people to be on my side and criticise my parents for me, so I can feel better.
It’s because the brain is really good at forgetting traumatic memories. The things that wounded me deeply in my childhood is fading every day. After so many years, I’ve become numb to my past, and started making up fantasies of a happy childhood for myself.
Every time I feel like forgiving them, I dig up all my responses and read through them one by one.”
Comments say, “I totally sympathise with the mother here. If I ever had kids, this is totally the kind of mother I would be. So for the sake of society, I’ve decided to not have any kids.”
“Not having any kind of follow up is making me feel worse than if I just ate a spoonful of shit.”
“It’s fine. When they’re old, you can shave them bald and dress them up in ugly sweaters too.”