“I ate at Haidilao for lunch today in Singapore, and heard the next table over discussing CEO of Evergrande, Xu Jiayin.
Their opinion is more or less the same as what you see on tiktok. If Xu was willing to put all of his money towards completing as many houses as possible and paying back as much debt as he could, he would’ve been fine. But he set himself on fire when he applied for bankruptcy protection in America, and then tactically got a divorce to protect half of his assets.
If Evergrande declared bankruptcy, they’d only have to pay back the register cost of 390 million. But with that pitiful amount of money, the rest of the debt would have to be paid by society. To the higher-ups got angry.
You can’t run such a big business in China by just following the laws to the letter. All big businesses in China not only have to obey the laws at their darkest moment, but they need to make their attitude clear to society too, put their actions where their mouth is, be willing to take any measures necessary to fill in any deficits, to prevent causing societal problems.
If they flourish, they need to display loyalty. If they fail, they need to make up for their mistakes.
Xu’s been in the business and politics world for a long time, and was once the richest man in China. Surely, he knows such obvious unspoken rules? What’s the point of money if you can’t even hold onto your life?
I’m a big fan of soccer, and Chinese soccer’s been in deep shit the last 20 years. Only Evergrande’s soccer team brings Chinese soccer fans any kind of joy.
I still remember back in 2013, I missed the AFC Championship because I was on a flight. As soon as I touched down in Atlanta, I immediately started searching the final score.
Now that Evergrande’s on its last breath and Xu’s become a prisoner, Evergrande’s soccer team is getting disbanded, and all the players are scattered about.
What a rise against hardship, what a glorious climax, and yet, in the end, it was all but a dream.”
Comments say, “You’re making up way too much stuff. Xu isn’t a scumbag. There’s no way for him to be, or else he wouldn’t have lived to this day. It’s all predetermined. Normal people would never understand.”
“He’ll probably come down with some kind of “sudden illness”. How did he get all of that money out of Evergrande? It’s not normal people who are sharing the proceeds with him. If he doesn’t die, a lot of people won’t be able to sleep at night.”
“It’s not point in trying to build any more houses. He sees the situation. He’s in too deep. He can’t possibly catch up. I think they were covering up like 660 billion RMB’s worth of losses when they were doing accounting fraud before. It’s ridiculous. Look how much dividends he got all these years by making up numbers.”
A tiktok video challenging “fastest way to make baby food”:
The baby food consists of some rice, a chunk of foie gras, tomato beef frozen into the shape of a cat paw (???), white sesame seed and pork liver powder, carrots, Napa cabbage, an egg, and dried shrimp, all steamed together.
Comments say, “I thought it was dog food.”
“Aside from the rice at the beginning, it looks exactly like a doggie mukbang.”
“Her son is not even two yet, and he’s so big and strong eating this “dog food”. And some babies won’t eat painstakingly prepared baby food. Her baby food has meat and veggies and soup and balanced nutrition and everything.”
“You know what demographic likes to think they look really young and like to pretend to be shojo?
Middle-aged to old women who are short and thin and flat and weak because of childhood malnutrition.
I’ve got a neighbour who invited me out to play ball every day during covid. She’s already retired, at least 51-52 years old, under 160cm, and super thin and flat. She really liked to constantly talk about how young she looked. She wore really girly clothes all the time, and even did her hair up in twin tails.
I’m not saying middle aged women can’t wear girly clothes or twin tails. I just don’t understand what the purpose is. Do they think they look good that way? Or are they just trying to be unique? Or are they trying to look young? It achieves a really different result based on their intentions. That’s why a lot of western old ladies were girly clothes and everyone is like, “Wow, how unique, how nice, they’re so confident.” But when old Chinese women wear girly clothes, it just makes people feel like they’re pretending to be young.
One day, while we were playing ball, she started showing off her “shojo-ness” again, and I got impatient and told her, “If you really want to be a shojo, then stay single and childfree. If you’re living together with a man and you’ve been pregnant and had kids, how could you possibly have any shojo-ness left? What kind of shojo lives like that?”
She had nothing to say and shut up. But ever since, she’s been resentful of me.
Compared to her, I’m really big-boned and solidly built, and I walk with my head up and my back straight, and I have a short haircut. And I’m rather cold towards men. And I know she likes to pretend to be young, so although I’m much younger than her, I never call her “sister” or “auntie”. I just call her by name, to make it seem like we’re the same generation. That made her even more confident.
She ended up feeling like because she’s smaller and prettier and younger and more shojo than me, and she’s sweeter to men, of course she’d be more popular among men. I knew she felt this way, but I never bothered saying anything about it.
Until one time, we were a part of some community event to do some poetry reading. The community elected three women and one man, including her and me. The other woman was the oldest among us, the man was the youngest. He’s only in his twenties, and none of us knew him.
Because of the short schedule, we each separated and memorised our part, and only rehearsed the day before the performance. The next day was the actual performance, and I arrived a little late. The row the three of them were sitting in had filled up, so I sat down in a different row.
After our performance, the guy didn’t go back to his original seat, but followed me to my row and sat down next to me to chat with me. I was a little surprised, but I didn’t think anything of it.
I never thought that after the performance ended, she kicked me out of the community group chat and told me, “Let’s just go our own way from now.” And I was like, “????” And then she cut me off completely.
She hadn’t blocked me on social media. Because I didn’t care to, and she had no grounds to. I mean, she couldn’t very well block me just because young guys like to sit with me and not her, right? It’s not like guys are blind. They can tell who’s a bit younger.
Then later, I saw a social media post of hers by chance, talking about how she went to the museum and the security guard called her “auntie”. She was mad and annoyed, all like, “Guess I really am showing my age.”
And in my heart, I was like, “No shit.””
Comments say, “All of their value is based on getting attention from and being harrased by men.”
“My roommate is only a hair above 150cm and super flat and thin, and constantly makes casual comments in front of me like, “Girls are only attractive if they’re small.” “Tall women are so bulky, it’s so ugly.” I just pretend not to hear anything, since I’m a full head taller than her. She’s so mad about it lol.”
“The competition among Chinese women is so anti-human.”
A blogger posts screenshots of someone else’s post, reading, “Almost killed my whole office single-handedly. I work in England, and on our zoom meeting today, I told my coworkers all about the Chinese Full Moon Festival and what moon cakes are, and promised that I’d bring them some moon cakes next time I went back to England. Then everyone studied the ingredient list of the moon cake I was showing them, and found that literally none of them could try these mooncakes, because every single ingredient had somebody who was allergic to it. If they ate the moon cake, not a single person in our office would survive XD
British people are so fragile.”
The blogger writes, “This post got on the trending posts lately. A lot of people are talking about how British people are allergic to all kinds of weird stuff—so allergic they end up in the hospital. I’ve talked before about how a lot of Chinese people go overseas to discover a lot of bizarre conditions and illnesses they’ve never even heard of, like lactose intolerance, or peanut allergies. And a lot of people have been wondering why westerners are so weak.
Modern medicine says this is normal, everyone is different. That’s all bullshit. This is all the result of modern medicine. Mostly, it’s all the vaccines they give you from childhood. The more vaccines you get, the more problematic your health becomes. The isolated Amish people in America who don’t use any modern medicine don’t have this problem. They’re never troubled by all these modern diseases.”
Comments say, “Nowadays, Chinese kids have all kinds of allergies from birth too. It’s just that most parents don’t realise. I follow a blogger whose kid is allergic to all kinds of stuff, and he has to feed his kid all kinds of nutrition powder just to keep up his nutrition. But the kid still got diagnosed as malnutritioned when he went to the hospital. The blogger felt like this was normal, because all kids are like this nowadays.”
“Do they actually get more vaccines than China mandates though?”
“Westerns really are super allergic to peanuts though. They say there’s no GMO’d peanuts, but I feel like there definitely are, they’re just not labelled that way.”
Apparently, Jennie from Blackpink was supposed to show up to watch Lisa’s Crazy Horse show today, and her flight was delayed, so Lisa delayed the performance for half an hour to wait for her to show up. In the comment section below the tiktok video covering this, the comments read, “Waiting a whole half hour just for her to show up!? What is this, the Red Wedding?”
“Flight is delayed. Jennie be all like, “Oh, thank god!” The performance is also delayed. Jennie be all like, “…Fine.””
“Imagine your friend is getting married, and just because you, as a single guest, is showing up late, they’re delaying the whole wedding for half an hour. Could you possibly say at this point that you’re just not gonna go?”
“She’s never shown up to support Jennie’s individual performances, and now she wants to hide behind Jennie when she’s putting herself out there? Wow, Lisa.”
“Do you really have to drag your teammate into the water too?”
“I’m fucking blown away. They delayed it for half an hour waiting for Jennie. Now she can’t possibly not go. And now this kind little girl just has to do what’s polite. What the hell kind of Red Wedding are they planning, that they had to drag her into this?”
“If you’ve already got two daughters, why do you want a third kid? Isn’t it obvious that you’re trying for a song? Stop with the bullshit that “the whole family’s hoping for a daughter”. You know how fake it is.
I would never have a second kid. Not ever in my life.
Honestly, if my first had been a son, I would consider having a second baby. But if my first is a girl, I would stop right there.
I’m going to give her all of my love. I want my daughter to enjoy the happiness of being an only child. All my money, all my time goes to her.”
Comments say, “Yup. That’s my plans too. If my first is a girl, I would never have a second, because I don’t want her to have to be anyone’s older sister. I want her to have all of my love. You can never balance a bowl of water perfectly. Even if you did, society is still going to impose its prejudices on them.”
“Exactly. Even if they really wanted daughters, they’ve already got two. That’s enough. They can already play with each other.”
“It’s not even a matter of money. The reason I don’t dare to have two sons is because I can’t possibly raise them both. It’s fine when they’re babies, but as soon as they grow up a little, boy’s destructive power grow at an exponential rate. If two boys got together, I can’t even imagine how much of a mess they could make. All my friends who have two daughters, they can handle them if the grandparents also get involved. But raising two boys really takes a whole family plus a nanny.”
“The worst part about Shanghai is the suffocating wealth gap. During the day, I’m in a skyscraper working with perfectly made-up white collar people, who each have a Starbucks or M Stand coffee on their desks. They eat these delicate little salads for hundreds of RMB for lunch, with like two slices of meat in them. They talk about which country they’re gonna travel to for Independent Day break.
Once I leave work, I go eat at a Mala Tang opened by a Dongbei family. The father’s working as a janitor for 4500 RMB a month. The mother and her son are running the restaurant together. The rent on their apartment is over 10K a month. Their family of three is only renting one room out of it for 2500 RMB a month. The mother stays up all night worrying about how not to lose any money and actually earn a little extra with the restaurant.
I go to a Lawson store [convenience store], and it’s ran by an auntie from Henan, trying to put her two kids through school. Lawson pays 23 RMB per hour, 18 per hour for the first month as your trial period. Her husband drives for Uber, and just the gas and maintenance on his car costs 6500 RMB a month. The two of them live in a studio apartment in Baoshan [distant suburbs of Shanghai] for over 1000 RMB a month.
I was waiting for the bus today, and saw a super tanned middle-aged guy who fell asleep in the smooth, hard bus chairs, and then accidentally fell on the ground. His head rammed into the floor with a really loud bang. I could imagine how much it must’ve hurt. He just picked himself up and smiled in embarrassment and said he’d nodded off. I wanted to ask if he was alright, but I didn’t want to poke his sore spot. So many people aren’t alright at all. There are countless hardships in the world. And yet only one form of happiness.
What I see at work and off of work is like two sides of a mountain. I feel a vast, suffocating wealth gap. I use this to remind myself all the time to avoid consumerism, but I still don’t know how to face the other side of the mountain.”
Comments say, “The white-collar people in the skyscrapers aren’t any better off than the out-of-towners you wrote about in your post. They’re not rich either. You’re all in the same class. You’re targeting the wrong people if you’re comparing these two types. You coward.”
“You think you’re in a different class than them, but you’re just dress a little nicer, eat a little better. That’s all. You’re still fundamentally the same. Also, that gap you feel is man-made. People in the same class are forcibly separated by different styles of dress and food. I feel like this is all some kind of conspiracy.”
“At least everyone in Shanghai can be said to be proles still. Take a look at Beijing. That’s where the aristocrats are.”
What's the "Red Wedding"? That isn't a Game of Thrones reference, is it?
Wait, lactose intolerance? Surely that's far more common in China than in the West?