10/17/23 - I accept my parent’s mediocrity, but they won’t accept mine.
A compilation of comments underneath an instagram post reading, “My parents knew how much pressure I’d be under in a traditional school environment, so they sent me to an international school. Only once I got here did I realise that overseas, teachers gave back tests face down so no one can see your score. I can wear make up, I can do my hair how I like, I can bring my phone to school, I can order takeout for lunch. This was all unimaginable to me before.”
Comments say, “Oh my god, I am going insane. Dudes. Do you have to get the principle’s permission to get a single day off of school? My grandpa passed away. My cousin and I are the only grand children he has, and my school won’t give me more than two days off. It takes a whole day just for me to go back home. I took off 2-3 days for covid that it was fine.”
“I accept my parent’s mediocrity, but they won’t accept mine.”
“Silence once you enter the room, study so long as you’re at the desk, never look up.”
“But what kind of a score can you get at the end?”
“I took a drink of water during class and got accused of disrespecting the teacher and got slapped around too.”
“The sad part isn’t what’s written in the most. It’s the people in the comments still obsessing over what she gets on her tests.”
“I had no idea before I came overseas that you’re allowed to eat while listening to class.”
“When I was going to school, all the students calling for the school to imitate international schools on policy were all terrible students. Now none of them are successful.”
“In China, people insist we don’t have class and everyone’s equal, while we’re dividing our students into insurmountable classes.”
“If your parents are only middle class, then you’ll still have to enter the autumn hiring market. It’ll be real torturous them.”
“Reincarnation determines your birth, college entrance exam determines your life. Who knows how I felt when I first saw this saying…”
“When I was going to primary school, we had an exchange student who came to class the first day wearing a hat, and the homeroom teacher said it was disrespectful to her. I remember that to this day.”
“Any other country’s teacher would be totally shocked. Why don’t we let students to go the bathroom? Why don’t we let them wear hats or slippers? My middle school teacher won’t even let people wear hoodies. My high school teacher wouldn’t let people wear a winter jacket over their school uniform. Look at my IP address [Heilongjiang, where winter temperatures average 20 degrees below zero]. I was the only one brave enough to do our morning runs in a winter jacket. I don’t care what those special snowflakes think is disrespectful. It’s just as much PUA behaviour as insisting that women are disrespectful to men if they won’t wear makeup every day.”
“I graduated from high school in America. All my grades are uploaded to the school web system where only you can look it up. Even your parents can’t look it up because it’s your privacy. If the kid has a major problem or something, the school would obviously talk to the parents, but no one’s ever ranked against each other. After all, universities don’t really care what you’re ranked. There’s awards given out every year, like if you have a 4.0 GPA. Nobody cares about make up or hairstyle, but you have to join some kind of sports team or clock in 45 minutes of exercise a day in the gym.”
“Do you think I don’t want to go to an international school? I don’t have the money!”
“International schools involute just as much, they just do it in a different style. There’s a lot more uncertainty when you apply to universities. You can’t get into your dream school on grades alone. You can’t necessarily get the results you want just by studying really hard. And it’s really stressful thinking about all the troubles in daily life once you’re overseas by yourself. Sure, there’s a lot of competition in China’s college entrance exam, but nothing’s easy in life. Everyone’s fighting hard in their own lane in life.”
“Even the best judge can’t solve domestic disputes.
A newly wed couple is furnishing their brand new house. They’ve already had two huge fights over the interior decorating, and are both giving each other the silent treatment right now. The wife says that she’s even considering divorce over this.
First, they agreed to put in a walk-in closet. But in the middle of things, the husband changes his mind and says he wants to make it into a guest bedroom for his parents instead. He comes from out of state, and his parents are living in his hometown for now, but eventually, they would join him.
They fought, and the wife eventually compromised and gave up on her walk-in closet.
Then, the wife was watching the kitchen remodelling team work, and she discovered that they didn’t leave any space to install the dishwasher she wanted. That was something they’d agreed on too. She asked the team, and they said that it was the husband who said they wouldn’t need a dishwasher. So she asked the husband, and he was like, “How many dishes are we gonna have? It’s totally unnecessary. We need to save our money where it counts.”
But the guy had a big aquarium installed in the living room. Is keeping fish more important than a dishwasher?
The husband totally promises that he’ll wash all the dishes in the future. But the wife is like, “Yeah, right, sure you will.”
It sounds like he’s being the unreasonable one, right? Let me go on.
First, the husband makes five times as much money as the wife. Secondly, they’re remodelling the wife’s premarital house.
He has a house of his own too, but this house is really close to her family and work, so it’s a lot more convenient for her to live here. The guy’s paying for all of the remodelling. Everyone knows that remodelling is the worst return on investment you can make. No matter how much you spend on it, you won’t ever see a cent of it back. So in China’s deeply materialistic and stingy marital views, the guy is practically a living saint paying money towards remodelling a house that he doesn’t own.
But, the wife has a point too. The guy works a super busy job that requires a lot of travelling. She’s going to be the one who primarily lives in this house and has to deal with stuff like washing dishes. Right now, there’s only the two of them and there won’t be that many dishes. But they’re going to have kids eventually. And both of their parents are going to move in eventually. And there might be a nanny in the picture. By that point, there’s going to be piles of dishes every day. Do they have to completely remodel the kitchen again to fit in a dishwasher?
Of course she could insist on having a dishwasher installed anyways. The guy isn’t against it. He just made it clear up front, “You can go ahead and get one, but you gotta pay for it yourself.”
So firstly, the wife doesn’t really want to come up with the money herself. Secondly, the company she works at has been cutting people’s pay over the last two years, so she’s under a lot of financial pressure too. And thirdly, this would be practically slapping her husband in the face. If he flips out over it, then they wouldn’t have much of a marriage at all.
So now, her problem is how to go about persuading the man, to make him agree to put in a dishwasher.
It’s really hard to persuade somebody, especially to persuade somebody to throw money on something he thinks is pointless.”
Comments say, “How much does a dishwasher cost? If he’s not willing to pay this much, then they’ll have countless fights waiting for them once a kid is born. They might as well just get divorced now.”
“The guy’s pretty problematic. I mean, sure, it’s the wife’s house, but if his parents are going to live there, then it’s pretty reasonable that he has to at least put up the remodelling money. If he’s already blown six figures on remodelling, then it’s just retarded to make his wife mad now over a dishwasher. If he’s deliberately pulling this as some kind of a power move on his wife, then not only is he retarded, but he’s an asshole too. If he’s willing to be this much of an asshole now, imagine how much worse he would get once he’s old and comfortable in the marriage. This isn’t something I’d divorce over, but I would definitely insist on getting that dishwasher. The wife is being totally reasonable on this.”
“Interesting. It looks like they’re fighting over remodelling, but really, they’re fighting over their individual rights and privileges. My husband and I have remodelled two houses and never fought, because we both want each other to be happy. We automatically go for things that the other person would love.”
“A horror story I read way back when gave me PTSD. In the story, some guy did some crimes and got put in jail, and became good friends with a fellow inmate who would always protect him. They made a plan to jail break together, and dug a tunnel to run away. After a while, an insect infestation broke out in the jail. There would constantly be these maggoty, wriggling bugs crawling out. So people looked into the source, and finally found two giant maggots underneath the ground, who continually mated and produced babies. And the two missing inmate’s faces was vaguely visible on the face of the maggot.
Then, I read Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, and there was a short story in it that was vaguely similar. Maybe the horror story was inspired by his manga. And I suffered that hair-raising discomfort once again.
I’m sharing this with you guys to see if talking about it makes the disgust I feel every time I think about this story any better.”
Comments say, “I read this story too. The tunnel was sealed off at the end. They couldn’t get out at all.”
“You make me want to read the original story now.”
“So how did they get turned into maggots?”
“Cuisine might be some form of magic.
My grandma loved to mince chilli peppers and garlic together, put in a few drops of vinegar and a little bit of salt, and use it as sauce for her bread. The first time I saw, I kind of looked down on it. No oil, only raw fresh spiciness, how is that tasty at all? In my heart, the proper way to eat chilli peppers is minced with a bunch of rapeseed oil, stir-fried over a big fire until the whole room get spicy. When they’re charred and curling a little, eat it with a slightly warm piece of bread. Adding any other veggies or meat to chilli peppers is blasphemy in my eyes.
There’s a type of pickles called mustard chunks. It’s not made with turnips. I have no idea what it’s made with. [I assume it’s mustard.] It’s not spicy, or umami, just pure saltiness. Like, stomach-turning saltiness. You can julienne it into super thin strips, add chilli powder, and pour hot vegetable oil over it. Oil on chilli powder is so fragrant I could die for it. With a little bit of saltiness, it’s the perfect pairing for bread. You can mince it up and stir-fry it along with chilli peppers too, if you want to be super fancy. That’s a great pairing for rice porridge.
There’s a saying in China, that rivers with rock bottoms are completely different from rivers with mud bottoms. Whenever the summer planting season is over, aunties around town would tell their sons to go and bring a bunch of rocks back from the river. They’d wash the rocks clean, and put it in a big cast iron pan and heat it up, to make rock bread with. Rock bread is completely different from ordinary Guokui [literally pot helmet], you can put seasoning inside it, like peppercorn leafs, or crushed funnel, or salt and white sesame seed. You have to make the rocks super hot first, and use the rocks to roast the bread. Maybe it’s how much work went into it, but I’ve always thought rock bread was to die for.
Qihua noodles, otherwise known as “sparrow tongue” is a type of pasta, made with flour and warm salty water, risen over an hour, kneaded for half an hour. It’s super chewy. You rolling it out into a thin round shape, then cut it straight up and down, and cut diagonally across, to make tiny little diamond pasta. Boil it for two minutes and it’s cooked. Throw it in some soup and you can dig in. My favourite Qihua noodles have a really simple soup base, just tomatoes, chives, and firm minced tofu. If there’s any meat at all, the noodles are ruined. If there’s any other veggies, the noodles become at least 60% less tasty.
We didn’t use to have terms like “carb bombs”. People used to love carbs. At the time, we just called it, “good food”.
There’s a type of good food called a flaky oil bread. You use an iron bucket like you’re about to roast some sweet potatoes. But the bucket’s been remodelled. The inside is covered with mud, and the fire burns in the middle of the mud, licking up the thick and black sides of the bucket. The sides of the bucket is like a cast iron pan texture. You mix up dough with lard, then roll it out and stick it to the side of the bucket to sear. Once both sides have been seared a little, and the dough isn’t so soft, it can stand on its own. You put it into the mud inside to roast until it’s golden brown, until it flakes at a touch. Roast it until your whole mouth is filled with fragrance with a single bite, until your mouth and your stomach warms up right away. Remember to add some beef sausage to it.
My sister’s been obsessed since fifth grade, about one time she couldn’t go home for lunch, so our neighbour took the whole neighbourhood’s lunches and delivered it to their kids. One of the lunches was bread + mustard chunks pickles. One of the lunches was flaky oil bread + beef sausage. The rich girl obviously took the lunch with the meat, so my sister took the lunch with the pickles, only to find out later she was supposed to have the meat.
My sister’s brought this event up like 15 times. She talked endlessly about that bread, that meat, that bucket. I paid a lot of attention. Based on my observation, its level of deliciousness completely matches up to my sister’s never ending obsession.
And there’s fried bread. 1/3rd dough made with boiling water, 1/3rd with risen dough, 1/3rd with wheat dough. Mix it all together to make the skin. The stuffing inside is made with sugar and red green strips [made with julienne’d orange peel, carrots, and papaya], and fried in oil. They’re 20 cents each, crunch on the outside and sweet on the inside. Everyone who goes to market buys some. I’ve made it at home too, but it’s never the same. Sometimes, the portion of dough is off. Sometimes, the stuffing is off. When I bite into it, it’ll come squirting out and burn my mouth.
This is a snack that can only be bought at the market. There’s two other types of snacks that merchants would sell as they walk around town. One is zongzi, some with jujube stuffing, some with red bean paste, some that’s just pure rice. The lady who sold zongzi around town has a thin and sharp voice that wasn’t annoying at all. It was super audible, but still tolerable.
The woman who sold zongzi came from Jingyang County, and has to walk through a long, long slope to get to our village. The slope is called, “Stone Passage”. Legend says that when Wu Zetian’s mom died, she ordered artisans to transport stone from the northern mountains to carve into lions and unicorns for her mom. The artisans had to carve out huge boulders from the north and sail it down the Jing River, and they had to build this rock passage.
One zongzi was 25 cents, but that lady had to walk through several kilometres of the stone passage. Us kids never had any idea of the pressures of life. We just knew that she had the best zongzi. As soon as I heard her voice, I’d try to con my mom out of money. As soon as I got money, I’d get a bowl ready and wait for her, until she would stop in front of me and smile as she lifted the clean cloth over the zongzi, smile as she opened up the banana leaves. The white zongzi is revealed like…like sweet clouds.
Another tasty snack is Zhen cakes, sometimes called mirror cakes. It’s appeared in Nothing Gold Can Stay [my dad’s favourite TV show], but the ones in the TV show are wrong. The rice and the jujube are all separated, like they don’t know each other. The kind we had has jujubes on the bottom layer, with rice on top, and then another layer of jujubes on top of that, so on and so forth for several layers.
Jujubes are normally red, but after they’ve been cooked, they turn brown, and their juices will seep into the white rice and dye those brown too. So Zhen cakes aren’t red and white, but dark brown and light brown. The dark brown bits are especially sweet, and the light brown bits are especially soft.
The guy who sold Zhen cakes came from Jingyang too. His slogan was super simple and straightforward. The zongzi woman would sing, “Honey zongzi, with sugar, jujubes, and red bean past~” The guy selling Zhen cakes would just yell, “Zhen cakes! Zhen cakes!”
Any villager with any standards in life would only eat his Zhen cakes, and turn down anyone else’s, because in the realm of “good food”, good tasting food is the only standard. The villagers would never waste a cent of their money.
Zongzi and Zhen cakes are the cheapest of “delicacies”. They’re not expensive, they’re not only available at the market. But even so, every time I ate them, it was like a flower would bloom in my chest. Even though they’re replicable, even if I can never make them as well as the woman and man from Jingyang, my rose-coloured glasses will still put on a special “delicious” filter on them.
From all of these delicacies, it’s not hard to tell, that I grew up super poor. A little bit of carbs, a little bit of sugar, a little bit of spicy was enough to bring me joy. Maybe it’s because of this, I have a tendency toward strong flavours. Even when I’m picking out fruit, I prefer the ones that are either super sweet or super sour.
Later on, when I moved to Guangdong/Shenzhen, I liked the local food’s mildness and emphasise on natural flavours, but occasionally, my instincts would still urge me to eat mustard chunk pickles and honey zongzi. When I ate from Huang’s today and tasted all that spicy, salty, greasy tastiness, I felt like I was back in my hometown. I’m so happy.”
Comments say, “I’ve only left my hometown for one day, and now that I’ve read this blog on childhood delicacies, I’m drooling nonstop. My mom says I don’t miss her at all, I just miss her food. Although I never admit it, I can’t help but wonder how much my mom knows me hahahaha.”
“You can tell everything about someone’s life just from the food they love.”
“My mom’s been over at my place lately, and I’ve been telling all my hometown friends to come over to my place to eat. I tell my best friend every day that it’s great having my mom with me.”