12/21/25 - He could tell I still had too much dignity.
“First lesson in society: went to a job interview today and chatted for a long time with the boss. He could tell I still had too much dignity, so he told me every glass of liquor I drank, he’d give me 100RMB. I tried refusing at first, but then I thought it through and drank three glasses, which I knew wouldn’t make me drunk. I got 300RMB. I could’ve drank more and got more money, but I wasn’t greedy. I got the money and left without getting drunk at all, and once I sobered up, I rode my bike to the mall and bought my favourite dessert and then rode home again. My head wasn’t heavy anymore, and the wind wasn’t cold anymore.”
Comments say, “This is why sex work only takes a fleeting thought.”
“Before I opened the comment section, I thought it was just about the boss seeing that I couldn’t let go of my dignity so he brought up 100RMB per glass to help me get over myself hahahahaha.”
“If this was my parents, I’ll just keep drinking. If this was my boss at a normal dinner, I’ll drink moderately. But he gave you a precise price of 100RMB per glass. He’s not putting a price on the alcohol, he’s putting a price on you.”
“This free 300RMB you got is going to remind you every time you encounter real obstacles that there’s another path you can take.”
“What you should feel lucky about isn’t that you weren’t tempted (even though you totally were), but that the liquor was clean.”
“This comment section really taught me how scheming people in society are.”
“A bunch of people in this comment section think they’ve figured it out, and they think once they’re done drinking, they could delete his contact info and never get in touch again. They think it’s a free 300RMB. If he really wanted to give you 300 bucks for free, why didn’t he just do that? He could’ve offered you help, but he insisted you drink three glasses of booze. His goal isn’t to make you drunk, it’s to put a price on things, and I’m not talking about the alcohol. I’m talking about you. You’re super happy. You even posted a Tiktok about it. A lot of people who make 3K a month only get 100 bucks a day, and you got 300 bucks for just drinking three glasses of liquor. You’ll probably often think about this so long as you haven’t reached financial independence. The the boss is happy, because 300RMB is nothing to him, but he can test where your bottom line is. Later on, he can give you many such tests, and the number might go up. It might be 3000, 30000. But by then, what you have to give isn’t just a couple of glasses of booze.”
“He’s sown the greed in your heart. Anyone who’s made fast money before isn’t going to be content with a couple grand a month.”
“This is a pretty obvious testing of your boundaries, open and clear 100RMB per glass. Let me tell you about something in my life. I have a friend who’s very pretty, and she had a lot of pursuers. One guy was very generous, giving her money on Alipay, giving her all kinds of luxury handbags. At first, my friend would refuse, but she couldn’t resist regular transfers and red pockets. But my friend made it clear that she’s not going to date him, and the guy doesn’t care at all. He just wants to meet up once in a while and have dinner. He’s spent all that money without so much as holding my friend’s hand. My friend figured she’d made herself clear. If this guy wants to spend money on her, there’s nothing she can do about it, so they kept going like this, until the guy took her to a dinner party. She thought it was just friends, so she went, but it was a whole bunch of middle-aged men talking business with the guy. The guy begged her to do him this one favour, it’s just dinner, my friend was upset, but it was just dinner, not like she had to do anything. So although she was mad, she still agreed. But that’s not how that dinner turned out at all. The guy kept insisting that she toast those men, and my friend couldn’t refuse at all. Once she was there, she just had to keep fake smiling and getting gropes. Every time she wanted to leave, the guy would cut her off, pull her to the side, and ask her to put up with it more, help him out, this was a really important deal he was trying to make, he wouldn’t make her do anything she didn’t like or else he wouldn’t have spent so much money on her, this is the only time, etc. In the end, my friend still agreed. Once that was over, she immediately blocked the guy afterwards, and the guy didn’t contact her again.
But my friend was used to having plenty of money to spend. The money she got from the guy before didn’t last too long before she’d blown it all. She used to be able to get by on the money her family would give her, and now it’s not nearly enough. So she got a part-time job, but a whole month of working still wasn’t as much as what the guy used to give her. And the result was pretty obvious too. She contacted the guy again, and the guy stopped pretending too. He told her straight up, every dinner party was going to be 3000RMB. And my friend went in the end. At first, it was just simple drinking with people. And then she could make a couple grand having one on one dinners with these businessmen. And then in the end, you all know. All I can say is, don’t test human nature. You let go of your boundaries once, you let go of them forever. Just keep your bottom line.
And this is built on the basis that my friend was really good looking. Like you would see her immediately in a crowd. So those people were pretty generous. A lot of girls who end up doing sex work don’t make nearly as much as her, but even so, she couldn’t stop once she’d taken that much stuff. Greed is bottomless. Once you let go of your bottom line, you won’t be able to turn back. Sex, gambling, and drugs. You can tell quite a lot by just how sex comes first. I hope all girls can keep their bottom line, don’t think that you can pull out in time. Even if you want to, that environment won’t let you escape. It only takes a single thought to fall in, but climbing back out is like trying to get to heaven.”
“Menstrual goods for women appeared on men’s waistbands. This is an excerpt from “The Good Women of China”. I’ve translated the part about Scream Mountain, a very primitive place that actually existed. This book is a nonfiction about the last century. I’m just sharing an excerpt, it’s not representative of women today.
What’s most surprising to me about this passage is that this book recorded the pain of all kinds of different women, and in the author’s eyes, the women of Scream Mountain had it particularly bad, including but not limited to not having the right to inherit property, not having any status in the family, the girls of a family only have a couple of outfits that they take turns wearing, never having enough food, having to give birth to boys, etc. But this was also the only chapter where the women of Scream Mountain thought they were happy. They had no complaints or regrets.”
[OP translated an English book into Chinese and I’m basically translating it back into English here. If it differs from the original passage, that’s probably why.]
“Her grandmother slowly explained that these leaves are used by women during their periods. When a girl has her first period on Mount Xiaoting, or when a woman first marries into this village, her mother or other older women will give her ten of these leaves. These leaves are collected from somewhere very far away. The older women will teach their girls how to use these leaves: first, you have to cut each leaf into the right size so they fit in your pants; then, you have to stab little holes into the leaves so they better absorb blood. The leaves are very flexible and the fibres in them are very thick. So when they absorb blood, they’ll become very bloated.
In this region with such shortage of water, people have no choice but to press the leaves dry again after use. A woman will use the same ten leaves for multiple months in a row to deal with their period, even if it’s after childbirth. And these leaves will eventually be the only thing she takes into her grave.
I used a couple of menstrual pads that I had brought along with me to exchange for a leaf from Niu’er’s grandma. When I touched those leaves, tears burst out of my eyes; how can you use such a rough, hard leave to wipe the most sensitive area on a woman? It wasn’t until that moment that I understood why all the women on the mountain walk with their legs spread wide apart—this is the reason why their thighs are scarred from always rubbing up against the leaves.
These traditions make them believe that all the women in the world live the same life as them. If you try to tell them about the outside world, it’s like peeling off the calluses on a pair of hardworking hands and letting the pain touch the fresh new skin directly.
The day I left Scream Mountain, I found that the souvenir pads I had left Niu’er’s grandma was carried around on her son’s waistband. They use these pads to wipe away sweat or to protect their hands.”
Comments say, “These stories aren’t that far from us at all. The menstrual pads donated to girls in poverty-stricken areas are often used by the boys in the family as shoe inserts. The world has a thousand ways of not loving women. Men have been in a position of privilege for so long that they think they’re naturally entitled to whatever resources appear. They think they have to right to decide what women do and don’t get, or else they’ll fall into panic and anger. That’s how men are.”
“Whenever we don’t have to emphasise feminism when we fight for freedom, that’s when you’ll know we have achieved true equality.”
“The scariest part is that there’s no Chinese version of this book.”
“When I was in middle school, the teacher came out with a new rule to prevent students from going to the supermarket to buy latiao—if you’re found to have bought latiao, it’s a 5RMB fine. The next day, 8 other people in class and I got caught. At the time, the teacher made me the representative to collect the fine from everyone. That afternoon, after getting the money, I told the teacher, “Maybe I should secretly return this money and tell them not to tell anyone. And then you can tell the class that you’ve fined them. This way, not only do you intimidate the class, but they’ll be grateful to you.” The teacher agreed just like I expected. But I didn’t give them the money. I just pocketed it. Because I knew the teacher wasn’t going to ask them, and they weren’t going to ask the teacher.”
Comments say, “Holy fuck, bro, if you were an official, how would the peasantry live?”