2/27/23 - The wife is always an outsider.
People comment on a reality TV show where a male idol is being interviewed with his sister. The idol says his mom always puts an egg in when making instant noodles. His sister says that’s not true and calls and asks her mom. Her mother agrees that she always puts an egg in when making instant noodles. Her sister asks, “Then why haven’t I ever gotten one in mine?” And her mother went silent. Apparently, one of his sister’s habits is that after she eats grapes or chicken or whatever, she puts it back in a way that you can’t see a bit is missing. She says that her mother has asked that she not touch food before the idol is home, so she’s learned to hide her snacking.
An askreddit question, “What’s it like to never cook for your whole life?” Below is the answer, “My grandpa died at 81, never cooked a meal in his life. He was a judge during Federalist China, got servants at home, soldiers guarding his house. My grandma hired two wet nurses for each of her two kids, for fear that one wouldn’t make enough milk. My grandpa handed in his salary every month and never yelled at grandma, and that made him a top-tier man in those days.
When communist China began, he just continued being a judge, while grandma got a job as a stenographer. But they lost all their servants, so grandma had to figure out how to cook. She’s smart, so it didn’t take her long, and she immediate got to the work of teaching my mom how to cook. My mom was less than 10 years old when she took over cooking for the family. In the meantime, my grandpa didn’t even know how to boil water. Every time the tea kettle would start whistling, he’d start yelling too, ‘Sweetie! Sweetie! The water’s boiling!’
But in those days, cooking wasn’t hard. Finding food to cook with was. Grandpa was the first to start bloating with hunger. Grandma told her two daughters, “Do you have classmates who work at the silk factory? Ask them for some silkworm larvae.” Though it wasn’t tasty per se, the protein from the larvae quickly made the bloating go down. But soon enough, everyone had discovered this source of protein, so that didn’t last long.
So grandma thought about changing her job. I don’t know how many connections she had to pull, but she managed to get herself assigned to the meat factory as a “legal consultant”. She starts urging her husband to get a new job too, but he was scared of change. To quote grandma, ‘He’s too afraid to go outside in case a leaf falls on him.’ No matter how much she urged, he insisted, ‘We’ll piss people off if we do that.’
Later, when grandpa went to reeducation camps, mom took over grandma’s job, while my aunt started working part-time at a food production company and supporting the family. Why did grandpa go to reeducation camps? He found a radio god-knows-where and decided to take it home and hide it under his bed. When it was discovered, they found that if they tuned it just right, they can get channels from outside of China. The quota for finding “spies” was pretty high back then, so he got taken away.
When he got out, he found a job with the local communist party—a pointless bullshit job where he just practised calligraphy all day.
Grandpa also never learned to read a clock. All of his kids and grand kids made fun of him, that he had his name on all kinds of official judgements but he doesn’t even know how to tell time. In the early 80s, his son finally bought him an electronic clock that would read out the time automatically when you pressed a button. For a whole year, grandpa couldn’t wait for people to ask him what the time was.”
Author and screenwriter says that one of her fans said, “I married to a rural village in Shandong. My in-laws insist on living with me after marriage. They said they’re the hometown of Confucius, it wouldn’t be fillially pious to not live together. I can feel that they hate me, and yet they insist on living with me. We fight all the time. My husband agrees with them too, said if I don’t want to live together, he’ll get a divorce with me, there are plenty of others who are willing.
We have to do everything together, eating out, travelling, watching a movie. We always have to take his parents, or else I’m not fillially pious. It’s suffocating.”
It makes this author remember her own ex-husband. His dad passed away early, and his mom married again, and had a son with her new husband. This step-brother is 10 years younger than her ex-husband. Right after they had a kid together, her ex started planning for his mother, his step-dad, and his step-brother to come to Beijing and live with them.
He paid for his step-brother to go to school, found his step-brother a part-time job, supported his step-brother through a master’s degree, and then found his step-brother a full-time job. If they hadn’t gotten a divorce, he would have bought his step-brother a house in Beijing, to live in with his mom and his step-dad. Of course, it’d be right next to our place so we can take care of them better.
Of course, he didn’t make that much money. I’d have to pay for most of it. That is, I’d be paying to support his entire family. Almost all our fights when we were married were about his mom and his step brother. His step-brother was in his twenties and still slept in the same bed as his mom! I could not comprehend.
Of course, according to Shandong tradition, I had to take care of his mom and dad and brother. Even if that means wiping their splatter pee off of the toilet every morning.
Thank god I got a divorce. I get a migraine every time I think about my ex’s family. Some men always feel like they’re family with their parents and siblings, even if their mom remarried. And yet in their eyes, the wife is always an outsider. If their wife can’t fit into their family and be properly useful, they can just get another wife.
Personally, I’d like to advise these men to not get married and just be a motherfucker instead.
A parenting advice blogger talks about her three kids and their reaction to getting praise. The oldest gets praised and replies with a polite, “Thank you.” The second gets praised and gets all Mean Girls-like, “Really? I’m that awesome? Nah~ Really?” When the youngest gets praised, she’ll get annoyed that your praise is too general and not specific enough and launch into a speech deeply analysing how great she is.
Someone shows off shopping at Sam’s Club on Chinese Instagram and how fancy her life is. “Remember when you posted to your friend’s circle buying yule logs and cakes? It’s so obvious you only go once a year. I shop there all the time for all my daily stuff. Some people constantly try to show off how well-off they are on social media, but they’re just a joke, lol.” Someone comments, “You still go to Sam’s Club in person? I just get grocery delivery from them, lol.” And the original poster flips out at them.
An author says, “I’ve got a not very politically correct thought—I see people on the internet talk about having high-need babies. Almost all of the time, it’s a boy. I’ve seen a lot of cases of people saying they had a daughter first, and she was an absolute angel, so they decided to have a second, had a son, and he is a super high-need baby, and now the whole family revolves around him and are all exhausted. That’s a very Chinese phenomenon—a boy with an older sister who is super fussy and need s a lot of attention.
It was even on the news lately that a full-time mom got constipation because every time she went to the bathroom, her son would scream and cry and bang on the door outside, and she’d have to pause her business to go out and comfort him. She claims too that he is a high-need baby.
My thoughts are he’s probably just spoiled. Just let him cry while you shit. What is he gonna do, break the door down? Who do you think your son is? Xin Qiji? The more he cries, the longer you spend scrolling your phone on the toilet. Do that once or twice and he’ll learn his lesson.
Of course, in that news story, this full-time mom was living with her son’s grandpa, grandma, dad, and nanny. There’s no reason she should be the one who has to come out and comfort the baby.”
Man fought with his wife over Chinese New Year, over how society judges men for spending money. All of men’s interests, at least any ones that takes money like photography, gaming, fishing, biking, etc, are all considered to be inappropriate. Or at least, it has to be expensive enough that you have to be rich to do it, like golf or cars or rare watches or collecting antique, that you can be justified in liking it. Then his wife got mad at him for spending too much money on his hobbies and then it turned into an argument about how much money each of them spends. So, he decided to make an excel sheet breaking down all their expenses from 2015 on. The result was terrifying. He’s a average middle-class worker, makes about 100K a year. His wife doesn’t have a job, she occasionally sells collectibles in her video games and has made about 30-40K over the last 7 years.
But their expenses are as follows:
Shopping expenses: $457896
My expenses: $78812
My wife’s expenses: $318542
Family expenses: $47249
Parents’ expenses: $13293
Mortgage: $225840 ($103169.81 remaining)
Total: $683736
This is not including eating, groceries, take out, gas, internet, phones, etc.
Of the 78K of his expenses, it includes two laptops costing 13K and 15K respectively, replacement parts for his motorcycle 5K, and a computer he bought his wife costing 17K.
He couldn’t handle seeing these numbers. Turns out, he’s been working so hard and paying 7K a month for mortgage, and his wife has been spending five times as him on her clothes and make up and handbags?
Here is a breakdown of her yearly expenses, by the way:
2015: $13244
2016: $35214
2017: $32371
2018: $30253
2019: $18849
2020: $124836
2021: $63771
Breaking down her expenses by category:
Video games: $63739
Make up: $99124
Clothes: $119402
Snacks: $36277
Someone breaks down in the comments that 100K a year, that’s 700K in 7 years, and yet his documented expenses are up to 680K. They only spent 20K in 7 years on groceries and bills?
Is Sam's Club marketed differently in China, seen as more upscale?