A fan submission to a writer: “There’s a weird growth in my body. Just in case it’s malignant or something, I had a discussion with my husband about whether or not we could set aside a portion of our savings for my parents. It’s almost all my income, since he earns so little money. I’m the one paying all our daily expenses too. I just want to take care of my parents in their old age. He refused. I asked whether it was because we’re not well off, and he’d be more willing if we had tons of money. He said it wasn’t about that—even if he had tons of money, he still would’ve refused.”
“There are so many accidents in this world. Just thinking about how he wouldn’t even take care of my parents if I died, I don’t see what the purpose to this marriage is.”
Comments advise, “It’s your income, you have control over it. It doesn’t matter whether he agrees or not, just wire whatever amount you want to your parents. You don’t need his consent on this.”
Chinese internet coins new term, “Screenshot Hoarding”, for people who have thousands of screenshots in their phone for no reason at all, which they haven’t looked at since the day they took it, but won’t delete because maybe it’ll be useful one day. Finally, they go on a big deleting spree and clean out their albums, only to suddenly start needing those screenshots.
In the comments, people show off their albums of tens of thousands of screenshots, while others wonder if they’re just showing off how much memory their phone has.
A video of a toddler crying and fussing and refusing to go to bed. The mother complains that she’s about to have a mental breakdown. This blogger says, “Some kids are here to repay you, some kids are here to collect on a debt. I’ve ran into a lady at driving school who said her son used to cry for no reason at night too. They tried everything. They even took him to a doctor. The whole family had to take shifts staying up with him every night until he grew up. That lady said she thought many times about jumping off a building with her son. People shouldn’t criticise a mother for her impatience if they haven’t experienced this. This is torture.” The blogger also set up a poll asking people if this is because this toddler wasn’t beaten enough.
Comments agree that she clearly wasn’t beaten enough.
A real estate blogger writes, “How involuted are primary school kids these days? Their lessons are ten times harder than what I learned when I was their age. I’m a parent of a first grader, and I’m not exaggerating at all. They have to learn the whole of Chinese phonetics in a month. If you don’t teach it all beforehand at home, there’s no way any kid could keep up. They’re supposed to learn a thousand characters in the first year of school. They need to be able to independently read 500-word short stories to get passable grades. If you don’t teach the syllabus beforehand, there’s no way your kid can even pass.”
“It’s not even just a matter of recognising characters—they need to know how to write them. All the reading material they use at school is ancient poetry and folklore, with very few stories using modern Chinese. But when it comes to writing assignments, they’re always asked to write with modern Chinese (and their writing assignments are always over a hundred words). They basically expect you to teach the entirety of modern grammar and sentence structure outside of class.”
“They don’t even teach the English alphabet and pronunciation anymore—they assume you’ve learned at home. They start right away with full sentences and conversation. All 26 letters, how you pronounce them, commonly seen words, grammar, and sentence structure all has to be taught at home. The baseline assumption is that you’ve been learning English since birth. When I was little, we didn’t even start learning our ABCs until third grade.”
“Only math is slightly reasonable. Just learning two digit addition and subtraction, equation transposition, and some logic problems. There are tons of word problems though that assumes a certain level of vocabulary and reading comprehension from a first grader.”
“Because they did away with midterms and finals, there are tons of quizzes all throughout the semester. There’s one English test every week, two Chinese ones, and one maths quiz every day.”
“I didn’t teach any of this stuff to my daughter before hand, and now we have to spend four hours every day on homework. Aside from the weekends, she’s never had more than 10 hours of sleep, and she’s only just pulled from failing all her classes to barely passing.”
Comments lament, “And that’s how kids lose all passion for learning and burn out all their potential early on.”
Another blogger shows a first grade math question, and says that as a college student, he has no idea what the answer is.
Take a minute and try to solve it yourself. Got it? The answer is 5, 7, and 11. The pattern is that the first two numbers are prime numbers, and the third number is the closest non-prime number to the second number. The total sequence is 2, 3, 5, 4, 7, 8, 11.
A tiktok video of a mother solving a conflict between two sisters both toddler age. One is crying because she wants the coat the other is wearing, the mother reassures the kid that she doesn’t have to give up what she loves just because someone out is crying and hurt that they don’t have it. If she doesn’t want to share, she doesn’t have to share. You have no obligation to make your sister happy. A blogger’s wife showed him this video and said that’s how she wants to educate her kids. He immediately saw a problem and explained it to his wife.
First, for context, his wife has lots of siblings and is the oldest of the bunch. Her family is pretty well-off, so she never had to go without or anything, but her mother taught her from childhood that she needs to take care of her younger siblings. Even if they’re in the wrong, she still has to let them get their way. She really resented that and doesn’t want to educate her kids this way.
He said that the education method shown in the video is also wrong though. It’s not wrong because it’s training kids to be selfish—although clearly, the mother in the video is trying to shape her kids into selfish people. Of course, his wife’s mother is also wrong. No one has an obligation to take care of their siblings, or to let them have their way just because they’re younger. That’s not the values our society is built on. China doesn’t teach that women should always get their way and men have to do all the hardest jobs and constantly sacrifice themselves.
His wife asked, “So what should we do then?”
And he answered, “Choice.”
The highest form of freedom is choice. For example, if I came upon some injustice on the street, he can choose whether to help or not. And if he chooses to help, no one will sue him for it, and if he chose not to help, no one will blame him over it. That’s true freedom. That’s how he wants to raise his kids. He would ask, “Buddy, you said you want to give this coat to your sister—is it because she’s crying and you don’t want her to be upset?”
Whether the answer is yes or no, he can go to the next step. If no, then he can ask exactly why she wants to switch coats. If yes, then ask if she likes this coat.
If she says she likes the coat, then he will turn around and ask the younger sister, “Do you like this coat?” The answer is in the video—yes. It’s because she likes the coat that she’s crying. So he’ll ask her, “What if your older sister also likes this coat?”
If the younger one says she doesn’t know or says that her older sister can have it, he would immediately praise them and tell them that they really love each other. Although he can’t produce a second coat right here and now, he will reward them with something else like snacks or toys. He would tell them that they are sister and blood is thicker than water. They should never let material objects come between them. They need to keep loving each other, sharing with each other, protecting each other, and forgiving each other.
If the younger one wants the coat despite the older one also wanting it, then he’d ask the older daughter, “Your sister isn’t considerate at all that you like this coat too. She just wants it for herself. She has no care what you would prefer. Under these circumstances, would you still switch coats with her just to comfort her, so that she’ll stop crying?”
Children may be naive, but they’re not stupid. They just look at the world in a childish way. If he explains the situation to the older daughter, she can make her own choice. If her love of the coat surpasses her love for her sister, then she’ll make that choice. Or vice versa.
Whether they switch or not, he would tell them, they’re sisters, they’re family, they’re the closest people in the world to each other. It’s their responsibility to figure out how to treat and strengthen this relationship. He’ll give them the choice, and the corresponding consequences and responsibilities. Even if they’re young now, he insists that all children who are verbal get to choose.
Of course, he’d never let them make dangerous choices, or illegal ones, because freedom doesn’t cover those. Only limited freedom is true freedom.
As they get older, they’ll understand that they have choices. Even now, when it comes to spending money, snacks, play time, gaming time, cartoon time, although there are rules as to how much they get, they still get to choose what they want to do and how they want to assign their time. But they have to finish their studies every day.
This is showing your kids respect and teaching them independence and agency. This is his ideal for education. He told all of this to his wife, and his wife agreed with him.
His ideal is basically that you should discard the old way of thinking, like how women have to go along with men, or older kids have to go along with younger kids, or you have to listen to your parents. And you can’t just raise your kids to put themselves first, because there are a lot of long-term goals that are a lot more complex than just only thinking about yourself—like your family, your country, etc.
The most important thing is to teach your children what is good, what is kind, what is profit, what is family, what is patriotism…I don’t want him to be a martyr, I don’t want him to be a sociopath. I want him to be someone who chooses to be good, who can choose to act or not act, to save someone or not to save someone. That’s it.
In the tiktok video shown, this mother is just teaching her kids to think only about themselves and their own immediate preferences. She’s raising little sociopaths. But sociopaths truly don’t care about anyone else. They’ll abandon even their own parents in a heartbeat. Or worse. Is this really what she wants?
“Never let people force you into something you don’t want.”
Well, when she’s old and needs taken care of, would her daughter truly want to do that? When her daughter needs to give up something for her sake, would she want to do that?
Right?
Comments say, “I watched the whole video. The older kid chose the pink coat first, then the younger kid immediately started crying about how she wanted pink. So the older kid picked yellow instead, and the younger kid immediately started crying about how she wanted yellow. So the older kid offered to give the yellow coat to her. At this point, it’s pretty clear that the older kid is used to letting the younger kid get her way all the time—so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what the mother said. She does need to learn how to put herself first and not let herself get taken hostage by tears.”
There is a trending topic #Korea withdraws policy that having three children exempts you from being drafted by saying that “This policy was absolutely retarded anyways, for every Korean regardless of gender. For women, it’s you having kids just to benefit some man. For men, it’s hilarious to think anyone can produce three kids before they’ve even reached the legal age for marriage. It’s just impossible unless you’re some kind of celebrity or trust fund brat.”
“Women having kids exempts men from being drafted? This is probably only valuable to Korean idols, because they can afford those kids, and they can’t afford to take a 2 year break from their career. And once this policy went through, they have every excuse in the world to dodge the draft.”
Comments say, “Yeah, why not make the policy having three kids makes waives all their high school tuitions or something?”
I guess screenshot-hoarding makes more sense in China, since with Chinese characters more information fits on one screen. Always makes me jealous. I wonder if they have memes about how much space Western text takes up.