Haier posted:

I remember this. That photo is so staged, it's wonderful.
But what I really mean is the gifv you posted on this thread. I assume the building that was turned to dust was really a primary school / daycare / senior home / puppy store.

Hahahahahaha

But...but...but.. Jack Ma just said the the USA spent a lot of money on war and neglected infrastructure face projects that China was focusing on!

----------------

Last night I had a wonderful chat with this girl I have to work with sometimes. I will be talking to or seeing her until I leave, and we must cooperate. I was going to ignore her because I had a feeling we would be at odds in general association, but she really wanted me to add her to Wechat.
I feel like she's been fishing for information on my single life and if I am available for her, and so I am pretending to be a total prude and can't consider being more than friends with a woman. This is frustrating to her.

She's a Chaoshan person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaoshan

She was telling me about how her hometown is and what Chaoshan culture is like. Much of it is based on One-Up-manship and holier-than-thou. You can immediately get a sense of this when reading the Wikipedia article about them.
She works in Huaqiang electronic market here in Shenzhen and said that about 90% of the people working there (owning shops and selling) are Chaoshan people, and Chaoshan people stick together.
She said true Chaoshan do not allow their women to get married, because the family will own some business and she can work there, so education is useless. She's 23, but has been pressured for two years now to get married, since Chaoshan women don't get educations, they just get married to get a raise at work. Her parents sent her to university but she said they call her every other day to complain how her education made her unfit for marriage and now she's too independent working in a company rather than with some person connected to her family or their friends (the nerve!).

She said the Chaoshan culture is heavily invested in social ties for business and other things. Since women don't get educated, and instead instantly get married and shoot out babies before someone else can deflower them, that gossip and "keeping up with the Jones's" are the main ways of interaction. In her case, because she didn't follow the standard timeline of a Chaoshan woman, she said her mom is constantly shamed by her friends and relatives for having such a useless daughter that can't even force herself to marry a stranger and get pregnant already. Every month that goes by without her chabudou'ing a husband is one more month where her mom calls her weeping at the abuse she's facing from her neighbors. It doesn't matter that her brothers and sisters are already married and have kids (I believe she said she has SIX siblings).
She said since gossip is so key to interactions that the idea of NOT telling someone all of your secrets and problems, for your own sake and them to not make fun of you or berate you constantly, is completely unheard of. Privacy is not part of their culture, apparently, and it's cool and good to whisper rumors and gossip about each other and look down the nose at everyone you know. It's like high school for your entire life.

Despite the culture making her adult life miserable, she is extremely proud of the culture. She doesn't find any of this particularly difficult to live with, because Chaoshan people are the greatest in China! Also, because of her culture being so up-her-butt in every part of her life, until coming to Shenzhen she didn't have much interaction with non-Chaoshan people. Working in an office with non-Chaoshan people, and going to different cities for work and meeting non-Chaoshan people has been blowing her mind because.... strangers don't want to gossip and spill every embarrassing life secret with her. Why are they so secretive? The reason must be that they are all bad. Therefore, Chaoshan people are pure and their culture is number one for purity.

This got me disagreeing and arguing "humans are the same everywhere, people do what they want to do." This brought her to saying that women do not cheat. Why? Because only a man can cheat. Women will never cheat, because they only care about their families, not sex. Men cheat because they only care about sex, not their families. Why? Because this is what Chaoshan people do. Chaoshan women are pure, and she's never heard of any Chaoshan woman cheating, only men. I asked her who the men were cheating with if they were always cheating, and that maybe there is finally a secret that Chaoshan people are willing to shut up about. She found this impossible.
Instead, she did Whataboutism with the West, and then greater China, as her travels have led her to assume the worst about her countrymen. Except, it was still the idea that Chinese men only cheat, and maybe some non-Chaoshan women will cheat. The logic system was based on personal experience, and when living in an extremely tight bubble your life, it makes it hard to accept or believe things can be any other way.

She tried to tell me the superiority of Chaoshan advanced culture by saying that men cheat in their culture, but the women just pretend it does not happen. Why? Because there is no divorce. Because there is no divorce, and other cultures/people are divorcing, that Chaoshan people are the true bastions of family values. She further added to this by telling me about a family friend that married two women. He wasn't divorced when he married the second one; she's a second wife. This is much more acceptable than divorce.

Since she's obviously a blabbermouth, I patted myself on the back for not breaking from my prude routine. I decided to tell her stories "my friends had told me" to help her see Chinese in a different way. She saw my gossiping with her as a form of trust for her, so she didn't question that these were really stories from "friends." She did, however, argue that I was making much of these up. She only wanted to know where in China these women were from. Chinese people don't act this way, only Westerners. We argued about that for a while but eventually she agreed that she had heard similar stories before, but didn't think it was real. Now that a non-Chinese was saying the same things there must be a little bit of truth, but probably grossly exaggerated because Chinese are still more pure than foreigners.

She asked me to eat lunch with her today but I said I would be too late. Last day before the Spring Festival holiday begins for everyone.

Zzulu posted:

this man has truly changed teh world now

BCR posted:

Hot water is good for the healthy.

Haier posted:

REAL TALK:

Last night I was listening to Beyond the Darkness (Darkness Radio is no more, but they have a new show that's basically the same and still on their app, and it's still free and way better than C2C George Noory's wack show).
Anyway, the show was about Black-Eyed Children, and how they keep showing up and demanding to be let into people's homes or vehicles. They talked about how demons and other bad creatures have a system like this where they must first gain approval and then they will gently caress you up or feed off of your fear for their psychic something or other.

So now I am scared that these people on Tantan and Wechat might be succubi that are trying to gain access to my house and life. Since I am foreign, I might not be able to tell the difference between a local and a demon so easily, because the specific Human Chinese characteristics will be completely unknown to me and lost in translation because foreigners don't understand China. They might use their demonic powers to trap me and make me buy them a house and car, and threaten me with having a baby. All of my resources, time, and energy will be stolen away from me while under their spell, and I will convince myself this is what happiness is. It is an absolutely terrifying thought, and I wonder how many "women" I have met here are really just demons in disguise. The reptilians have obviously taken over this country at least 5000 years ago, to account for the cultural insanity here.

BCR posted:

WALK IN, DROP TROU, SPRAY THE WALLS, CALL ME MAO

Do it ironically posted:

my wife wants to take a job in beijing (not english teaching), it pays $3,000 US a month, and they provide flights, medical insurance, and housing

im trying to tell her how awful it can be living there when you dont speak the language and are pasty white but she doesn't get it

if you don't have any housing expenses is $3,000 US a lot or a little ?

Outrail posted:

China sounds like the perfect place for psychos to go pick street fights for a few months.

How often do foreigners get arrested for fighting?

^^: Getting black bagged into a van by several policemen sounds like a reasonable way to deal with a traffic violation.

fits my needs posted:

ancient cloaking technique

Haier posted:

Regardless if it a non-event outside China or for the world, inside China is another story. Chinese view of foreign people will go from the current "I hate you because my government shaped my opinions about people that look different than me and now I am a racist piece of poo poo," into "You are actually the/my enemy, and all of my China-related frustrations can be safely and repercussion-free acted out on you in however I think is fit." If we think passive-aggressive manchildren are standard now, they will really amp that up once the Chinese media makes a humongous deal out of the evil aggressors stealing Chinese land by force and they're coming for the rest of China soon. It doesn't matter what side is morally better, China is for Chinese, remember? Uncle Xi can do no wrong.

Police might be more strong about kicking people out of apartments, businesses and money getting confiscated, etc. Blah blah. LOL

Gargamel Gibson posted:

Are we supposed to know what that means?

Kopijeger posted:

I wonder: do Chinese people expect every yellow person to naturally speak Chinese? What about Indians or Africans?

Kopijeger posted:

Interesting that they would cling to these ideas in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary. You'd think they would have noticed by now that what language you speak is not determined by genetics. Also, wiki claims that rice was cultivated in the Middle East and Egypt in the days of the Roman Empire, and that rice stores have been discovered in military camps in Germany dating to the 1st century AD. That they haven't noticed this and other examples of rice cultivation outside China in the last 2000+ years is nothing short of remarkable.

JaucheCharly posted:

I take this thread at face value. Where am I wrong, where am I right?

Invalid answers:

*30% wrong, 70% right*
*9 fingers out of 10 right*

Go!

Punkin Spunkin posted:

There's a lot of stuff in this thread that I can kind of wrap my head around, mull it over and realize that Americans or members of other countries do it too, even if it's a different manifestation of it or more/less extreme by degrees. Not to craft false equivalencies but you get what I mean. It's also fun reading white Americans going to China and getting a tiny taste of the minority experience but not really connecting the dots farther than, "gosh can you imagine if we did this??"
But I will seriously never understand the constant Chinese seasons stuff that comes up itt. It's mind boggling to me. Is "it's hot, I feel hot"/"it's cold, I feel cold" not some basic human poo poo??? Are there any countries where something remotely similar happens? There are a lot of cultural conventions around the world that "go against nature" or are idiotic, but the constant descriptions of Chinese people layering up and dripping sweat because "it's winter" will never not loving baffle me. if you're hot, it's hot!!
Don't people around the world dress according to how the loving temperature feels??? It's hot, I shouldn't layer up! Oh hey it's cold, I should wear a jacket!

P-Mack posted:

There's supposedly an authentic chuanr cart somewhere in NYC's Chinatown but I haven't managed to catch it yet.

Magna Kaser posted:

What Chinese muslim group are they talking about? I have never heard a bad stereotype about the Hui, and their restaurants are always packed. In fact the Hui are like the model minority group in China, if one exists.

Now if you're talking about Uighur yeah that's a total thing here. The bad stereotypes are usually about Uighurs and (not Muslim but also explicitly not Han Chinese) Tibetans and Mongolians, but not Hui. My city has Tibetan and Uighur districts that always have increased police presence and uncomfortable looking Han people clutching their bags and crossing the street if they see an obviously Uighur or Tibetan person coming up in front of them.

Uighur food is super awesome, Tibetan food not so much.

Stringent posted: