DeathByBigSad
@DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on True 1 hour ago:
I remember the first time I ever saw snow in my life, I was 8 years old, my family just moved to the US, to NYC. Probably one of the most exciting moments in my entire life.
Don’t remember if there was a snow day, but kids should really be allowed to have free days to play in the snow more often.
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- Comment on How much money's out there? 5 hours ago:
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- Comment on Getting too expensive 8 hours ago:
I mean, I’m not alone, I read a lot of users on reddit Asian communities that also said their parents “joked” about the same thing. I think its some weird cultural thing… Asians, I’m talking about Chinese specifically, tend to just be blunt about everything and joke about everything, like… if you watch enough media (which, I know, is not an accurate representation of life), you notice the differents in how people talk differently.
My extended family members (they’re from Hong Kong, we’re from Mainland) is also very blunt about things, so its not exactly unique to my parents. Like… I have no idea what a western family dynamic is really like… but from what I can gather on watching TV and movies, there’s like a different “vibe” to it.
It’s seen as toxic in a western family, but in a Chinese family, that’s just a harmless joke.
My mom also called me “肥仔“ (“fatty”?) which… by the tone of her voice, it’s supposed to be endearing in a way… like how you call a big/overweight cat a “chonker”, but its gets annoying after a while since that’s not exactly positive attribute since like she’s just say I’m fat and need to lose weight like every so often… apparantly this is a normal thing… in the Asian “overton window” of parenting.
My mom also joked and called me “二公子” (second son [of a noble]) as if we are nobility or something, like I think that’s implying that I’m too “needy” like a spoiled child or something… she said it with a positive tone as if its supposed to be endearing… but it feels kinda passive aggressive and sarcastic… like didn’t they give me a name (well actually I think that’s the paternal grandparents that had the most say in choosing our names), like I have a name, a legal name passed down by my ancestors… that just doesn’t exist? lmao… literally just one syllable (first character/syllable of the name can be omitted since my brother shame the same character), its literally easier to use my actual name than these weird joke nicknames that, I dont exactly hate per se, like I don’t feel offended or like sad, but its very annoying is what I mean.
I think sometime during my teenage years, I just started “rebeling” and called my parents by their real names… and that’s like a big no-no in Chinese culture, you are never supposed to use their real names, you are only supposed to call older relative by their relationship to you. So you can’t call an older brother by their name, but they can call you by your name…
I hated it.
So I just started using “死■” to refer to my older brother ([character for death] + [the last character of his given name, which I’ll redact for privacy reasons]). I did that ever since I was a kid and learned the death character. We fought a lot.
Wall of Text on Chinese names
For context: Chinese name are like (I’m gonna use English letters in place of the actual characters, like pretend this is algebra or soemthing): So, your name looks something like: Say: The letter F represents your family name, your brother would have ZA as their name, then you’d have ZB, both of you share the Z character, so you just refer to them by their other character that’s unique to yourself. Your father would have like XW for their name. So im summary, your father would have the characters FXW, your brother would have FZA, you’d have FZB, also the AB characters can actually form one word together. So using 死 and their Chinese character that is in this example represented by the letter A, is how my older brother and I just curse at each other, by insulting the name. Anyways, enough rambling about Chinese Names
As I got older, I even started calling my parents by their names, I mean… never use the death character on my parents, but I did just call them by their given names, sometimes their full names. At first, they got mad (they were also unhappy about me calling my older brother by his name, but this is next level of “crossing the line”), but then I just use the “This is 'Murica” excuse, and I read on the news that white kids call their parents on first name basis anyways, so I just kept doing that and they kinda just accepted it.
I don’t do that all the time, but when I really wanna piss them off, I’ll use their real names. xD, fuck tradition
- Comment on Shut up science!! 11 hours ago:
Monkey brain need dopamines 🥺
- Comment on Getting too expensive 12 hours ago:
Lol, when I was kid whenever I “misbehave” (aka: doing any doing anything she doesn’t like), my mother (we’re Chinese American) would joke like “hey, how much do you think you’re worth if I sold you back to China? … probably nothing since you’re worthless”
It was kinda joking, but I got half-scared too lol, couldn’t tell when she was serious.
She also joked to me she that “found me in a trashcan somewhere” and took me in.
What’s with these “jokes” lmfao 💀 I mean its funny but my soul dies a little 🫠
- Comment on Hershey highway 1 day ago:
Folks, see right here: That’s what age verification laws do to someone.
- Comment on "enjoy the show" 2 days ago:
Tuturu
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 days ago:
No chance. My brain is fucked.
I literally felt so much anxiety when I tried to live on campus so I ended up withdrawing from college altogether.
I’m just feeling so ashamed of myself for being such a failure I kinda think about killing myself all the time. Depression is so hard, I don’t have the energy to do anything.
It was already bad enough before, now I feel so anxious going outside because of ICE.
I have trouble dealing with other people. I don’t think I can handle roomates… I mean I did had roommates in college, and I kinda… everyone hated me. Well they didn’t say it, but I feel like I was unwelcomed.
I have a lot of health issues. I snore when I sleep and it annoys everyone.
Rent is so expensive these days you can’t be by yourself, but roomates is also a… no no.
I’d probably just get stabbed to death since I have no social skills (well not like zero, but I never really made friends in school, so… there… I doubt I’d get along with randos as roomates in like the adult world no-less)
I mean, I even have trouble finding psychaitric help and feel anxious af trying to schedule an appointment.
I need my parents’ money to even afford health related stuff. Y’all know how it is in the US. They say “seek professional help” but nobody ever mentions the money aspect.
This is years of emotional abuse and neglect.
They destroyed my ability to be independent.
I mean even my older brother 5 years older than me probably has problems being independent. He’s still at home with us.
I know I sound pathetic af
Our family is just a bunch of failures
Shitty parenting destroyed us
Thanks a lot, Confucious and your “filial piety” tiger parenting bullshit.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 days ago:
💀
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 days ago:
Also if you have any disabilities, like if you have depression. Oh your parents are gonna be so cruel to you. You are a “useless eater”.
What the fuck is this life. Why?
I wasn’t even supposed to be born. Why the fuck am I here. This fucking suffering.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 days ago:
I’m from mainland China (currently residing in the US), profile pic is because I hate the 5-Star Red Flag and the politics it represents.
Probably something with Asian cultures’s obsession with the idea of “success”. Like… my parents literally wouldn’t care if I became some corrupt government official as long as I don’t get caught. Success is worshipped, failure is shamed. I talk shit about trump, and like my mom said “at least he became president, can you do that?”
I’m like: “naturalized citizens can’t be president”
omg immediately less than 1 second later, mom goes: “but Gary Locke became Governor” (Gary Locke is a Chinese American)
And like you know Mamdani won, immedialy after, she told me “an immigrant managed to become Mayor, you are an immigrant just like him, why can’t you do the same?” bruh… maybe I could if I didn’t get so much emotional damage, mom.
Like they worship success, regardless of if they are “good” or “bad” people.
If you try to be a good person and you “fail” in life, you are considered worse than the bad person in power making a lot of money.
I’m like just so close to killing myself, even though I really wanna live, this is too painful, depression is too painful.
My parents are slowly killing my ethics and empathy, like one day I might just not care.
Either you die young with your morals intact, or you seek success and survival, and you corrupt your soul…
This world is cruel. The world wants you to be cruel to be able to even live a comfortable life.
- Comment on Shout out to my engineering homies. 2 days ago:
Not an engineer, but I have I have Asian parents, if I were an engineer and worked for a genocidal dictator, they wouldn’t care, that’s success anyways.
So… yea…
people value success over ethics
welcome to life
society…
- Comment on 18 days til the deadline btw 2 days ago:
The epStein CP Files
- Comment on Which countries combine high quality of life and strong equality? 2 days ago:
Yeah, China has the Hukou bullshit. They deny kids of migrant parents from going to public school in the cities where the parents work, and cities are where you really find income, so since the kids follow the parent’s Hukou status, I was born in Guangzhou (a city), and I don’t get the city’s Hukou, I get my parent’s status from rural Taishan.
So parents had to:
- either lets the kids be left behind in their village so they can go to school there, and to be cared for by relatives, like grandparents, meaning they rarely see their parents
or
- pay for a privately-run school out of pocket (which is worse than public school)
also for option 2, you’d need to be able to afford to rent (there are a lot of people hoarding apartments and then profit from this btw, you see a lot of “for rent” posters everywhete) or “buy” (70 year “permission to use” or something) an apartment big enough for your kids to even live with you comfortably, cuz housing isn’t free, you have your ancestral home in your village and that’s all you got, also you probably need someone to take care of the kids like after school hours, like the kids grandparents or someone like that. Also crowded, polluted, hard to find income.
- Comment on Which countries combine high quality of life and strong equality? 2 days ago:
Far easier for their children to learn and assimilate, break down that language barrier and bridge that gap.
Lmao, their parents are gonna use their kids as free human translators… I feel bad for those kids… cuz I was one of those.
I was born in China, moved to the US.
Like literally every customer service call, every form they fill, every letter, even going to insurance company, or car dealership, or buying a house, or like filing taxes, I had to translate everything. Omg it hurts my brain so much, drained my energy. Like literally, just chillin’ and like, there’s a letter and my mom wants me to translate… 💀 I someyimes lack the advanced vocabulary in Chinese to even explain what it means lmao
But… it is what it is lol 🤷♂️
- Comment on Where is heart?! 2 days ago:
Fun fact: did y’all know the Chinese Periodic Table, it has the type of elements built into the chemical symbols as the radical?
Like: 气 Air, 氵 Water, 石 Rock, 钅Metal
- Comment on Lemmy users who say that Lemmy users are smarter than Reddit users 3 days ago:
Beep Boop
Yes I am a human
Beep
- Comment on Which countries combine high quality of life and strong equality? 3 days ago:
Plus immigrant friendly, I guess.
I mean, this is exactly why I kinda side-eye Lemmings when they are like “why did you choose to move to 'such a shithole’¹ like the US, isn’t China much better”, (¹their words btw, not mine) like… (first of all, I didn’t even choose, my parent did) lol I’d go to Norway if they took us, but no they don’t lmao, the US was our only option for emigration… it was either this or stay in mainland China with all that pollution stuff and Hukou bullshit and crowded, and hard to find income.
- Comment on What do you feel lucky forabout? 3 days ago:
Multilingualism. Cantonese, Mandarin, English. Also I rarely really watch media in those other languages, feels special to have them. Like bragging rights xD
Literacy in English and Chinese (sort of, idk the higher level vocabulary). Just having literacy in general, 100 years ago most people can’t read.
And ease of access of information in this era, and also in my region. No firewall* like they did have in my now-former country
(*for now at least)
- Comment on Do people who have bad relationship with their parents care about "insults" like "I fucked your mom last night"? Or do you just not care? 3 days ago:
In China, I don’t think there is even a “fuck you”, the default curseword is always “fuck your mother”
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 4 days ago:
China will probably have the solar system in a generation
OMG I just had a thought.
Remember what happened when Great Britain expanded and colonized stuff? 13 colonies?Independence?
OMG wouldn’t it be cool if China did that to like Mars, then the Martian colonists be like, “no fuck you CCP”, then:
Declaration of Independence
United Provinces of Mars
Constitution (hopefully a smarter constitution)
Martian Revolution
Becomes a Solar Superpower
Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the solar system.
Time is a circle lmao.
Literally just The Expanse timeline, but without blue goo and Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the UN. LOL
FOR MARS!
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 4 days ago:
There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions
That’s not really “shame”, not really the right word for it, shame is something you feel about yourself, this is more like resentment.
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 4 days ago:
Best you can do is to focus on your own life.
Lol that’s why my parents say to me. That trying to change anything in politics is pointless, futile, that, in a hypothetical revolution, I’ll never get to live to see such a hypothetical victory…
I mean I kinda get it, my parents don’t want their kids to die in some war…
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 4 days ago:
I don’t think public education is meant to make people informed, one of it’s goals is mass indoctrination. It’s the same in almost every country. I’m fortunate to be one of the people that recognize that. Me being in two spheres of influence make it so easy to identify what propaganda looks like, I seen it on both sides, two different countries, how media, like tv shows, portrays things.
They want obedient people to keep the cogs of the machine running. They want nationalism and absolute obedience to the state, the government.
In the US, at least, there are a lot of reliable sources on internet, and also public libraries… but of course, poor people don’t have time to educate themselves, just as its designed. The lower class, different countries, similar story.
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 5 days ago:
guilty over getting out of the US
Please don’t feel guilty for leaving somewhere you don’t like. That is your right. Stay safe, friend.
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 5 days ago:
Ok, a majority of voters
Plurality of voters, didn’t get more than 50% of all votes
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 5 days ago:
When’s the last time you were in China? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I’ve never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days.
Around 2010. Guangzhou.
The actual city part doesn’t look too bad, but I lives in a slum neighborhood of Guangzhou that most tourists don’t really see. It was very dirty and you go through narrow alleyways. Like, according to Baidu Maps, its a 10 minutes walk from the main street, in my memory, it always felt like a 20-30 minute walk for some reasons, it felt so distant, the walk was always boring af. It’s as if through through that short walk, you time travel back in time 20-50 years. The school I went to was the worst school I ever went to. Even worst than the shittist American school I went to with a rating of like 4/10 looked better.
Although, it could’ve be my Hukou issue. The school I went to was not a public school, it was one for children of migrant parents that parents have to pay for. Kids without Guangzhou Hukou were not allowed Guangzhou’s public schools.
So far, the worst places I’ve stayed at was the small apartment in Guangzhou, and the ancestral homes in parents villages in Taishan.
I mean, China looks so great? Sure, only if you are privilaged enough to live in the good parts, which my family wasn’t able to. In China, most people have homes in their villages, but if they wanma find work, they’d have to go to cities, and then they’d have to rent some shitty apartment. Landlords are still a thing, but they don’t call them 地主 (di4 zhu3), but instead 房东 (fang2 dong1), people “buy” (not really “buy”, more like 70 years permission to use, but you get what I’m saying) housing, then lease it, kinda profits off it.
In Guangzhou, we were second-class residents.
China isn’t really one united country when you really think about it. It’s a bunch of different countries with different internal passports in a trench coat. Y’all can leave your red state shitholes and go to a blue city, in a blue state, and you are treated as any other resident.
In China, my ancestors are from Taishan, so I’m always a 台山人 Taishanese due to Hukou, even though I was born in Guangzhou and speak both Cantonese and Mandarin.
- Comment on Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault? 5 days ago:
I mean, different views.
Like, if you gave a North Korean PRC Citizenship (which does not really happen btw, just a hypothetical), then the Now-Former North Korean would probably be proud to be a Chinese Citizen rather than being in North Korea.
Because it’s relatively better by comparison.
So its the same with me. Sure, I know there are far better countries like Norway, but I mean like… Norway does not take many immigrants, and the best place I could be, given my circumstances, is the US. So, it’s less about “I’m proud of my government” or “I’m proud of the history of this country”, more like “I’m glad I’m here instead of [their ancestral country]”. And as to getting questioned, its the fear of getting “othered”, of getting rejected. So its natural to immediately declare their US Citizenship status as a defense.
I mean, I think nowadays, that’s even more so the case.
Like I didn’t really worry about this before. But especially nowadays, if someone, especially someone claiming to be a cop, is trying to talk to me, the first thing I’ll do is immediately declare my Citizenship status and then assert my rights immediately after.
I still have memories of China, and I do not like being there. Not every Chinese American is gonna feel the same way as I do, but, at least in my case, our life in China prior to emigrating was very poor, and it got better in the US. So there’s that.
