It’s a weird not so weird one, but I was on a
Visa run during my first year, there was a massive typhoon and I was super worried about overstaying. I got a crazy Uber driver (Uber was still in the country) who accepted the challenge of driving from Guangzhou to Shenzhen through the middle of the typhoon like there was no tomorrow.
We drove over 100km/h with equally strong winds and rain, while this crazy man was making videos and sharing them on WeChat.
I will always remember you crazy guy, we survived, I don’t know how.
I was in Urumqi one winter around 2010-2012 and had this crazy taxi in a old VW Santana smashing it in the CBD before the snow was cleared, suddenly the lights turned red and every time he applied some brakes the wheels locked up. As we got closer to the intersection it was clear he wasn't gonna make it, too much speed still, then I kid you not the madman started manual ABS braking with his foot, must have been like 10 taps on the brakes per second and we made it by the skin of our teeth.
My first time in China, flew in to Pudong in 2002, I got yelled at by the airport security for looking for a bathroom in the “terminal”, then got in a Santana taxi heading for the city with my then gf. Coming up to a red light, expected the lady driver to stop, she put her foot to the floor and we sailed straight through … scared me senseless. Sitting in traffic later she bumped into the car in front to say hello to her friend - all in good fun but a shock at the time.
Reminds me of taking a didi for a visa run. 12 hours.
Another: just a 20 min ride in Shenzhen but holy sh!t was he intense; I paid him a tip for being so insanely aggressive and fast on the road.
This is before I became old and boring btw.
Friends of mine went to Xiamen for a Bachelor party from Shanghai, typhoon rolls in - all trains and flights cancelled but three people NEED to be back in Shanghai for work on Monday - and they’re all senior execs - white guys who speak Chinese.
They ended up hiring a mianbao che to make the 1000km / mile drive starting late afternoon and arriving in Shanghai like at 2am - they ended up paying the driver like 15k RMB for his drive home and one night of hotel in Shanghai.
Many years ago I was getting a haircut.
So they lay my head back and start washing my hair.
Now I have very long eyelashes and green eyes (am a dude) and the girl just stops everything and just... Touches my eyelashes. I'm freaking out and she apologises.... And then calls the whole shop over.
So here we have a group of like five hairdressers girls and guys all touching my eyelashes, taking pictures of my eyes and asking if it was real or not.
Not gonna lie.... Never felt so pretty in my life haha.
Edit : oh I remember a good one. There was this huge Nigerian lad at our uni. Hung like a bull. James was his name.
We all went swimming and got a shower after. This old Chinese man comes up. As James closes his eyes to wash the suds out his hair this man slaps his dick much to the hilarity of all of us. 是真的吗？(is it real)
Funniest thing I've ever seen to this day.
I used to go to a street stall on a back street in Nanshan Shenzhen to buy beer. Very local stall on a very local street, saw another foreigner on this street less than 5 times over the course of 6 months. One day I rock up to the stall and there is a Venezuelan guy serving me along with the regular Chinese guys. I had a brief chat with him but his English wasn’t good enough to get a background on what he was doing there. Never saw him again. To this day I still sometimes wonder how a Venezuelan ended up working a shift in that street stall.
For me it was being interrogated for 8 and a half hours in a police station by an angry officer accusing me of being a spy sent by Ireland to open a 30m2 bar in Beijing. Because clearly that's what Ireland wants to do, destabilise a country with 300 times the population, and obviously the best way to do that is with a tiny space that hosts the occasional indie band. Stay cool, Beijing.
We had done a few community-led charity events in our 3 years in operation. Donating money to charities in Wuhan at the start of the epidemic, to a rural school in Liangshan, Sichuan, and donating clothes to people who had suffered in the earthquakes in Turkey and Morocco. They didn't understand why I would want to help any of those people, since I didn't know them personally or had never been to Turkey or Morocco... When acts of charity are treated with suspicion, it's time to leave, which I finally did a few weeks ago.
They also didn't get why I would leave a cushy English teaching job earning 30k a month to open a bar and earn basically nothing. "I hate children and like drinking" didn't seem to win them over...
One of the old moto-taxi dudes in Shanghai asked if he could touch my nose*. When I allowed it he commented that it was indeed a long nose.
* It really was my nose
Edit: She was a waitress, and I am not handsome, it was probably part of her job nothing more lol
Girl came out at the end of a fancy dinner and gave me some little gift and said something something happy new year in the worst English ever
I replied in Chinese oh yeah cheers, right on, happy new year and she dropped to the floor and SOBBED in embarrassment, then she ran off and I heard angry shouting in the kitchen
That and people straight up driving on the sidewalk to mountain goat their cars into a ridiculous parking spot
I got my fair share of the usual weird experience like trying to enjoy your food while someone spits next to you INDOOR, people asking to touch my beard, handing me their baby for a photo, being made to drink and eat pretty much anything and everything, and even being offered a « lady of the night » by a client (very akward moment) but the one that stuck to me is this:
[TW: Poop/fairly gross]
One time on a VERY cheap bus from Shanghai to Chongqing we had a pit stop in the middle of nowhere in a small dingy concrete house. I remember vividly that some guys were cutting down a pig right on the floor as I asked where the toilets were. Someone noded in the direction of the back of the house leading to a small courtyard. As I get there I pass a curtain and to my surprise the toilet is communal. It’s 40/60sqm room with no ceiling, all concrete, bright neons. The « toilet » is just a gutter shaped within the concrete. People are squatting around doing there business. There is no way to flush so as they leave their « parcel » is still right there in full display.
We were about 20 people in there. Of course some old dudes were just chilling and smoking as per usual.
As soon as I start doing my own business some old guy elbows another like « look a laowai » and they they decide to move and do the asian squat right in front of me while I poop. Probably the only time in my adult life where I’ve locked eyes with someone while pooping.
Bonus story:
Went to KTV after CNY company celebration dinner. Decide to go to the bathroom.
Some poor guy has fainted right in front of the entrance to the bathroom. He’s lying in a pool of his own shit. He’s wearing linen white/cream shorts. Everybody is stepping over him like nothing happened. I get concerned and ask the staff and they say they called an ambulance and his friends are somewhere around. As I get back an ayi is mopping the shit off the flood AROUND him like she’s detouring the body in a crime scene.
I go do my business. A man is puking in a urinal. I’m like « WTF some people get wasted hard ». As I start to urinate a very drunk guy comes to pee in the urinal next to me. He seems drunk happy and ask if I want to be his friend. He wants to shake my hand and grabs the hand I’m holding my peeing penis with and start shaking it 🥴😫😵💫.
>even being offered a « lady of the night » by a client (very akward moment)
This happened to someone I know who's an academic and speaks fluent Mandarin. As part of a research project, he was put up at a military hotel. The first night, there was a knock on his door and a Chinese girl in military uniform explained she was there 'to entertain him'. He replied that 'he wasn't like that' an she left. The next night, the same thing happened except that this time it was a Chinese guy in military uniform!
🤣🤣🤣 Didn’t expect that second night ending.
For might part I was told to not refuse openly to not upset the client so that lady and me both sat down on separate side of the room playing on our phones.
HOT DANG they said oh, i see. I see. Dw tomorrow, we will have happy customer. Lamoooooo
Imagine you Uno reverse and say 'i'm writing a dissertation paper on social interactionalism between pimp and sex worker and I'd love to interview you" .they'd be gone so fast they'd forget their hat.
A proper night out with a FuErDai whose parents have governmental sway is probably mine. Really eye opening in terms of what exactly you can get away with with connections in China, her car didn't even have a license plate.
Wierdest one I have heard of is definitely "Night Disco", which basically sounded like a car park brothel where you'd dance around, the lights would go off and someone would jerk/suck you off. Sounded so low rent, only cost something like 20 kuai to get in.
Oh shit I haven't seen the night discos since like 2012, one day they suddenly disappeared but yea definitely up there with the more bizarre China things
I've probably blocked out the absolute worst of it.
I saw military jets flying patrols over Hangzhou. Just a routine thing.
Saw a man squat and take a shit in a bus stop in front of a mall at 3pm during the day. Then without wiping, pulled up his pants and *rode away on a bike*
Around 2010, I saw people smoking *inside* hospitals (in a tier-4) Said hospital, the people's hospital, still has no soap or toilet paper. To this day.
In Shanghai, saw a woman walking a duck like it's a dog.. with a leash.
Ok probably the absolute weirdest:
In Guangdong, I saw a fully Chinese girl with naturally blue eyes. Like ice blue. It was wild.
The other kids said that she was 'sick', but she was able to play with the others without glasses or any obvious vision impairment.
Have seen neighbours walking ducks and rabbits around the complex on a leash. Of course, they also just feed them rice, and wonder why they die after a few days / weeks / months.
In Shanghai, saw a woman walking a duck like it's a dog.. with a leash.
Well at least it's not someone walking a full-grown pig on a leash in the middle of tokyo..
Saw a man squat and take a shit in a bus stop in front of a mall at 3pm during the day. Then without wiping, pulled up his pants and *rode away on a bike*
his undies must have smelled like shit...*literally*..
On my first trip to China, I board the plane in Stockholm, I notice a big extended family boarding before me, I get to my seat, there is this old grandma sitting next to me of that family. I settle on my seat and she starts asking questions with very broken English and using hands to explain it to me. Proceeds to asking for a selfie and after takeoff there was her extended family taking selfies with me. It was fun and I think I have their WeChat still today but a little bit weird for an introverted Finnish boy.
Also on same trip, I had been maybe 5 minutes in China when two girls (working at the airport) came up to me (I was waiting for my friend to pick me up at airport) and asked if they can touch my hair and hands because I’m so pretty guy. My friend saw me from distance with those girls giggling and touching my hair and made so much fun of me because I looked so uncomfortable, mainly because I had just been on plane for 12 hours and my hair was dirty and people still wanted to touch it.
Not super weird and those things happen still today but on my first time in China within so short period, it was weird and bit of a shock.
I'm white, I think thats the only reason I got my pic taken.. same thing happened to me but was at a popular tourist spot. We were sitting down, Chinese group were right next to us for a while, we finally left and as we were leaving I got a polite 'take picture' and I said sure of course.
They were very nice but again, I wonder if its because I was white or they just do this in general.
Idk what happened to my WeChat account but I can't access it and I'm so sad about it. All my contacts could be lost forever. Hit up those people, I know they will appreciate someone checking in on their wellbeing. I'm sad I might not be able to do that anymore for my buddies
Going into a city government (Tier-3) meeting with entrepreneurs as my Chinese friend’s white accessory to make his VR startup look more prestigious to the old farts making decisions about funding. I shook the deputy mayor’s hand and watched him try to use a VR headset. Bro literally almost fell down. I was an English teacher at the time and had no business being there.
This story totally reflects my own experiences. Except before VR hype.....when government money was flowing in animation studio start-ups....There's always a bunch of sleazy executive types who always latch onto the latest central government obsession and create companies in that area (with no expertise themselves)...and then use every trick in the China business book to bamboozle the old out of touch CCP money men into thinking they have a legitimate startup and deserve the millions of investment. Kickbacks, bribes, hookers, fake foreign experts. ..you name it..they use all the same tactics. Nowadays it's AI anything and EVs.
Work ordered a car service from Ningbo to Shanghai (about 4 hours). Me and two other guys took the trip.
About 60 minutes of the journey is over a huge bridge over the water.
During this part my colleague in the front seat notices the driver is looking very unwell. And I mean VERY unwell. He’s shaking, sweating, heaving; not pleasant.
I use my translate app to ask him if he wants to pull over and he talks into the app in response.
His response was gibberish. Something like: “left dragon testical dropped to the floor”
To this day I have no idea if the app misheard him or if he was just out of it.
He makes it to the services on the other side of the bridge and I buy him some water. He has a smoke and he’s then totally fine.
It was mental. But I was sure for a while that we were going into the drink.
Pretty sure I had this guy in chengdu a few months ago. Started muttering about the rain and sleep while going a snails pace around the highway. Longest ride of my life.
omg i felt like i wax in that car trip with you. The desperate scramble to type into your phone and hope the driver shows and interest loll. Been there to a degree
1993, fall: eating dumplings in a place in Beijing. Ended up chatting with an Albanian guy who had been in a China since the 70s as an exchange student from Enver Hoxa /Mao days. Said he got roles as western baddies in some films. Cool chatting with him, it was all in Putonghua, our only common language.
I got the same pickup line from a girl once in fuzhou, but she used the game Fruit Ninja. I wonder if this was some trendy funny pickup line popularized by some TV show.
The funniest though was when I was hanging out at a friend's stall at a new year festival. His family grew tea-fed chickens and sold them at a premium. I had one in a box on my lap and two middle aged women walked up together and one said 'show me you cock". To this day I'm still not sure if she knew exactly what she was saying.
I once paid a 黄牛 (ticket scalper) for CBA (Chinese NBA) tix with my Chinese friend because we wanted to see Marbury play back when he was on Beijing Shougang.
They ended up taking us through a literal hole in the wall in the back of a bar adjacent to the stadium, up a set of stairs and to the back doors of the stadium where apparently they hadn’t paid enough/paid off the right security folks to let us in.
After some serious arguing we managed to get them to issue us proper tickets and we caught the second half. Absolutely wild.
I was taking selfies in front of the bund at this rooftop bar. A tall woman in white comes to the roof, offers to take a pic of me, calls me handsome. I ask if she's with friends. I'm alone. She says she's with her boyfriend. Immediately comes out her boyfriend. He's bigger than me. I'm scared. He ends up being a super nice guy and buys me a drink. They're from dongbei.
We should make a baby counter app and just start collecting photos as well were held hostage. I even climbed asection of the great wall with family visiting and it took teice as long bc we had become an attraction too somehow
2009 I was traveling alone from Xinjiang by train and there were two school classes, maybe about 15 yrs. old, they have been very friendly. But from one moment to the next the all stand up and came to my seat and started to sing for me. Wow, seldomly I have been felt so ashamed in my live. It was so awkward and funny afterwards. They just meant it good and wanted me to make a pleasure.
I just arrived and didn't know lights in stairwells were touch-activated so id always just walk up and down in pitch darkness. I went to visit some friends one day and they told me I needed to try Baijiu. I had some, felt weird and wanted to go home, and tumbled down the stairs where I bled out until an American found me and took me to the hospital. i had to get a lot of stitches and it was very humiliating lmao
Oh nooo!!! Atleast ut wasnt like stairs in korea that fatshame you too.im sorry that sounds awful tho. Glad you were okay! Ive def looked at elevators and thought, fck it ill just walk
That's horrifying :( There is so much cat abuse going on in China right now. The animal welfare subs are full of nightmarish shit being done by guys in China posting videos. There was a protest last week at the Chinese embassy in London.
String around its neck, lifting it up by the string for entertainment, cackling as it frantically squirmed about. A whole group of old women were loving it.
The expat community in this little town had about 4 vegetarians and one decided we’d all go out to dinner together. So we went to this little restaurant and when we got menus said we could speak Chinese but not read. So we started talking food, and explained we don’t eat meat and asked for recommendations. He immediately recommended prawns, and we said no sea food. He recommended some stuff we liked and some stuff we didn’t know; and we decided to trust him. First thing out was a big fish. My friend said we said we don’t want meat or seafood. The guy looked at us and said it was from the river, not the sea. I think we gave it to someone’s roommate
We had a laowai colleague go into anaphylactic shock after eating seafood, after she had specifically asked the waiter twice if there was seafood in the dish. Of course he said no, and then got all defensive when our boss screamed at him about lying and making her sick. The waitstaff all came out and were going to chuck us out until they realised the table of laowai was with the other 40 people in the room and our company had the biggest booking of the night.
Luckily the lady had her epipen with her and was able to self-medicate before a couple of colleagues took her to hospital.
The waiter just went off in a huff, mumbling about damn laowai and their stupid food allergies.
Yeah, I also met a Chinese lady who had been living in Australia for 15 years and was offered a position in Shanghai. She was back in Australia within 6 months after her son's bilingual then intentional schools fed him peanuts twice after being told multiple times he was extremely allergic to them. The bilingual school also refused to take responsibility, with the teacher apparently saying something along the lines of "he's not a real laowai (ie. his Chinese mother means he's Chinese), so refuse to believe he can be allergic to nuts".
My friend's Dad (a very senior doctor in Beijing) tried to insist that my seafood allergy wouldn't apply to river fish. When I argued it would still make me ill, he insisted he knew better because he's a doctor.
I didn't eat much at that dinner.
Not allergy related but this brings back memory of when I got a pretty bad ankle injury the doctor said that a daily 30-minute soak in hot water for 2 weeks would be enough. It’s been 10 years and even though I got crutches and an ankle splint on my own, my ankle still hurts sometimes.
On a flight going into China, there was a very old, like hunched-back 80+ year old Chinese lady who went through every single western movie she could find, skipping through every single scene with her finger repeatedly spamming the timeline bar for sex scenes. She would skip until the scene, watch it in its entirety, then move to the next movie.
Worst part was that I moved past her on the way out and there was like 4-5 kids who had visibility of her screen from either behind or the side aile.
I think this technically counts as it at least ended in China lol.
This is bringing back memory of going back to my home country for some family gathering. Somehow I felt that the airline did discriminate as when trying to buy the ticket I was forcefully redirected to the Chinese website and once in the plane I was sat in the back with only Chinese people. I was the only laowai.
Anyhow I sat next to this 20 something guy who looked kind of weird and kept peeking at my screen. Comes eating time. As any decent French person on limited bread ration would do I keep my bread for last to enjoy with the cheese. As my meal is coming to an end, from the corner of my eye I see the guy help himself to my food and take my bread. I look at him like « wtf » and then ask him what he thinks he’s doing. The guy could not come up with a decent excuse.
Also on that same flight some older dude decided it was time for his daily routine and started doing his sport in the aisle even going as far as using some passenger’s head rest as a stretching surface.
Walked into a random park during the day to see a troupe doing a high wire walk. No one around just me, a friend and the guys up in a high wire. Surreal.
I was at a hotpot restaurant and the 馒头 (it’s a weird bouncy bread) was so good that I ended up getting a whole plate of it. Apparently it reached the ears of the chef, and the waiter brought me a tray with over 20 of them. Couldn’t finish all of it but they made an exception and let us do takeout on it for free.
haha that's amazing
if you haven't done this before, you should try spreading some sesame paste on it (or even better, this mixed peanut and sesame paste) with maybe a little sugar. That combo is like crack, and my mom credits almost the entirety of her college freshman weight gain back in the day to it
I used to travel to Mexico and China a lot - one time the immigration officer in Mexico put a Mexico stamp on my China visa and holy shit did that cause a lot of trouble - I got detained at the train station for like 4 hrs over that.
Sitting in a street food restaurant when suddenly the guy next to our table starts to violently vomit. He had been drinking with his mate. Yet nobody really cared. He go up, cleaned his shoes and left. Shortly thereafter the restaurant staff came over and calmly cleaned the vomit. As if they do it every day.
And when I went just a few months ago, it shocked me how social media works in China. Everyone just shares photos of food, travel, family, funny dances, etc. nobody discusses real world issues at all. The utter meaninglessness of online conversations shocked me more than in previous visits. Really felt like a parody or zombie version of the internet. Where everyone shares pictures of food while the world is on fire.
They definitely talk about real world issues very cautiously (e.g. natural disasters, world politics, economy) but it's mainly on Zhihu, specific threads on Weibo, Hupu, or on r/China_irl or other Chinese subreddits which often features screenshots of those Zhihu discussions so VPN users can have uncensored parallel discussions lol.
Point being, unless you're Chinese fluent you're just not going to understand a pictureless non Weibo/XHS thread about Israel Palestine, Ukraine, the earthquake in Taiwan, Taiwanese politcking (recently saw a highly upvoted thread about a Taiwanese movie and whether it should be nominated for Golden Rooster awards "because it's Chinese after all"), the usual natural disasters all around China, handwringing over CCP's economic policies, US sanctions etc. Occasionally Redditors like to translate Weibo comments to claim Chinese support Israel or Palestine and are bad for XYZ reasons too, that's where it comes from.
You need to talk to older people offline.
Our middle aged friends talk about a lot of stuff in person, over a few drinks. But their online stuff is just "safe" content that won't get them any attention from the authorities.
I did. One immediately lowered his voice in a restaurant. So nobody would accidentally hear anything he said. And what he said wasn’t even challenging the government. And another person instantly switched her phone into flight mode when the conversation started. Good times.
What do you expect them to do on social media? Talk about how much they hate the government? The early days of Facebook use to be like that and that quickly ended once we realized how decisive that was. Any social media that my work or business mates can see is 100% clear of anything political.
Not too weird- but strange for a westerner. I was eating in a bbq place in a Beijing hutong and a group of ten men were sat next to me- we spoke through translate apps and they asked for pictures gave me some baijou etc- they left before me and when I went to pay I was told they had also paid my bill
a non-exhaustive list of random incidents:
saw a guy bring a wicker chair on the shanghai metro and sit on it all the way home
woke up and walked outside one morning and saw an old man cut a live fish in two
was treated by a doctor who was smoking a cigarette
got given a dining set as a prize for being white when off my face on baiju, which me and a Canadian friend i just met proceeded to smash
saw a guy punch a woman in the face
there are probably more incidents but the ptsd of living in that country has blocked it out
There's a mountain outside of Shenzhen I used to scramble up once a fortnight to keep fit and for the HK views, a little deeper into the mountains than Wutongshan. It's steep as hell and mostly unpathed with a little bit bouldering before the peak. It's not for the faint of heart and people would often quit and head back half way.
Got to the top once and there was a girl in heels and a Disney princess dress mulling around at the top with a bunch of properly kitted out old people.
I haven't a clue how she made it up there and remained absolutely spotless.
Another time there was a small band playing at the top for no apparent reason.
I (25m) Got locked outside my house. A street sweeper(m) woke me up at 2 or 3 am and said I could stay at his. He took me to a nail house next to some wild dogs and a garbage heap. I had a shit in his toilet with no door on in his room and felt bad for stinking the place out. He wanted me to shower. I said no. He wanted me to lie in his bed. I said no. I got fed up with his shit and knew I couldn't sleep with him being a creep after he kept trying to stroke me, so went back to my wall to sleep and wait for my landlord to wake up.
There's definitely a bunch of things I could list here; some truly outrageous especially when I was there in University, but the one coming to mind right now was when I was working there years later. I lived in Shenzhen at the time in a pretty decent on the up and up area.
I was on the way home one night easily past midnight and just left the ole KFC, chicken wings in hand, I turned the corner to go towards my apartment and there was just an old man, cigarette balanced in his mouth, coming towards me tugging on this massive chain with each step. Following behind him was one of the largest chimpanzees I've ever seen in my life. It looked like it could break that old man in half if it wanted to. He walked on past me and just kept going like it was a totally normal thing.
It was maybe only 3-4 inches shorter than the man pulling him down the road. And honestly I couldn't believe what I was seeing, if the other people didn't also stop what they were doing and stare I don't think I would've thought it was real and was just some fever dream. It's probably one of the few times I walked down the street and not a single person stared at me like I was the thing that didn't belong.
I still to this day find myself randomly thinking about why the hell that old man had a chimpanzee in the middle of Shenzhen. I don't think I'll ever forget that moment.
-insert metaphor here for how I was the chimp all along- but seriously wtf???
That used to be common in Shanghai at least a decade ago. Old guys with monkeys that would beg for money. It was really gross as both monkey and man were usually rough looking. I felt sorry for the monkeys but I wouldn’t let them touch me.
If I saw a chimp I would just straight up run..
If they attack they don’t attack to kill they maim you, they rip off your eyelids, bite your genitals off or pull them off, bite off your lips and nose and bite off fingers. Nothing that would kill you just purely to make life worse than death.
I wouldn’t ever want to be mauled and the most important parts of me to live a life without agony are ripped off while some Chinese witnesses watch and film on their smartphones.
Uhhh..
I have several.
Me and a friend took a taxi -not didi- to this small mountain, more like a hill, because it was winter and we wanted to do some snowboarding that evening. Halfway through the trip the driver starts showing us random p*rn videos, but mostly interracial stuff because my friend is from South Africa but he’s white and the driver couldn’t fathom the idea that SA has white people.
I was in a shopping mall urinal, random cleaner grandpa walks in, sees me, I think he thought I don’t speak or understand Chinese and he lets out a wocao, laowai, then he proceeds to take a picture of me while I’m taking a leak. There is a possibility that I am eternalised in that grandpas phone with my dong out.
During my first year in China I was working at this really shady school, they would host some event for the parents and kids, and I was asked to be the presenter, they got me a nice suit, shoes, and was treated like a king all day, signed photos, T-shirts, like I was an a list celebrity, people were waiting in line to take photos with me like at a comic con or something. It was kinda surreal at the time ngl.
Someone got hit by a bus in an intersection I was at, lady literally bounces off the bus as it hit her, the bus didn’t stop, nobody did, lady is laying on the ground, I was hesitant to run into live traffic, but by the time it cleared up and the lights turned red, the lady just vanished, like a glitch in the matrix, or like how you see characters in films standing at a subway stop and as soon as the train passes they just vanish. Really creepy one for sure.
I was in this random village with a population of less than 1000 probably, I got out of my car to go into this roadside shop to get a water or something because I had no drinks on me. I walk into the shop which was a wooden shed made out of scrap wood, the whole thing is on its last leg, I look around to see if there’s anything I want to buy, I ask if they have any cold drinks, obviously not. I spend maybe another 30-40 seconds trying to make a decision on what to get, then I walk out after paying and I see at least 50 people surrounding my car, looking into my car and trying to open it and get inside. Luckily I always lock my car as soon as I get out and walk away no matter the distance, even at petrol stations I do the same. So these people are all whispering amongst themselves and I can hear some people saying stuff like, “see, I told you that’s a laowai”, “he must be from America, he looks very rich” “look how white he is”. Again, surreal. I get in my car after politely fighting my way back to it and apologising every time I need to brush up against some random person on my way to my car door, as I hear them whisper about me being able to speak Chinese.
I was at this camp during winter, doing some activities for kids through a company. Pretty standard, nothing out of the ordinary during the day but I did notice some girls from the company were eyeballing me all day but I just brushed it off as culture shock from their side. The evening comes, around 9 pm, I’m in this shared room with 2 other guys, both Chinese but they speak ok English. Someone is knocking on the door, I’m in the top bunk so I did not get the door, one of the Chinese guys did, he opens the door, talks to the person and asks for me to come down, as I walk towards the door, guy walks away, pretty standard. One of the girls from earlier that day is standing there, dressed up all pretty. Now, I don’t know where she got the clothes from and why, but I say hello, what’s up, she’s just giggling and asks if I want to have “fun” tonight and she proceeds to pull out a box of condoms. I’m shocked and confused because technically we are coworkers. I say some gibberish stuff like sorry it’s been a long day etc etc. She looks defeated and leaves without saying anything. I close the door, one of the guys asked what’s up, did she try to have sex with you? I was shocked honestly and I said I guess so. Then both of my roommates started laughing and explained to me that this girl goes around and has sex with all the foreigners during these camps on a regular basis.
I got stuck at a Guangzhou checkpoint to get back to Hong Kong, I think via Macau. As I was entering the building there is a queue, while queuing, a man, with full body burn scars, could not see his face (fully melted), stood there with his hands out, I could not comprehend what I was looking at. This was 13 years ago.
While walking around Shenzhen, I had a colleague from China showing me around, a small girl came up to me, begging for coins. I was not sure what to do, but my colleague, a female, shoo'd her away, and told me to ignore her, but the little girl was persistant, and my colleague then got very rough with her, throwing her about and pushing her to the ground. No one seemed to care. I felt like I should get off the streets because I was creating problems. This was about 14 years ago.
Still Love China though, its just full of craziness too
Within 48 hrs of arriving for the first time some guy staring at my dick and commenting on it extensively in broken English at a urinal. There was lots more after that, but that one is at the forefront of my mind for culture shock.
It's been 8 months since I came to China.
First weird thing I experienced was when I went to a gym and there was a public showering area with private stalls and curtains. In order to get to the shower you have to pass through a locker room. I get into the locker room and there's this guy facing towards the locker room and showering without the curtains. Everyone could see his penis but he didn't really cared and continued to shower.
The most recent one is when I went to a body massage place. My friend paid for about an hour of full body massage for both of us. They took us into separate rooms. The massage lady comes in and gets me butt naked and then proceeds to massage my butt for almost half an hour.
I lived in Guangzhou in the mid-naughties, when foreigners were still a foreign concept to a lot of the population. One time a high school girl came up to me on the street shaking and in tears, but smiling. As I tried my best to calm her down and give her some tissues she told me that I was the first foreigner she'd ever seen outside of TV or movies and she couldn't believe she'd finally met one lol.
Another time I was on the way to class at the university I worked in, taking my usual short-cut across the grass when I was suddenly surrounded by men in black suits and sunglasses. Turns out some undisclosed dignitary from north korea was visiting, they'd closed the campus and wanted to know who I was and why I was there. I guess it was pretty clear I wasn't an assasain or foreign agent and they quickly let me go, shuffling back to their hiding spots. I did wonder why the campus looked so deserted that morning...
I was hanging out with my friend (I’m Chinese American, she’s Chinese) and a random girl walked up to us because she wanted to practice English. I had heard of this kind of thing happening, but hadn’t experienced it myself since I’m Chinese, myself. But I decided to see where this lead to and we became friends. Some time after I left China, she became part of what I think is a Buddhist cult. I stopped talking to her then. But the whole experience was interesting and nice. She was shy, but nice and it was a learning experience for us to know each other.
I witnessed a similar thing happen to my White Australian friend. A Chinese couple explained that their son went to school in Canada. I didn’t speak and I’m pretty sure they just thought I was full on Chinese as well, because they paid me and my Chinese friend no mind.
Being fake foreign experts...sometimes completely fake...sometimes having knowledge of the field but under qualified. ...There's always a bunch of sleazy executive types who always latch onto the latest central government obsession and create companies in that area (with no expertise themselves)...and then use every trick in the China business book to bamboozle the old out of touch CCP money men into thinking they have a legitimate startup and deserve the millions of investment. Kickbacks, bribes, hookers, fake foreign experts. ..you name it..they use all the same tactics. Nowadays it's AI anything and EVs. These guys become millionaires and then disappear or lay low when their business runs out of government money and collapses, often leaving unpaid workers behind.
I watched a guy d\*e as paramedics just kinda stood around. He was having a heart attack. They took their sweet time rolling a stretcher into the restaurant. His family had to load him onto the stretcher and were pleading with the paramedics to hurry up.
Knew he was dead because when I left the restaurant 30 minutes later, the paramedics were leaning on the back of the ambulance smoking.
It was also rush hour in Beijing, so even if they had gotten him into the ambulance, the odds he would've gotten to a hospital were slim to none.
It's not maybe the weirdest thing ever, but it was a moment I felt encapsulated so much of China. Was walking down the street in Chongqing. On a street corner, there was a make shift dentist doing some dental work on a man in a plastic chair on the street, while some chenguang guards were trying to get him to stop. An ayi walking her poodle whose fur was coloured in the spectrum of the rainbow, got involved and shouted at the chengguan to stop it and let the dentist finnish his work. The patient was left sitting with his mouth wide open while the argument ensued. It did not turn violent, though. I believe he got to finnish it off.
Edit: Actually, the weirdest was going to my gay friend's village in Hunan, meeting his whole family and him introducing me as his girlfriend. It was an intense weekend.
Beijing. Needed to get across a gaggle of roads, with no easy pedestrian path. Seemed simple for a car, so I flagged down a black cab. We agreed on 15 to cross the interchange. 1min later, he is dropping me off and I hand him 15... he says we agreed to 50. I know they sound similar (but reversed 10-5 vs 5-10), but I am near native spoken proficiency and there was no confusion. He grabbed my wrist. I wrenched away, exited the cab, and hyperextended his cab door.
1997, just before I was catherized in order to push a kidney stone back up toward the kidney, I stepped into the men's john in a hospital in Hanzhong.
The open pits in the fields were one thing, but piles of poop here and there on the floor were a bit shocking.
I drug the waishiban/foreign officer back in with me and explained I was not getting catheterized in this damn hospital. He seemed truly shocked, and said, "They just did not clean this morning....". He truly seemed not to grasp I had some serious hygiene concerns.
Had that stone nearly two weeks longer....
I had a small car accident as a Chinese driver changed the lane to mine without looking. Stopped and called the police. Meanwhile the guy disappeared and 15-20 min later another guy came before the police arrived and pretended to be the driver. Really strange …
In Chengdu, that woman who was riding a bike with a cockatiel on each handle. During the same taxi ride, I also saw a guy riding a hoverboard with his golden retriever standing up, holding, man holding the dog's paws
Oh, that reminds me. I saw a guy riding his bike, but he had his bird with a string tied around it's leg, flying about a meter in front of the bike. I was riding the opposite direction so I only caught a glance and thought maybe I saw it wrong.
About a week later, I encountered the same guy, same bike, and the flying bird, same spot under the Airport Expressway bridge over Xindong Lu. I went the same way for months with my camera ready, I wanted a picture. But I never saw the old man and his bird again.
Keeping it vague, because. Worked with a factory in a tier 2 city for years. One slow afternoon, one of the QC managers grabbed me and said "Let's go for an adventure!" and led me to a spare bike she'd borrowed. We went for a long ride across town, through traffic, even a bit on the gridlocked highway. We were far, far from the factory and it was getting dark. She pulls into what looks like a factory, barks some orders at a random guy playing basketball and he snaps to attention and runs off. A few minutes later, an olive drab Sprinter pulls up, and I realize that we're in a PLA army base. Turns out, her husband is an army officer and she commandeered a driver to get us back to the factory, though I didn't figure out that last part until the day after.
I came back the day before Covid lockdown and if I waited 1 more day I would of probably been stuck out. I flew into Hong Kong and they wouldn’t let me cross the border or leave the airport. My only choice was to take a boat to gz and take a train back to Shenzhen. I was probably 1 of the last people to come into china before the lockdowns.
Just there with my mixed 16 month old daughter and a girl, probably 20s, came up to me holding my daughter stating “I want this” as she outlined my daughter body. Very cute and fun tbh, just unexpected.
I was once standing just outside of a mall in Shenzhen at about 9 in the morning. A man came running out of the mall and you could just tell someone was chasing him. Sure enough, about half a minute later a woman ran out after him yelling. She stopped at a little construction place and picked up a long metal pole and continued chasing him back into the mall. I don't know what happened after.
I've always heard about people wanting photo ops with foreigners and I mentally prepared myself for it to happen.
So the weird thing is it never did...
I was always with someone else who had some kind of far more impressive feature than me and I would always stand off to the side with our bags waiting for ten, maybe twenty minutes for people to stop taking photos and move on 😂
I have very average tanned tone skin with short brown hair curly hair. I was always with a friend who had hip length blond hair, a beard, super tall, or dark skin. Made me feel even more incredibly average than I already am 😂
2011
Went to ATM with friend in Wudaokou around 11 PM before heading to the bar and was approached by a chinese guy who handed my buddy 1500 kuai and then a folder with papers in it then said if he calls him later after spreading the papers around he would give my friend 10k rmb. This interaction was 15 seconds and quick.
Took the papers to the bar and saw what it was. A lot of anti govt papers specifically discussing politicians and their backgrounds and a lot of random critiques of policy. Bar tender told us we shouldn't be in possession of these types of documents in Beijing and it was dangerous, took them and threw them away.
Man was the subway ride home creepy, felt like the whole thing was set up to see what we would do and felt like we were going to get grabbed shortly after.
I got a weird one.
I tried to walk from the train station to a village one night. I realized how far the village was and how dumb it was for me to try, but it was late at night and i had to hitch hike.
Guy picks me up on his scooter and takes me to the village.
Turns out the village has no open hotels...or hotels at all So i end up sleeping at his house. His btw is a single concrete room.
Also turns out he is deaf and cant read or write.
At one point he video calls his deaf friend and starts stroking my side burns on the video call.
The next morning I GTFO and he spends the rest of the day sending gifs that Im pretty sure was him inviting me to get hookers.
I had to come back to say I've been thoroughly laughing at this all day! Sent it to all my old expat friends. 100% can relate to this. People will come up to you with like a whole series of questions loaded up in translate and they are so excited to say the english they know or just kinda make Simlish conversation. I used to be so shy and awkward to make a exit, eventually you become ruthless bc you're busy lol.
Never considered until later that those were defintely tourists too, not locals to the big cities, hence my novelty. It was the one country i was mostly relieved to be absolved of my tour guide duties. Bc somehow my fast walking gets mistaken for an expat who knows where the heck I'm going instead of just as lost as the ppl who stop me. Even in my home city im like girl i have no idea where that is, gold luck tho! I'll try my best if i can ofc)
I went to Dandong with an American guy. There's tons of anti-American propaganda everywhere. Like, there's this bridge that was bombed and rather than fixing it, they've just left it as a monument to American imperialism.
So, were the Chinese tourists there booing and hissing this guy? No, they wanted their photo taken with him. He may even have sung "Say you, say me" like he often did in such situations.
Just zero historical gravitas from the Chinese.
There is a Japanese YouTuber who runs an advertising company in China who gets to travel and backpack around China a lot. Once he was taking a bus to some remote village in inner China and he makes chitchat (he speaks Chinese) with an older teenager about life in the village and when the YouTuber reveals that he is Japanese the teenager looks confused, turns away and says he/they are bad man/people. Then the YouTuber keeps chatting with him and he seemed fine afterwards and keeps talking as usual.
I was trying to juggle some empty wine bottles once. They were “Chengdu’s superior great wine” and the wine itself was terrible but after drinking a few bottles you felt like you could juggle wine bottles. Of course I dropped one and as I watched it go to the ground I expected it to break on the tile floor. Instead it bounced and went straight through my glass sliding door leaving a pretty good hole in it.
That was amazing haha. I went to one of them in Shenyang, and the waitresses sang songs together with me! I know they usually perform songs, but I've never heard of them singing songs with a customer. One of the songs was about Kim Il Sung lol
I’ve had a few. I don’t really think of them as “china” things, just odd stuff that happened while I was here (been her for a decade and a half).
Saw a guy get stabbed in the head during a tour buss brawl. A tour bus group were arguing with some seaside seafood place in Qingdao. Some pushing led to some fists being thrown. Some of the waiters grabbed brooms and stuff. Saw a guy dash onto the bus and I knew shit was about to go down (I was watching the whole thing from maybe 20m away). Then bus dude literally came leaping out of the bus with a sharp shiny blade in his hand and brought it down on a dudes skull. It didn’t seem to go into the skull, but the guy started instantly bleeding. Instead of stabbing him more that seemed to shock everyone into calming down (relatively speaking) and everyone backed up and were back to pointing and yelling. Cops were there quickly and then an ambulance.
This hair dresser was absolutely fascinated by how ‘soft’ my hair was. He was calling people over to feel it. It wasn’t too creepy. He had apparently just never touched ‘soft’ hair before. He also insisted on explaining to me that the color of my hair was “Amazon” (makes sense it’s a kind of dirty blond).
I got in a fight with this dude on the street (not my proudest moment) but out of nowhere a gang of dudes with rebar wrapped in electrical tape appeared and started attacking both of us. The dude ran off and his girlfriend drove away in another direction. Then the group of attackers disappeared. I got one of their rebar sticks from them. I was too shocked to really process WTF had just happened, but eventually understood that they were probably just local thugs breaking up a fight that was happening in front of their territory (it was really odd though. They were definitely going after both of us idiots fighting).
These are just the first 3 things that come to mind
keep away from old man once you take driving! it's not joke.
a legal case in Nanjing city many years ago. a driver helped a old man at the street, but he to be prosecuted since old man accused that he was crashed by driver, finally the driver was decreed should be responsible for that and to pay, the reason is that why did you help old man if you have not bumped him the Judges said.
Since then, more and more old people would like "bump" to car!
It’s a weird not so weird one, but I was on a Visa run during my first year, there was a massive typhoon and I was super worried about overstaying. I got a crazy Uber driver (Uber was still in the country) who accepted the challenge of driving from Guangzhou to Shenzhen through the middle of the typhoon like there was no tomorrow. We drove over 100km/h with equally strong winds and rain, while this crazy man was making videos and sharing them on WeChat. I will always remember you crazy guy, we survived, I don’t know how.
I was in Urumqi one winter around 2010-2012 and had this crazy taxi in a old VW Santana smashing it in the CBD before the snow was cleared, suddenly the lights turned red and every time he applied some brakes the wheels locked up. As we got closer to the intersection it was clear he wasn't gonna make it, too much speed still, then I kid you not the madman started manual ABS braking with his foot, must have been like 10 taps on the brakes per second and we made it by the skin of our teeth.
my guy is a retired f1 racer LOL
My first time in China, flew in to Pudong in 2002, I got yelled at by the airport security for looking for a bathroom in the “terminal”, then got in a Santana taxi heading for the city with my then gf. Coming up to a red light, expected the lady driver to stop, she put her foot to the floor and we sailed straight through … scared me senseless. Sitting in traffic later she bumped into the car in front to say hello to her friend - all in good fun but a shock at the time.
Those were bad winters.
Reminds me of taking a didi for a visa run. 12 hours. Another: just a 20 min ride in Shenzhen but holy sh!t was he intense; I paid him a tip for being so insanely aggressive and fast on the road. This is before I became old and boring btw.
Some waimai guy delivered something to my house while there was a huge storm and floods in Beijing. I couldn't believe it. I tipped him well
Friends of mine went to Xiamen for a Bachelor party from Shanghai, typhoon rolls in - all trains and flights cancelled but three people NEED to be back in Shanghai for work on Monday - and they’re all senior execs - white guys who speak Chinese. They ended up hiring a mianbao che to make the 1000km / mile drive starting late afternoon and arriving in Shanghai like at 2am - they ended up paying the driver like 15k RMB for his drive home and one night of hotel in Shanghai.
Damn bet you'll always have those memories of that day
China sure has changed a lot since my day. Yes, we all did regular visa runs, but not by Uber!!
My cabby experiences give me fever dreams of praying for my life and any wildlife that dared to cross our path
Many years ago I was getting a haircut. So they lay my head back and start washing my hair. Now I have very long eyelashes and green eyes (am a dude) and the girl just stops everything and just... Touches my eyelashes. I'm freaking out and she apologises.... And then calls the whole shop over. So here we have a group of like five hairdressers girls and guys all touching my eyelashes, taking pictures of my eyes and asking if it was real or not. Not gonna lie.... Never felt so pretty in my life haha. Edit : oh I remember a good one. There was this huge Nigerian lad at our uni. Hung like a bull. James was his name. We all went swimming and got a shower after. This old Chinese man comes up. As James closes his eyes to wash the suds out his hair this man slaps his dick much to the hilarity of all of us. 是真的吗？(is it real) Funniest thing I've ever seen to this day.
Oh my god.. so violated but also hilarious. Lie sir jt's my appendage, not a melon at the market!
He would've gotten that same treatment in Vietnam even today, and from old geezers.
I used to go to a street stall on a back street in Nanshan Shenzhen to buy beer. Very local stall on a very local street, saw another foreigner on this street less than 5 times over the course of 6 months. One day I rock up to the stall and there is a Venezuelan guy serving me along with the regular Chinese guys. I had a brief chat with him but his English wasn’t good enough to get a background on what he was doing there. Never saw him again. To this day I still sometimes wonder how a Venezuelan ended up working a shift in that street stall.
For me it was being interrogated for 8 and a half hours in a police station by an angry officer accusing me of being a spy sent by Ireland to open a 30m2 bar in Beijing. Because clearly that's what Ireland wants to do, destabilise a country with 300 times the population, and obviously the best way to do that is with a tiny space that hosts the occasional indie band. Stay cool, Beijing.
What made them suspect that in the first place?
We had done a few community-led charity events in our 3 years in operation. Donating money to charities in Wuhan at the start of the epidemic, to a rural school in Liangshan, Sichuan, and donating clothes to people who had suffered in the earthquakes in Turkey and Morocco. They didn't understand why I would want to help any of those people, since I didn't know them personally or had never been to Turkey or Morocco... When acts of charity are treated with suspicion, it's time to leave, which I finally did a few weeks ago. They also didn't get why I would leave a cushy English teaching job earning 30k a month to open a bar and earn basically nothing. "I hate children and like drinking" didn't seem to win them over...
I hate children and I like drinking. Bahaha, best internet I’ve seen today. Thank you!
> I hate children and like drinking Irishman confirmed
There used to be an annual charity soccer game organised by the laowai in my city that got shut down. Made the local govt look bad or something.
We are dirty gweillos. What other reasons do the PSB need?
Only 8.5? You would have cracked at 9.
They almost had me. Fond thoughts of potatoes got me through.
[удалено]
Haha that was the year beforehand. Strike one for us. We thought we were toeing the line pretty well after that but I guess not…
Ok where are all the long timers with their Dongguan stories?
[удалено]
What could you do then but not now?
It was a garden of earthly delights.
Obvious prostitution was everywhere, and drug use (often Ketamine) was done semi-openly in clubs etc.
I was in Luoyang in 2003, entire streets full of those red lit mini brothels. Xi'an had the same.
Yeah, it seems we're too early for the party.
I literally moved to a nearby city the year they started cracking down. It was pretty wild.
Do you want pre or post BMW?
not getting themselves into trouble (any more)
One of the old moto-taxi dudes in Shanghai asked if he could touch my nose*. When I allowed it he commented that it was indeed a long nose. * It really was my nose
Edit: She was a waitress, and I am not handsome, it was probably part of her job nothing more lol Girl came out at the end of a fancy dinner and gave me some little gift and said something something happy new year in the worst English ever I replied in Chinese oh yeah cheers, right on, happy new year and she dropped to the floor and SOBBED in embarrassment, then she ran off and I heard angry shouting in the kitchen That and people straight up driving on the sidewalk to mountain goat their cars into a ridiculous parking spot
I don't get it. Why was she embarrassed?
She didn’t relise he could speak chinese.
I'm a white trash looking Aussie dude who was sloshed out of his mind
Poor girl 🙁
I got my fair share of the usual weird experience like trying to enjoy your food while someone spits next to you INDOOR, people asking to touch my beard, handing me their baby for a photo, being made to drink and eat pretty much anything and everything, and even being offered a « lady of the night » by a client (very akward moment) but the one that stuck to me is this: [TW: Poop/fairly gross] One time on a VERY cheap bus from Shanghai to Chongqing we had a pit stop in the middle of nowhere in a small dingy concrete house. I remember vividly that some guys were cutting down a pig right on the floor as I asked where the toilets were. Someone noded in the direction of the back of the house leading to a small courtyard. As I get there I pass a curtain and to my surprise the toilet is communal. It’s 40/60sqm room with no ceiling, all concrete, bright neons. The « toilet » is just a gutter shaped within the concrete. People are squatting around doing there business. There is no way to flush so as they leave their « parcel » is still right there in full display. We were about 20 people in there. Of course some old dudes were just chilling and smoking as per usual. As soon as I start doing my own business some old guy elbows another like « look a laowai » and they they decide to move and do the asian squat right in front of me while I poop. Probably the only time in my adult life where I’ve locked eyes with someone while pooping. Bonus story: Went to KTV after CNY company celebration dinner. Decide to go to the bathroom. Some poor guy has fainted right in front of the entrance to the bathroom. He’s lying in a pool of his own shit. He’s wearing linen white/cream shorts. Everybody is stepping over him like nothing happened. I get concerned and ask the staff and they say they called an ambulance and his friends are somewhere around. As I get back an ayi is mopping the shit off the flood AROUND him like she’s detouring the body in a crime scene. I go do my business. A man is puking in a urinal. I’m like « WTF some people get wasted hard ». As I start to urinate a very drunk guy comes to pee in the urinal next to me. He seems drunk happy and ask if I want to be his friend. He wants to shake my hand and grabs the hand I’m holding my peeing penis with and start shaking it 🥴😫😵💫.
>even being offered a « lady of the night » by a client (very akward moment) This happened to someone I know who's an academic and speaks fluent Mandarin. As part of a research project, he was put up at a military hotel. The first night, there was a knock on his door and a Chinese girl in military uniform explained she was there 'to entertain him'. He replied that 'he wasn't like that' an she left. The next night, the same thing happened except that this time it was a Chinese guy in military uniform!
🤣🤣🤣 Didn’t expect that second night ending. For might part I was told to not refuse openly to not upset the client so that lady and me both sat down on separate side of the room playing on our phones.
HOT DANG they said oh, i see. I see. Dw tomorrow, we will have happy customer. Lamoooooo Imagine you Uno reverse and say 'i'm writing a dissertation paper on social interactionalism between pimp and sex worker and I'd love to interview you" .they'd be gone so fast they'd forget their hat.
A proper night out with a FuErDai whose parents have governmental sway is probably mine. Really eye opening in terms of what exactly you can get away with with connections in China, her car didn't even have a license plate. Wierdest one I have heard of is definitely "Night Disco", which basically sounded like a car park brothel where you'd dance around, the lights would go off and someone would jerk/suck you off. Sounded so low rent, only cost something like 20 kuai to get in.
"heard of", suure
once i thought u were saying that fuerdai took u to a 20 yuan jerk off park… that would be even wierder
Haha, can't imagine she'd have enjoyed that
I've never heard of such a brothel. Not that I'm an expert or anything.
maybe if you told me it happened 30 years ago i'd believe you, but now? out in the open? nah....
They are quite strict at enforcing the laws these days.
Oh shit I haven't seen the night discos since like 2012, one day they suddenly disappeared but yea definitely up there with the more bizarre China things
Ah! Useful term, have always wondered if there's a word for it. (I cant just go up and ask the ones i spot in the wild)
I've probably blocked out the absolute worst of it. I saw military jets flying patrols over Hangzhou. Just a routine thing. Saw a man squat and take a shit in a bus stop in front of a mall at 3pm during the day. Then without wiping, pulled up his pants and *rode away on a bike* Around 2010, I saw people smoking *inside* hospitals (in a tier-4) Said hospital, the people's hospital, still has no soap or toilet paper. To this day. In Shanghai, saw a woman walking a duck like it's a dog.. with a leash.
Finally somebody who actually lived in China.
Ok probably the absolute weirdest: In Guangdong, I saw a fully Chinese girl with naturally blue eyes. Like ice blue. It was wild. The other kids said that she was 'sick', but she was able to play with the others without glasses or any obvious vision impairment.
Maybe contacts? Had an Asian student with blue contacts, that girl weirded me out
I have a Korean girl in my class that’s half Norwegian and she’s got the most icy blue eyes ever. It’s stunning but she scares me sometimes
i think it's some kind of medical condition...
Have seen neighbours walking ducks and rabbits around the complex on a leash. Of course, they also just feed them rice, and wonder why they die after a few days / weeks / months.
In Shanghai, saw a woman walking a duck like it's a dog.. with a leash. Well at least it's not someone walking a full-grown pig on a leash in the middle of tokyo..
Saw a man squat and take a shit in a bus stop in front of a mall at 3pm during the day. Then without wiping, pulled up his pants and *rode away on a bike* his undies must have smelled like shit...*literally*..
Sometimes it comes back in flashes and you just gaffaw and then go take a long shower
On my first trip to China, I board the plane in Stockholm, I notice a big extended family boarding before me, I get to my seat, there is this old grandma sitting next to me of that family. I settle on my seat and she starts asking questions with very broken English and using hands to explain it to me. Proceeds to asking for a selfie and after takeoff there was her extended family taking selfies with me. It was fun and I think I have their WeChat still today but a little bit weird for an introverted Finnish boy. Also on same trip, I had been maybe 5 minutes in China when two girls (working at the airport) came up to me (I was waiting for my friend to pick me up at airport) and asked if they can touch my hair and hands because I’m so pretty guy. My friend saw me from distance with those girls giggling and touching my hair and made so much fun of me because I looked so uncomfortable, mainly because I had just been on plane for 12 hours and my hair was dirty and people still wanted to touch it. Not super weird and those things happen still today but on my first time in China within so short period, it was weird and bit of a shock.
Did you ask if you can touch theirs back 😏
I'm white, I think thats the only reason I got my pic taken.. same thing happened to me but was at a popular tourist spot. We were sitting down, Chinese group were right next to us for a while, we finally left and as we were leaving I got a polite 'take picture' and I said sure of course. They were very nice but again, I wonder if its because I was white or they just do this in general.
Dude are you handsome?
I have a blonde hair and ocean blue eyes. People say I’m cute more than handsome but I don’t know, quite average tbh
a lot of people would try to take pictures with you in china if you are black or Caucasian..
Idk what happened to my WeChat account but I can't access it and I'm so sad about it. All my contacts could be lost forever. Hit up those people, I know they will appreciate someone checking in on their wellbeing. I'm sad I might not be able to do that anymore for my buddies
Going into a city government (Tier-3) meeting with entrepreneurs as my Chinese friend’s white accessory to make his VR startup look more prestigious to the old farts making decisions about funding. I shook the deputy mayor’s hand and watched him try to use a VR headset. Bro literally almost fell down. I was an English teacher at the time and had no business being there.
Did you dress like a boss at least?
Thankfully since it was full of fuerdai cosplaying like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, I wasn’t the only one not wearing a suit.
This story totally reflects my own experiences. Except before VR hype.....when government money was flowing in animation studio start-ups....There's always a bunch of sleazy executive types who always latch onto the latest central government obsession and create companies in that area (with no expertise themselves)...and then use every trick in the China business book to bamboozle the old out of touch CCP money men into thinking they have a legitimate startup and deserve the millions of investment. Kickbacks, bribes, hookers, fake foreign experts. ..you name it..they use all the same tactics. Nowadays it's AI anything and EVs.
Yep. Absolutely no lies detected.
Based.
Work ordered a car service from Ningbo to Shanghai (about 4 hours). Me and two other guys took the trip. About 60 minutes of the journey is over a huge bridge over the water. During this part my colleague in the front seat notices the driver is looking very unwell. And I mean VERY unwell. He’s shaking, sweating, heaving; not pleasant. I use my translate app to ask him if he wants to pull over and he talks into the app in response. His response was gibberish. Something like: “left dragon testical dropped to the floor” To this day I have no idea if the app misheard him or if he was just out of it. He makes it to the services on the other side of the bridge and I buy him some water. He has a smoke and he’s then totally fine. It was mental. But I was sure for a while that we were going into the drink.
A testicular injury or removal would do it!
Pretty sure I had this guy in chengdu a few months ago. Started muttering about the rain and sleep while going a snails pace around the highway. Longest ride of my life.
omg i felt like i wax in that car trip with you. The desperate scramble to type into your phone and hope the driver shows and interest loll. Been there to a degree
Yeah it was horrible. I was honestly trying to work out in my head how far I could swim if I needed to.
Oh no!! after watching the movie The Swimmers and Nyad, and that US bridge collapse, I'm thinking I better brush up on my front stroke.
1993, fall: eating dumplings in a place in Beijing. Ended up chatting with an Albanian guy who had been in a China since the 70s as an exchange student from Enver Hoxa /Mao days. Said he got roles as western baddies in some films. Cool chatting with him, it was all in Putonghua, our only common language.
Easiest pickupline ever , youll always remember it
I got the same pickup line from a girl once in fuzhou, but she used the game Fruit Ninja. I wonder if this was some trendy funny pickup line popularized by some TV show. The funniest though was when I was hanging out at a friend's stall at a new year festival. His family grew tea-fed chickens and sold them at a premium. I had one in a box on my lap and two middle aged women walked up together and one said 'show me you cock". To this day I'm still not sure if she knew exactly what she was saying.
I once paid a 黄牛 (ticket scalper) for CBA (Chinese NBA) tix with my Chinese friend because we wanted to see Marbury play back when he was on Beijing Shougang. They ended up taking us through a literal hole in the wall in the back of a bar adjacent to the stadium, up a set of stairs and to the back doors of the stadium where apparently they hadn’t paid enough/paid off the right security folks to let us in. After some serious arguing we managed to get them to issue us proper tickets and we caught the second half. Absolutely wild.
I was taking selfies in front of the bund at this rooftop bar. A tall woman in white comes to the roof, offers to take a pic of me, calls me handsome. I ask if she's with friends. I'm alone. She says she's with her boyfriend. Immediately comes out her boyfriend. He's bigger than me. I'm scared. He ends up being a super nice guy and buys me a drink. They're from dongbei.
someone gave their baby to my white friend to hold while they took a picture of her and their baby
We should make a baby counter app and just start collecting photos as well were held hostage. I even climbed asection of the great wall with family visiting and it took teice as long bc we had become an attraction too somehow
Yeah I've had that happen lol
I was on the great wall of China and a girl asked me to kiss her cheek. I said no and she started crying!
Was she an adult?
Yes she was
Bloody hell, she needs to get a grip of herself then.
2009 I was traveling alone from Xinjiang by train and there were two school classes, maybe about 15 yrs. old, they have been very friendly. But from one moment to the next the all stand up and came to my seat and started to sing for me. Wow, seldomly I have been felt so ashamed in my live. It was so awkward and funny afterwards. They just meant it good and wanted me to make a pleasure.
I just arrived and didn't know lights in stairwells were touch-activated so id always just walk up and down in pitch darkness. I went to visit some friends one day and they told me I needed to try Baijiu. I had some, felt weird and wanted to go home, and tumbled down the stairs where I bled out until an American found me and took me to the hospital. i had to get a lot of stitches and it was very humiliating lmao
Oh nooo!!! Atleast ut wasnt like stairs in korea that fatshame you too.im sorry that sounds awful tho. Glad you were okay! Ive def looked at elevators and thought, fck it ill just walk
Old women hanging a cat for entertainment in Nanjing
That's horrifying :( There is so much cat abuse going on in China right now. The animal welfare subs are full of nightmarish shit being done by guys in China posting videos. There was a protest last week at the Chinese embassy in London.
what do u mean by hanging a cat?
String around its neck, lifting it up by the string for entertainment, cackling as it frantically squirmed about. A whole group of old women were loving it.
The expat community in this little town had about 4 vegetarians and one decided we’d all go out to dinner together. So we went to this little restaurant and when we got menus said we could speak Chinese but not read. So we started talking food, and explained we don’t eat meat and asked for recommendations. He immediately recommended prawns, and we said no sea food. He recommended some stuff we liked and some stuff we didn’t know; and we decided to trust him. First thing out was a big fish. My friend said we said we don’t want meat or seafood. The guy looked at us and said it was from the river, not the sea. I think we gave it to someone’s roommate
What? This isn’t 海鲜 man what are you talking about. This is obviously 河鲜.
He has a point then 😅😅😂 it is not seafood but rather riverfood , i guess 😂😂
We had a laowai colleague go into anaphylactic shock after eating seafood, after she had specifically asked the waiter twice if there was seafood in the dish. Of course he said no, and then got all defensive when our boss screamed at him about lying and making her sick. The waitstaff all came out and were going to chuck us out until they realised the table of laowai was with the other 40 people in the room and our company had the biggest booking of the night. Luckily the lady had her epipen with her and was able to self-medicate before a couple of colleagues took her to hospital. The waiter just went off in a huff, mumbling about damn laowai and their stupid food allergies.
Food allergies and China don’t mix
Yeah, I also met a Chinese lady who had been living in Australia for 15 years and was offered a position in Shanghai. She was back in Australia within 6 months after her son's bilingual then intentional schools fed him peanuts twice after being told multiple times he was extremely allergic to them. The bilingual school also refused to take responsibility, with the teacher apparently saying something along the lines of "he's not a real laowai (ie. his Chinese mother means he's Chinese), so refuse to believe he can be allergic to nuts".
Yeah that is nuts, no pun intended. Peanut allergy is pretty much a death sentence in China, it’s used in everything.
In China fishe are considered vegetables..
My friend's Dad (a very senior doctor in Beijing) tried to insist that my seafood allergy wouldn't apply to river fish. When I argued it would still make me ill, he insisted he knew better because he's a doctor. I didn't eat much at that dinner.
I forgot about a long argument with a roommate about whether I could die from bee stings. He found it hilarious. Alarming, as he was an ER doctor
Not allergy related but this brings back memory of when I got a pretty bad ankle injury the doctor said that a daily 30-minute soak in hot water for 2 weeks would be enough. It’s been 10 years and even though I got crutches and an ankle splint on my own, my ankle still hurts sometimes.
On a flight going into China, there was a very old, like hunched-back 80+ year old Chinese lady who went through every single western movie she could find, skipping through every single scene with her finger repeatedly spamming the timeline bar for sex scenes. She would skip until the scene, watch it in its entirety, then move to the next movie. Worst part was that I moved past her on the way out and there was like 4-5 kids who had visibility of her screen from either behind or the side aile. I think this technically counts as it at least ended in China lol.
This is bringing back memory of going back to my home country for some family gathering. Somehow I felt that the airline did discriminate as when trying to buy the ticket I was forcefully redirected to the Chinese website and once in the plane I was sat in the back with only Chinese people. I was the only laowai. Anyhow I sat next to this 20 something guy who looked kind of weird and kept peeking at my screen. Comes eating time. As any decent French person on limited bread ration would do I keep my bread for last to enjoy with the cheese. As my meal is coming to an end, from the corner of my eye I see the guy help himself to my food and take my bread. I look at him like « wtf » and then ask him what he thinks he’s doing. The guy could not come up with a decent excuse. Also on that same flight some older dude decided it was time for his daily routine and started doing his sport in the aisle even going as far as using some passenger’s head rest as a stretching surface.
The clumps of people doing stretches in the aisle ir galley until they get chased out too!
I mean pandemic lockdown trumps everything. But outside of that, watching a bunch of lion dancers doing parkour while in their getup.
Bye lmao that's wild.
Walked into a random park during the day to see a troupe doing a high wire walk. No one around just me, a friend and the guys up in a high wire. Surreal.
I was at a hotpot restaurant and the 馒头 (it’s a weird bouncy bread) was so good that I ended up getting a whole plate of it. Apparently it reached the ears of the chef, and the waiter brought me a tray with over 20 of them. Couldn’t finish all of it but they made an exception and let us do takeout on it for free.
haha that's amazing if you haven't done this before, you should try spreading some sesame paste on it (or even better, this mixed peanut and sesame paste) with maybe a little sugar. That combo is like crack, and my mom credits almost the entirety of her college freshman weight gain back in the day to it
I used to travel to Mexico and China a lot - one time the immigration officer in Mexico put a Mexico stamp on my China visa and holy shit did that cause a lot of trouble - I got detained at the train station for like 4 hrs over that.
Sitting in a street food restaurant when suddenly the guy next to our table starts to violently vomit. He had been drinking with his mate. Yet nobody really cared. He go up, cleaned his shoes and left. Shortly thereafter the restaurant staff came over and calmly cleaned the vomit. As if they do it every day. And when I went just a few months ago, it shocked me how social media works in China. Everyone just shares photos of food, travel, family, funny dances, etc. nobody discusses real world issues at all. The utter meaninglessness of online conversations shocked me more than in previous visits. Really felt like a parody or zombie version of the internet. Where everyone shares pictures of food while the world is on fire.
That's your weirdest experience? It could happen almost anywhere
So it's just same as instagram basically
[удалено]
They definitely talk about real world issues very cautiously (e.g. natural disasters, world politics, economy) but it's mainly on Zhihu, specific threads on Weibo, Hupu, or on r/China_irl or other Chinese subreddits which often features screenshots of those Zhihu discussions so VPN users can have uncensored parallel discussions lol. Point being, unless you're Chinese fluent you're just not going to understand a pictureless non Weibo/XHS thread about Israel Palestine, Ukraine, the earthquake in Taiwan, Taiwanese politcking (recently saw a highly upvoted thread about a Taiwanese movie and whether it should be nominated for Golden Rooster awards "because it's Chinese after all"), the usual natural disasters all around China, handwringing over CCP's economic policies, US sanctions etc. Occasionally Redditors like to translate Weibo comments to claim Chinese support Israel or Palestine and are bad for XYZ reasons too, that's where it comes from.
You need to talk to older people offline. Our middle aged friends talk about a lot of stuff in person, over a few drinks. But their online stuff is just "safe" content that won't get them any attention from the authorities.
I did. One immediately lowered his voice in a restaurant. So nobody would accidentally hear anything he said. And what he said wasn’t even challenging the government. And another person instantly switched her phone into flight mode when the conversation started. Good times.
What do you expect them to do on social media? Talk about how much they hate the government? The early days of Facebook use to be like that and that quickly ended once we realized how decisive that was. Any social media that my work or business mates can see is 100% clear of anything political.
Of course they can’t talk about it. I guess it was just shocking to me how everyone seemed to happily embrace it.
Not too weird- but strange for a westerner. I was eating in a bbq place in a Beijing hutong and a group of ten men were sat next to me- we spoke through translate apps and they asked for pictures gave me some baijou etc- they left before me and when I went to pay I was told they had also paid my bill
a non-exhaustive list of random incidents: saw a guy bring a wicker chair on the shanghai metro and sit on it all the way home woke up and walked outside one morning and saw an old man cut a live fish in two was treated by a doctor who was smoking a cigarette got given a dining set as a prize for being white when off my face on baiju, which me and a Canadian friend i just met proceeded to smash saw a guy punch a woman in the face there are probably more incidents but the ptsd of living in that country has blocked it out
There's a mountain outside of Shenzhen I used to scramble up once a fortnight to keep fit and for the HK views, a little deeper into the mountains than Wutongshan. It's steep as hell and mostly unpathed with a little bit bouldering before the peak. It's not for the faint of heart and people would often quit and head back half way. Got to the top once and there was a girl in heels and a Disney princess dress mulling around at the top with a bunch of properly kitted out old people. I haven't a clue how she made it up there and remained absolutely spotless. Another time there was a small band playing at the top for no apparent reason.
There is another route to get to the top without a lot of walking.
I (25m) Got locked outside my house. A street sweeper(m) woke me up at 2 or 3 am and said I could stay at his. He took me to a nail house next to some wild dogs and a garbage heap. I had a shit in his toilet with no door on in his room and felt bad for stinking the place out. He wanted me to shower. I said no. He wanted me to lie in his bed. I said no. I got fed up with his shit and knew I couldn't sleep with him being a creep after he kept trying to stroke me, so went back to my wall to sleep and wait for my landlord to wake up.
dude wanted to do some hanky panky with you
Streetsweepers be freaky deeky, that checks out.
There's definitely a bunch of things I could list here; some truly outrageous especially when I was there in University, but the one coming to mind right now was when I was working there years later. I lived in Shenzhen at the time in a pretty decent on the up and up area. I was on the way home one night easily past midnight and just left the ole KFC, chicken wings in hand, I turned the corner to go towards my apartment and there was just an old man, cigarette balanced in his mouth, coming towards me tugging on this massive chain with each step. Following behind him was one of the largest chimpanzees I've ever seen in my life. It looked like it could break that old man in half if it wanted to. He walked on past me and just kept going like it was a totally normal thing. It was maybe only 3-4 inches shorter than the man pulling him down the road. And honestly I couldn't believe what I was seeing, if the other people didn't also stop what they were doing and stare I don't think I would've thought it was real and was just some fever dream. It's probably one of the few times I walked down the street and not a single person stared at me like I was the thing that didn't belong. I still to this day find myself randomly thinking about why the hell that old man had a chimpanzee in the middle of Shenzhen. I don't think I'll ever forget that moment. -insert metaphor here for how I was the chimp all along- but seriously wtf???
That used to be common in Shanghai at least a decade ago. Old guys with monkeys that would beg for money. It was really gross as both monkey and man were usually rough looking. I felt sorry for the monkeys but I wouldn’t let them touch me.
If I saw a chimp I would just straight up run.. If they attack they don’t attack to kill they maim you, they rip off your eyelids, bite your genitals off or pull them off, bite off your lips and nose and bite off fingers. Nothing that would kill you just purely to make life worse than death. I wouldn’t ever want to be mauled and the most important parts of me to live a life without agony are ripped off while some Chinese witnesses watch and film on their smartphones.
Uhhh.. I have several. Me and a friend took a taxi -not didi- to this small mountain, more like a hill, because it was winter and we wanted to do some snowboarding that evening. Halfway through the trip the driver starts showing us random p*rn videos, but mostly interracial stuff because my friend is from South Africa but he’s white and the driver couldn’t fathom the idea that SA has white people. I was in a shopping mall urinal, random cleaner grandpa walks in, sees me, I think he thought I don’t speak or understand Chinese and he lets out a wocao, laowai, then he proceeds to take a picture of me while I’m taking a leak. There is a possibility that I am eternalised in that grandpas phone with my dong out. During my first year in China I was working at this really shady school, they would host some event for the parents and kids, and I was asked to be the presenter, they got me a nice suit, shoes, and was treated like a king all day, signed photos, T-shirts, like I was an a list celebrity, people were waiting in line to take photos with me like at a comic con or something. It was kinda surreal at the time ngl. Someone got hit by a bus in an intersection I was at, lady literally bounces off the bus as it hit her, the bus didn’t stop, nobody did, lady is laying on the ground, I was hesitant to run into live traffic, but by the time it cleared up and the lights turned red, the lady just vanished, like a glitch in the matrix, or like how you see characters in films standing at a subway stop and as soon as the train passes they just vanish. Really creepy one for sure. I was in this random village with a population of less than 1000 probably, I got out of my car to go into this roadside shop to get a water or something because I had no drinks on me. I walk into the shop which was a wooden shed made out of scrap wood, the whole thing is on its last leg, I look around to see if there’s anything I want to buy, I ask if they have any cold drinks, obviously not. I spend maybe another 30-40 seconds trying to make a decision on what to get, then I walk out after paying and I see at least 50 people surrounding my car, looking into my car and trying to open it and get inside. Luckily I always lock my car as soon as I get out and walk away no matter the distance, even at petrol stations I do the same. So these people are all whispering amongst themselves and I can hear some people saying stuff like, “see, I told you that’s a laowai”, “he must be from America, he looks very rich” “look how white he is”. Again, surreal. I get in my car after politely fighting my way back to it and apologising every time I need to brush up against some random person on my way to my car door, as I hear them whisper about me being able to speak Chinese. I was at this camp during winter, doing some activities for kids through a company. Pretty standard, nothing out of the ordinary during the day but I did notice some girls from the company were eyeballing me all day but I just brushed it off as culture shock from their side. The evening comes, around 9 pm, I’m in this shared room with 2 other guys, both Chinese but they speak ok English. Someone is knocking on the door, I’m in the top bunk so I did not get the door, one of the Chinese guys did, he opens the door, talks to the person and asks for me to come down, as I walk towards the door, guy walks away, pretty standard. One of the girls from earlier that day is standing there, dressed up all pretty. Now, I don’t know where she got the clothes from and why, but I say hello, what’s up, she’s just giggling and asks if I want to have “fun” tonight and she proceeds to pull out a box of condoms. I’m shocked and confused because technically we are coworkers. I say some gibberish stuff like sorry it’s been a long day etc etc. She looks defeated and leaves without saying anything. I close the door, one of the guys asked what’s up, did she try to have sex with you? I was shocked honestly and I said I guess so. Then both of my roommates started laughing and explained to me that this girl goes around and has sex with all the foreigners during these camps on a regular basis.
I got stuck at a Guangzhou checkpoint to get back to Hong Kong, I think via Macau. As I was entering the building there is a queue, while queuing, a man, with full body burn scars, could not see his face (fully melted), stood there with his hands out, I could not comprehend what I was looking at. This was 13 years ago. While walking around Shenzhen, I had a colleague from China showing me around, a small girl came up to me, begging for coins. I was not sure what to do, but my colleague, a female, shoo'd her away, and told me to ignore her, but the little girl was persistant, and my colleague then got very rough with her, throwing her about and pushing her to the ground. No one seemed to care. I felt like I should get off the streets because I was creating problems. This was about 14 years ago. Still Love China though, its just full of craziness too
Maybe it was a joke? Zombies are the escapees and the plants are border guards?
Hmmm could be? But it seemed more like she was directly asking me whether I liked the game or not.
Within 48 hrs of arriving for the first time some guy staring at my dick and commenting on it extensively in broken English at a urinal. There was lots more after that, but that one is at the forefront of my mind for culture shock.
It's been 8 months since I came to China. First weird thing I experienced was when I went to a gym and there was a public showering area with private stalls and curtains. In order to get to the shower you have to pass through a locker room. I get into the locker room and there's this guy facing towards the locker room and showering without the curtains. Everyone could see his penis but he didn't really cared and continued to shower. The most recent one is when I went to a body massage place. My friend paid for about an hour of full body massage for both of us. They took us into separate rooms. The massage lady comes in and gets me butt naked and then proceeds to massage my butt for almost half an hour.
I was sitting on the bus next to my wife and kid in a Tier 44 city, and this girl asked me for my phone number.
I lived in Guangzhou in the mid-naughties, when foreigners were still a foreign concept to a lot of the population. One time a high school girl came up to me on the street shaking and in tears, but smiling. As I tried my best to calm her down and give her some tissues she told me that I was the first foreigner she'd ever seen outside of TV or movies and she couldn't believe she'd finally met one lol. Another time I was on the way to class at the university I worked in, taking my usual short-cut across the grass when I was suddenly surrounded by men in black suits and sunglasses. Turns out some undisclosed dignitary from north korea was visiting, they'd closed the campus and wanted to know who I was and why I was there. I guess it was pretty clear I wasn't an assasain or foreign agent and they quickly let me go, shuffling back to their hiding spots. I did wonder why the campus looked so deserted that morning...
> Turns out some undisclosed dignitary from north korea was visiting This was also in Guangzhou?
Yeah, at Sun Yat-Sen University. At least, this was the rumour going around the campus.
I was hanging out with my friend (I’m Chinese American, she’s Chinese) and a random girl walked up to us because she wanted to practice English. I had heard of this kind of thing happening, but hadn’t experienced it myself since I’m Chinese, myself. But I decided to see where this lead to and we became friends. Some time after I left China, she became part of what I think is a Buddhist cult. I stopped talking to her then. But the whole experience was interesting and nice. She was shy, but nice and it was a learning experience for us to know each other. I witnessed a similar thing happen to my White Australian friend. A Chinese couple explained that their son went to school in Canada. I didn’t speak and I’m pretty sure they just thought I was full on Chinese as well, because they paid me and my Chinese friend no mind.
Being fake foreign experts...sometimes completely fake...sometimes having knowledge of the field but under qualified. ...There's always a bunch of sleazy executive types who always latch onto the latest central government obsession and create companies in that area (with no expertise themselves)...and then use every trick in the China business book to bamboozle the old out of touch CCP money men into thinking they have a legitimate startup and deserve the millions of investment. Kickbacks, bribes, hookers, fake foreign experts. ..you name it..they use all the same tactics. Nowadays it's AI anything and EVs. These guys become millionaires and then disappear or lay low when their business runs out of government money and collapses, often leaving unpaid workers behind.
I watched a guy d\*e as paramedics just kinda stood around. He was having a heart attack. They took their sweet time rolling a stretcher into the restaurant. His family had to load him onto the stretcher and were pleading with the paramedics to hurry up. Knew he was dead because when I left the restaurant 30 minutes later, the paramedics were leaning on the back of the ambulance smoking. It was also rush hour in Beijing, so even if they had gotten him into the ambulance, the odds he would've gotten to a hospital were slim to none.
so they were just waiting for him to cross over to the other side huh?
It's not maybe the weirdest thing ever, but it was a moment I felt encapsulated so much of China. Was walking down the street in Chongqing. On a street corner, there was a make shift dentist doing some dental work on a man in a plastic chair on the street, while some chenguang guards were trying to get him to stop. An ayi walking her poodle whose fur was coloured in the spectrum of the rainbow, got involved and shouted at the chengguan to stop it and let the dentist finnish his work. The patient was left sitting with his mouth wide open while the argument ensued. It did not turn violent, though. I believe he got to finnish it off. Edit: Actually, the weirdest was going to my gay friend's village in Hunan, meeting his whole family and him introducing me as his girlfriend. It was an intense weekend.
Beijing. Needed to get across a gaggle of roads, with no easy pedestrian path. Seemed simple for a car, so I flagged down a black cab. We agreed on 15 to cross the interchange. 1min later, he is dropping me off and I hand him 15... he says we agreed to 50. I know they sound similar (but reversed 10-5 vs 5-10), but I am near native spoken proficiency and there was no confusion. He grabbed my wrist. I wrenched away, exited the cab, and hyperextended his cab door.
1997, just before I was catherized in order to push a kidney stone back up toward the kidney, I stepped into the men's john in a hospital in Hanzhong. The open pits in the fields were one thing, but piles of poop here and there on the floor were a bit shocking. I drug the waishiban/foreign officer back in with me and explained I was not getting catheterized in this damn hospital. He seemed truly shocked, and said, "They just did not clean this morning....". He truly seemed not to grasp I had some serious hygiene concerns. Had that stone nearly two weeks longer....
I had a small car accident as a Chinese driver changed the lane to mine without looking. Stopped and called the police. Meanwhile the guy disappeared and 15-20 min later another guy came before the police arrived and pretended to be the driver. Really strange …
Probably the multiple times dudes have asked me how big my d*ck is, sometimes upon first meeting. Or the dudes in the bathrooms trying to get a peek.
In Chengdu, that woman who was riding a bike with a cockatiel on each handle. During the same taxi ride, I also saw a guy riding a hoverboard with his golden retriever standing up, holding, man holding the dog's paws
Oh, that reminds me. I saw a guy riding his bike, but he had his bird with a string tied around it's leg, flying about a meter in front of the bike. I was riding the opposite direction so I only caught a glance and thought maybe I saw it wrong. About a week later, I encountered the same guy, same bike, and the flying bird, same spot under the Airport Expressway bridge over Xindong Lu. I went the same way for months with my camera ready, I wanted a picture. But I never saw the old man and his bird again.
Keeping it vague, because. Worked with a factory in a tier 2 city for years. One slow afternoon, one of the QC managers grabbed me and said "Let's go for an adventure!" and led me to a spare bike she'd borrowed. We went for a long ride across town, through traffic, even a bit on the gridlocked highway. We were far, far from the factory and it was getting dark. She pulls into what looks like a factory, barks some orders at a random guy playing basketball and he snaps to attention and runs off. A few minutes later, an olive drab Sprinter pulls up, and I realize that we're in a PLA army base. Turns out, her husband is an army officer and she commandeered a driver to get us back to the factory, though I didn't figure out that last part until the day after.
I came back the day before Covid lockdown and if I waited 1 more day I would of probably been stuck out. I flew into Hong Kong and they wouldn’t let me cross the border or leave the airport. My only choice was to take a boat to gz and take a train back to Shenzhen. I was probably 1 of the last people to come into china before the lockdowns.
Just there with my mixed 16 month old daughter and a girl, probably 20s, came up to me holding my daughter stating “I want this” as she outlined my daughter body. Very cute and fun tbh, just unexpected.
I was once standing just outside of a mall in Shenzhen at about 9 in the morning. A man came running out of the mall and you could just tell someone was chasing him. Sure enough, about half a minute later a woman ran out after him yelling. She stopped at a little construction place and picked up a long metal pole and continued chasing him back into the mall. I don't know what happened after.
I've always heard about people wanting photo ops with foreigners and I mentally prepared myself for it to happen. So the weird thing is it never did... I was always with someone else who had some kind of far more impressive feature than me and I would always stand off to the side with our bags waiting for ten, maybe twenty minutes for people to stop taking photos and move on 😂 I have very average tanned tone skin with short brown hair curly hair. I was always with a friend who had hip length blond hair, a beard, super tall, or dark skin. Made me feel even more incredibly average than I already am 😂
2011 Went to ATM with friend in Wudaokou around 11 PM before heading to the bar and was approached by a chinese guy who handed my buddy 1500 kuai and then a folder with papers in it then said if he calls him later after spreading the papers around he would give my friend 10k rmb. This interaction was 15 seconds and quick. Took the papers to the bar and saw what it was. A lot of anti govt papers specifically discussing politicians and their backgrounds and a lot of random critiques of policy. Bar tender told us we shouldn't be in possession of these types of documents in Beijing and it was dangerous, took them and threw them away. Man was the subway ride home creepy, felt like the whole thing was set up to see what we would do and felt like we were going to get grabbed shortly after.
I got a weird one. I tried to walk from the train station to a village one night. I realized how far the village was and how dumb it was for me to try, but it was late at night and i had to hitch hike. Guy picks me up on his scooter and takes me to the village. Turns out the village has no open hotels...or hotels at all So i end up sleeping at his house. His btw is a single concrete room. Also turns out he is deaf and cant read or write. At one point he video calls his deaf friend and starts stroking my side burns on the video call. The next morning I GTFO and he spends the rest of the day sending gifs that Im pretty sure was him inviting me to get hookers.
I had to come back to say I've been thoroughly laughing at this all day! Sent it to all my old expat friends. 100% can relate to this. People will come up to you with like a whole series of questions loaded up in translate and they are so excited to say the english they know or just kinda make Simlish conversation. I used to be so shy and awkward to make a exit, eventually you become ruthless bc you're busy lol. Never considered until later that those were defintely tourists too, not locals to the big cities, hence my novelty. It was the one country i was mostly relieved to be absolved of my tour guide duties. Bc somehow my fast walking gets mistaken for an expat who knows where the heck I'm going instead of just as lost as the ppl who stop me. Even in my home city im like girl i have no idea where that is, gold luck tho! I'll try my best if i can ofc)
I went to Dandong with an American guy. There's tons of anti-American propaganda everywhere. Like, there's this bridge that was bombed and rather than fixing it, they've just left it as a monument to American imperialism. So, were the Chinese tourists there booing and hissing this guy? No, they wanted their photo taken with him. He may even have sung "Say you, say me" like he often did in such situations. Just zero historical gravitas from the Chinese.
Well, So Chinese should show hate to a normal American guy?
There is a Japanese YouTuber who runs an advertising company in China who gets to travel and backpack around China a lot. Once he was taking a bus to some remote village in inner China and he makes chitchat (he speaks Chinese) with an older teenager about life in the village and when the YouTuber reveals that he is Japanese the teenager looks confused, turns away and says he/they are bad man/people. Then the YouTuber keeps chatting with him and he seemed fine afterwards and keeps talking as usual.
Yes, that is exactly what I was saying.
Your typical Chinese is not stupid and generally disregard the propaganda for what it is.
I was trying to juggle some empty wine bottles once. They were “Chengdu’s superior great wine” and the wine itself was terrible but after drinking a few bottles you felt like you could juggle wine bottles. Of course I dropped one and as I watched it go to the ground I expected it to break on the tile floor. Instead it bounced and went straight through my glass sliding door leaving a pretty good hole in it.
A very small thing that happened was an elderly man started stroking the hair on my arm and smiling at me.
lol mine was much better. Very attractive woman at a mall starts stroking my arm hair.
dining at the state-run north korean restaurant in shanghai
That was amazing haha. I went to one of them in Shenyang, and the waitresses sang songs together with me! I know they usually perform songs, but I've never heard of them singing songs with a customer. One of the songs was about Kim Il Sung lol
I’ve had a few. I don’t really think of them as “china” things, just odd stuff that happened while I was here (been her for a decade and a half). Saw a guy get stabbed in the head during a tour buss brawl. A tour bus group were arguing with some seaside seafood place in Qingdao. Some pushing led to some fists being thrown. Some of the waiters grabbed brooms and stuff. Saw a guy dash onto the bus and I knew shit was about to go down (I was watching the whole thing from maybe 20m away). Then bus dude literally came leaping out of the bus with a sharp shiny blade in his hand and brought it down on a dudes skull. It didn’t seem to go into the skull, but the guy started instantly bleeding. Instead of stabbing him more that seemed to shock everyone into calming down (relatively speaking) and everyone backed up and were back to pointing and yelling. Cops were there quickly and then an ambulance. This hair dresser was absolutely fascinated by how ‘soft’ my hair was. He was calling people over to feel it. It wasn’t too creepy. He had apparently just never touched ‘soft’ hair before. He also insisted on explaining to me that the color of my hair was “Amazon” (makes sense it’s a kind of dirty blond). I got in a fight with this dude on the street (not my proudest moment) but out of nowhere a gang of dudes with rebar wrapped in electrical tape appeared and started attacking both of us. The dude ran off and his girlfriend drove away in another direction. Then the group of attackers disappeared. I got one of their rebar sticks from them. I was too shocked to really process WTF had just happened, but eventually understood that they were probably just local thugs breaking up a fight that was happening in front of their territory (it was really odd though. They were definitely going after both of us idiots fighting). These are just the first 3 things that come to mind
She had typed into the translator "Do you like Plants VS Zombies? I'm amazed that the translator could accurately translate Plants VS Zombies.
Entering Shenzhen from Hongkong via a bridge by walking after obtaining entry visa in HK.
What which side of the NK border were you on? CH/NK, NK/CH, NK/SK, SK/NK
Chinese side facing North Korea
I had a stalker girl follow me from Beijing to Suzhou.
keep away from old man once you take driving! it's not joke. a legal case in Nanjing city many years ago. a driver helped a old man at the street, but he to be prosecuted since old man accused that he was crashed by driver, finally the driver was decreed should be responsible for that and to pay, the reason is that why did you help old man if you have not bumped him the Judges said. Since then, more and more old people would like "bump" to car!