Yes, I once posted that quote on Lemmy and used that to criticize the US Democrats’ Gun Policies and got downvoted lmao

Leftists don’t like guns… that’s why all the nutjobs have them. :/

Yeah, China has the Hukou bullshit. They deny kids of migrant parents from going to public school in the cities where the parents work, and cities are where you really find income, so since the kids follow the parent’s Hukou status, I was born in Guangzhou (a city), and I don’t get the city’s Hukou, I get my parent’s status from rural Taishan.

So parents had to:

1. either lets the kids be left behind in their village so they can go to school there, and to be cared for by relatives, like grandparents, meaning they rarely see their parents

or

2. pay for a privately-run school out of pocket (which is worse than public school)

also for option 2, you’d need to be able to afford to rent (there are a lot of people hoarding apartments and then profit from this btw, you see a lot of “for rent” posters everywhete) or “buy” (70 year “permission to use” or something) an apartment big enough for your kids to even live with you comfortably, cuz housing isn’t free, you have your ancestral home in your village and that’s all you got, also you probably need someone to take care of the kids like after school hours, like the kids grandparents or someone like that. Also crowded, polluted, hard to find income.

As someone born in China, I always just find it funny that ignorant westerners somehow think China is some socialist paradise, it ain’t even socialist lmao.

Far easier for their children to learn and assimilate, break down that language barrier and bridge that gap.

Lmao, their parents are gonna use their kids as free human translators… I feel bad for those kids… cuz I was one of those.

I was born in China, moved to the US.

Like literally every customer service call, every form they fill, every letter, even going to insurance company, or car dealership, or buying a house, or like filing taxes, I had to translate everything. Omg it hurts my brain so much, drained my energy. Like literally, just chillin’ and like, there’s a letter and my mom wants me to translate… 💀 I sometimes lack the advanced vocabulary in Chinese to even explain what it means lmao

But… it is what it is lol 🤷‍♂️

Plus immigrant friendly, I guess.

I mean, this is exactly why I kinda side-eye Lemmings when they are like “why did you choose to move to 'such a shithole’¹ like the US, isn’t China much better”, (¹their words btw, not mine) like… (first of all, I didn’t even choose, my parent did) lol I’d go to Norway if they took us, but no they don’t lmao, the US was our only option for emigration… it was either this or stay in mainland China with all that pollution stuff and Hukou bullshit and crowded, and hard to find income.

Multilingualism. Cantonese, Mandarin, English. Although I rarely really watch media in those other languages, but still feels special to have them. Like for bragging rights xD

Literacy in English and Chinese (sort of, idk the higher level vocabulary). Just having literacy in general, 100 years ago most people can’t read.

And ease of access of information in this era, and also in my region. No firewall* like they did have in my now-former country

(*for now at least)

In China, I don’t think there is even a “fuck you”, the default curseword is always “fuck your mother”

China will probably have the solar system in a generation

OMG I just had a thought.

Remember what happened when Great Britain expanded and colonized stuff? 13 colonies?Independence?

OMG wouldn’t it be cool if China did that to like Mars, then the Martian colonists be like, “no fuck you CCP”, then:

Declaration of Independence

United Provinces of Mars

Constitution (hopefully a smarter constitution)

Martian Revolution

Becomes a Solar Superpower

Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the solar system.

Time is a circle lmao.

Literally just The Expanse timeline, but without blue goo and Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the UN. LOL

FOR MARS!

火星联合众国

There’s a huge difference between being ashamed of your Government’s actions

That’s not really “shame”, not really the right word for it, shame is something you feel about yourself, this is more like resentment.

Best you can do is to focus on your own life.

Lol that’s why my parents say to me. That trying to change anything in politics is pointless, futile, that, in a hypothetical revolution, I’ll never get to live to see such a hypothetical victory…

I mean I kinda get it, my parents don’t want their kids to die in some war…

I don’t think public education is meant to make people informed, one of it’s goals is mass indoctrination. It’s the same in almost every country. I’m fortunate to be one of the people that recognize that. Me being in two spheres of influence make it so easy to identify what propaganda looks like, I seen it on both sides, two different countries, how media, like tv shows, portrays things.

They want obedient people to keep the cogs of the machine running. They want nationalism and absolute obedience to the state, the government.

In the US, at least, there are a lot of reliable sources on internet, and also public libraries… but of course, poor people don’t have time to educate themselves, just as its designed. The lower class, different countries, similar story.

guilty over getting out of the US

Please don’t feel guilty for leaving somewhere you don’t like. That is your right. Stay safe, friend.

Ok, a majority of voters

Plurality of voters, didn’t get more than 50% of all votes

When’s the last time you were in China? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I’ve never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days.

Around 2010. Guangzhou.

The actual city part doesn’t look too bad, but I lives in a slum neighborhood of Guangzhou that most tourists don’t really see. It was very dirty and you go through narrow alleyways. Like, according to Baidu Maps, its a 10 minutes walk from the main street, in my memory, it always felt like a 20-30 minute walk for some reasons, it felt so distant, the walk was always boring af. It’s as if through through that short walk, you time travel back in time 20-50 years. The school I went to was the worst school I ever went to. Even worst than the shittist American school I went to with a rating of like 4/10 looked better.

Although, it could’ve be my Hukou issue. The school I went to was not a public school, it was one for children of migrant parents that parents have to pay for. Kids without Guangzhou Hukou were not allowed Guangzhou’s public schools.

So far, the worst places I’ve stayed at was the small apartment in Guangzhou, and the ancestral homes in parents villages in Taishan.

I mean, China looks so great? Sure, only if you are privilaged enough to live in the good parts, which my family wasn’t able to. In China, most people have homes in their villages, but if they wanma find work, they’d have to go to cities, and then they’d have to rent some shitty apartment. Landlords are still a thing, but they don’t call them 地主 (di4 zhu3), but instead 房东 (fang2 dong1), people “buy” (not really “buy”, more like 70 years permission to use, but you get what I’m saying) housing, then lease it, kinda profits off it.

In Guangzhou, we were second-class residents.

China isn’t really one united country when you really think about it. It’s a bunch of different countries with different internal passports in a trench coat. Y’all can leave your red state shitholes and go to a blue city, in a blue state, and you are treated as any other resident.

In China, my ancestors are from Taishan, so I’m always a 台山人 Taishanese due to Hukou, even though I was born in Guangzhou and speak both Cantonese and Mandarin.

I mean, a person from the western world is not gonna view this the same as someone from a non-western less-developed country.

Like, I know people shit on the US a lot, and perhaps it might be “the worst” in the Western World. But compared to globally, it’s far from “the worst”.

Like, if you gave a North Korean PRC Citizenship (which does not really happen btw, just a hypothetical), then the Now-Former North Korean would probably be proud to be a Chinese Citizen rather than being in North Korea.

Because it’s relatively better by comparison.

So its the same with me. Sure, I know there are far better countries like Norway, but I mean like… Norway does not take many immigrants, and the best place I could be, given my circumstances, is the US. So, it’s less about “I’m proud of my government” or “I’m proud of the history of this country”, more like “I’m glad I’m here instead of [their ancestral country]”. And as to getting questioned, its the fear of getting “othered”, of getting rejected. So its natural to immediately declare their US Citizenship status as a defense.

I mean, I think nowadays, that’s even more so the case.

Like I didn’t really worry about this before. But especially nowadays, if someone, especially someone claiming to be a cop, is trying to talk to me, the first thing I’ll do is immediately declare my Citizenship status and then assert my rights immediately after.

I still have memories of China, and I do not like being there. Not every Chinese American is gonna feel the same way as I do, but, at least in my case, our life in China prior to emigrating was very poor, and it got better in the US. So there’s that.

Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec

I open a tab, read half of it.

“I’ll finish it later”

opens another tab

repeat forever…

Lol, it takes like just 1-2 generation for the language to be lost. I know alot of US-Born ethnic Chinese that speak very broken and heavily-accented Cantonese, zero Mandarin. These are the 2nd-gens, they still speak their ancestral language at home, but I bet by the 3rd generation, they are not gonna be able to speak it since the 2nd-gen’s primary language is already English so they’ll just be using that at home, since that is the path of least resistance.

Idk if I’ll ever have kids, but if I do, I’ll try to pass on the language, but I highly doubt that kids growing up here would care to learn…

Oh well… 🤷‍♂️ you can only preserve it for so long.

I grew up with it as an immigrant to the US. I arrived in Brooklyn, NY at 8 years old and started public school there. I’m basically a native speaker of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, no translator tools necessary lmfao. English is actually my primary language, I’m a US Citizen now.

As for Cantonese and Mandarin, I can express my self using basic 2nd-grade level words + some vocabulary I learned while looking up the online dictionaries for some terms. I can recognize most of the basic characters. But if I read a text from someone that has more education than I did, and they use higher level vocab or like colloquel terms, then I’d actually be stuggling to reading Chinese and might have to read very very slowly or have to use Google translate to verify I understand it correctly.

In any case, English seems to rule the internet, a modern lingua franca

Oh yea. I can’t imagine the alternate timeline where I was stuck in Mainland China and, not only firewall issues, but also the massive language barrier on top of that.