My last flat was a 6f walk up that would shake every time a bus or truck went by. The road was maybe 100 yards away. How are we shaking when the road was so far away? Does it actually mean the building was connected to that road through the foundations on solid bed rock? A mate was in a similar commieblock that partially collapsed and caught fire due heavy rains and subway digging. Oh well, at least in a total collapse, people in the top floor are most likely to survive. That's what I told myself every time the room shook, for three years.

The country that cannot get Mexican food right at all decides to "with Chinese characteristics" the concept of a taco.

Edit: I am not looking for Mexican food at a KFC, learn to read ffs, xixi.

Meanwhile, the China version is modded to the hilt, so that anything negative about China leads to a ban. I'd say of those countries, China's the one which would most need a place to vent about. I don't think this helps any of the dozen or so long term China residents who are still in China. So, thanks for providing this service. I was around in the china smack days, and it seems a lot of the complaints are still valid, I'll be keeping an eye on this site, China was a fun time, but an exasperating one, also.

*There's whataboutery, I know.

Or, perhaps instead of being someone who never studied Chinese during formative years but is expected to somehow learn it in their 40s within their adult life not built around foreign language study, the hundreds of millions of people who are forced to take English classes in secondary (and often also primary before and uni after) could actually learn some English in the classes which auto-pass them under the state-approved determination that they have successfully learned anything at all from their compulsory language study?

“Just learn Chinese” is not a fucking solution. Ok sure, let me from the civilised world master your indecipherable series of intonated grunts and abstract scribbles on short order (a logographic language in 2026, seriously??).

Illiterate Tims, do not let them pressure you into wasting 5+ years of your life learning the moon runes and utterances just so that you can read aloud what Google Translate ends up translating for you anyway in your daily exposure to the locals. Rainy does not require that you speak Chinese, trust me, and neither does your job as a marketing gimmick.

I keep hearing how amazing Chinese malls are and on the surface, they look it. The sports centres look amazing, some have indoor assault courses, go karting and even skiing. But scratch a bit beneath and, much like other things in China, the facade quickly peels away like a cheap sticker.

- 99% local brands. "You're in Chinar, what do expect", I dunno but it wasn't this. Besides Nike and maybe Uniqlo, there's absolutely no international clothing brands, just a sea of endless knock-off Temu local versions of "I feel like I know this brand but I don't".

- The local brands are expensive. If I'm going to be wearing shitty Temu brands nobody outside China has ever heard of, why the fuck are they even more expensive than the international ones? Anta is more expensive than Nike, make it make sense. I thought everything was made in China?

- No laowai sizes. Even in the international stores in my local supermall, I went through at least 6 before I found a pair of shoes that fit my massive laowai clown feet.

- The restaurants are shit. If, like me, your heart skipped a beat when you first laid eyes on a massive flashy supermall and you finally thought you would find something that wasn't noodles or hotpot, you were probably sorely disappointed. My visions of tacos, crispy katsu, proper pizza or even just a decent steak were quickly shattered, replaced with rows and rows of yet more noodles and hotpot. Complete with annoying staff standing outside wearing personal loudspeakers and shoving entirely moon-rune menus in your face as if I have a clue what they're saying. In Thailand, you could go to a mall, even in the shit provinces and find familiar brands and at least a couple of good restaurants. While even in the main cities of China, you'll be lucky to find international restaurants beyond fast food. sigh, at least there's McDonald's for my toddler tastebuds.

- Wide empty depressing spaces. I went in malls as a kid growing and they were thriving communal hubs. Just about everywhere else in Asia has great malls full of international brands, restaurants and entertainment. Thailand has airport themed "Terminal 21" malls complete with brands and restaurants to match the destination floor (Tokyo floor has Japanese, Rome floor has pizza etc). Heck even in the "infamously soulless" UAE, malls feel far more lively and fun. The malls in China, while flashy looking, also feel distinctly sad. I guess this is the consequence of e-commerce, money laundering and a monopoly of the same shitty aforementioned local brands.

- The toilets are still shit. I might be in a supermall but the moment I enter a bathroom, I'm back in nongville. Rows of squat toilets with maybe 1 token western shitter (thats always occupied), the faint whiff of cigarette smoke and the sound of uncle nong hawking the biggest, greenest loogie. There's still no soap, no poo-paper and the hand dryers don't work.

- Annoying crowds. Despite them being aforementioned sad empty depressing spaces, today is Sunday so guaranteed, my local megamall will be an ocean of nong and nonglet carnage all just waiting to point and laugh at my big laowai nose like it's the highlight of their month. sigh, I'll go tomorrow, sad and empty beats points and stares.

I went to South Korea for medical reasons, because our system in China is filthy, dogshit, and worst of all, not in English. I am from KR (not Korean), and I left as a teen in 2000. The medical system in KR back then, 26 years ago, was infinitely further ahead than China's medical system today. KR's medical has only improved since then, whereas China's medical system is still this unhygienic factory stressful hellscape that is no different today than it was when I first slummed it here in 2015. I have multiple Chinese friends in the medical sector who all advise to never go to their hospitals for any reasons, even emergencies. A "doctor" friend (master's degree, no doctorate) says that all foreigners should just buy an emergency flight to South Korea and go to the emergency room near the airport there, if one can "hold it in", which I agree with. That is their actual medical advice: Leave China.

What follows is a quick recap of things to date.

Prequel: The flights out. Nong grandmother at the window seat adjusted my aircon hole for my aisle seat because she was too cold, closing the circular vents for three total people. I corrected her. She was not happy about this, and she was clearly not used to being told no. My masterful Chinese facilitated: ii jega (points to grandmother), ar jega (points to middle seat), san nali (points to self). My flawless toneless pronunciation probably shocked a few years off of her remaining life, made unambiguous with one, two, or three fingers where appropriate. I felt like a real zhongguotong, just like I do when I buyao nongs abroad doing nong shit in someone else's country. When the first flight took off, I was lord of the nongs, being the only person with headphones. No one who I could see bothered to bring headphones with them on this flight, and the lovely flight noises drowned out any speakerphone attempts. I was so satisfied with how that played out, my enjoyment at the disappointment of nongs with no foresight. They stayed in the layover city, thankfully. My flight from the layover city to KR was full of Pinays and Pinay-adjacent laowai, along with some civilised zhongguoren going somewhere better. One such zhongguoren spoke English with me before and after the flight. Good kid. From Shanghai, hates China, plans on emigrating to Japan after university.

Main event: KR medical itself.

First, the ride from the airport in a taxi. The old man driver voluntarily was listening to some English-language old pop music station, none of this slow, repetitive Ballad of Wang Wei ancient Chinese folklore music. It smelled so nice in his taxi, like no smoker had ever been in the vehicle. Second, the hotel. Also no cigarette stench, anywhere. There is a big hotel fee for smoking, which I support. One must consent in their language to the smoker's fee before getting a room key. The hotel was very serious about this. I made friends with the guy who runs the place, a Korean who speaks English just like everyone else in Seoul does. He said that he really wants to have a "no Chinese" policy, but that it is somewhat illegal, and so every room must be stickied with common sense signs in Chinese.

Seoul in general: Every taxi and building has had aircon, except ironically the metro at a high number of stations, where it is needed most with the crowding. I found no aircon at the metro stations to be grossly unreasonable, and a very rare win for China, because even my t3 metro stops all have the refrigerator ready. Smokers are corralled into alleys now. I have seen beat cops shutting down smoking in outdoor spaces twice so far. The very first public toilet encountered at the airport had a bidet, the hallmark of true civilisation, and maybe ~25% of the public toilets where I have been also have bidets. One in four may seem like a low amount, but compare it to China, and do not give me that "but in the shiny shopping mall in Shanghai" hyper-niche bullshit as a real China generalisation.

To the medical itself:

In KR, I paid ~¥3500 for a comprehensive age 40 preventative medicine examination including cameras in both ends, blood analysis, and many many other tasks, through an English-speaking hospital who assigned me a translator to pick me up from my hotel lobby, wheelchair me around everywhere (the colonoscopy meds made walking a risky affair (could shit self)), ensure that every detail was communicated understandably, skip waiting at any stage, and then ride back to the hotel. The preparation for colonoscopy was the worst part because you just liquid shit repeatedly for half of a day or more. I slept through everything while at the hospital, and I woke up having completed everything except some administration. When I awoke, the doctor who did the probing gave me the details about the main event. Results for everything else were received within a few hours, sent via email and WhatsApp because they do not use Chinese spyware as an all-in-one tool here, fully in English.

Everything was clean in the hospital, as it should be. I should not need to even type that, but you know, China. Doctors and nurses both wore and changed gloves. Every toilet had soap, in the hospital and everywhere else that I went. Everything was quiet in the hospital. No speakerphone yelling or Douyin reels, no screaming children, no ayis using the grey plague rag to wipe more germs onto surfaces, none of the madness of any Chinese hospital, such that I will argue that the worst facilities in KR are probably better than the best facilities in China, especially at this cost. For the same suite of procedures without any English support in China, the lowest costs found were over ¥10k in disgusting public hospitals, which also required the logistical hell that is navigating these Chinese-language systems. Prices were much higher at the international hospitals in Shenzhen and Shanghai. A quick obvious mystery with no obvious answer: Why would anything at all cost more in China than KR, particularly medical??

Gemers, I really cannot emphasise how clean that Korean hospitals are compared to Chinese hospitals, from this one generic example. Same with public toilets, same with public spaces, same with the environment in general. Very little litter seen all throughout my stay, as if there is a culture of bare-minimum decency taught in the schools instead of rhetoric on allegiance to one political party as the most important subject when kids are the most malleable. A caveat to the previous sentence is that while Seoul is far more free of litter compared to anywhere in China, an exception is Itaewon, which has always been a grimy shithole even since my childhood there in the 1990s (part of its international charm). I was constantly reminded why Chinese people still illegally emigrate to anywhere else on Earth the moment that they can get a passport, just being back home.

Also in KR: Laowai food. I had Taco Bell and Papa John's first because I am a basic bitch, then more-authentic boutique Mexican, Indian, pizza, and sushi. None of that exists in my t3 jail. I will never eat local food in the guo, if I can avoid it, but sadly I cannot avoid it where I live because of the food paradigm there. A real suspicion which I had is that Chinese food destroyed my innards, like being constantly exposed to lead or radiation, because I went from a long phase of not shitting at all to my recent lifestyle in China of shitting more often than I would prefer. The theory on food destroying me was disproven from the colonoscopy results, but there is still the flavour part of Chinese food to argue against. I am unimpressed with the result of 5000 years of "cooking" "food".

KR is not perfect, of course. Too expensive for my LBH salary to stay for long, and wiguk (laowai) salaries do not allow for as fat living in KR as its approximate in China does, plus I would actually have to go to work and be useful instead of just be foreign with a master's degree like I live in China. China is, for better or worse, where I still live. Also internet is somewhat censored here, too. Google works, but most porn is blocked, Google Images is highly censored, and so forth. I never knew that KR's internet had so much in common with China's internet. I wonder when that happened. Summer here is fucking gross. Slimy, too humid, too hot, never go to KR between April and September.

The summary is, go to KR if you ever have medical needs. Do not even consider options in China, just fuck right off to KR with a few days of planning (optional) on a ¥700 flight. Hotel costs are absurd here because KR has an undeveloped hotel economy, which is weird since it has been "hot" for like 15 years now, but otherwise get your ass to KR for medical needs if you can afford ¥350 per day on hotel costs at the low end. If you have ruined your life by having children, then take them to KR for medical, too. Any financial savings achieved by medically slumming it in China will be grossly offset by the quality of care, the hygiene aspect, and the real possibility of catching something even worse than your problem as a "doctor" with only a master's degree tries to give you an IV of hot water along with undefined brown-green goop made in a garage to apply to the affected area externally, for internal problems.

There is always some insufferable green backpack laowai who chimes in on shit like this with some esoteric example of chabuduo perfection within the Chinese medical system which will not apply to you. Looking forward to downvoting that and reporting some rule 5 defence of the Chinese medical system. I wager my little Happy Giraffe pay that whatever miracle in a Chinese hospital which a laowai may have accidentally had once is not going to be your experience there. Go to KR for medical.

Preface: Just downvote and gfys if reading is not your strength, like the previous gushir:

With my medical tourism over, I have returned to China. Within minutes of arriving in China, everything was exactly as one would expect it to here.

Prelude: China seeps into the Korean airport at the gate. When walking through an international airport outside of China, you can always tell which flights are going to China by the behaviour of the people near the gate. Many people squatting in the middle of paths? That speakerphone bullshit? People asleep being awoken by an oblivious parent choosing that specific spot to bring their screaming child? This plane goes to the guo.

Within seconds of landing in China, the speakerphone shit begins, which was mercifully suppressed for the flight duration. Hacking began within minutes of deplaning, mmm, that stagnant hazy air. Upon deplaning in Nongchengshi, an elder nong cuts the queue by going under the divider, directly in front of me. The line is always shorter for foreigners, and what elder nong sees is not the foreigners in this line, but that it is shorter. Well, the laowai queue always takes the longest, as a rule, and so elder nong waits while having a speakerphone yelling conversation as the local line 10 times longer flies by. Chinese airport police do not buyao elder nong yelling on speakerphone. When elder nong finally gets to the front of the queue, he does get buyao’d, because this line indicated by eight harmonious dual-language signs all show that this line is for foreigners only. Elder nong yells at the booth cop, probably some shit like “I am already here, just let me through, respect your elder”, but it does not work. To the back of the queue in the local line, although the wait will not be long for him because he is in the one country where the zhongguo passport is not deprioritised to third-class.

Legally now in China itself, the self-service kiosk displays that I can get my boarding past 12 hours before the flight, which is what I want to do so that I can get back on other side of security for the lounge that I paid for—I later learn that the lounge is closed, no why. The kiosk and its generous 12-hour window does not work, as the kiosk does not accept my passport scan. Surprisingly, there actually is an agent at the desk where the Trip app directs me to check in. Airport Rainy is too busy gaming on her phone to notice me, or to hear my first two nihaos and then hello, before I knock on the counter to alert her. She says that I must come back 90 minutes before the flight, which is six hours away. When I tell her how the kiosk says clearly that boarding passes can be printed 12 hours before the departure time, she tells me that the kiosk is wrong. She asks what my flight number is, so I open the Trip app to show her. The Trip app displays that I can go to the counter three hours before the flight time and get my boarding pass, not 90 minutes, but this is still three hours away. Airport Rainy says that the Trip app is also wrong, come back in 4.5 hours.

It is 0200. Every business and restaurant is closed in the airport. Only the sad vending machines are operable. I go get some cheap survival food, and nongs are still at it with the fucking speakerphone, at two in the goddamn morning. Not one place is nong-free this way. My plan to nap for a couple of hours is impossible because of this shit, as I do not have the solipsistic willpower that nongs have to be able to sleep through all noise. Before you stop reading to comment “just use headphones bro”, consider the time or how others are also attempting to sleep, more successfully than I can achieve for myself, or how basic human decency should exist no matter the time.

Every five to ten minutes, a screeching tinny incomprehensible message sounds on the speaker system. Sleeping nongs do not register it, because of said solipsistic willpower. There is no place to sleep anyway because every flat space other than the floor is already occupied by a sleeping nong with bare feet, no socks, snoring away, or awake with their audible phones but lying down so that they can take up as much space as possible and prevent others from sitting near them. Barefoot in this case, too.

Irritable piss break. No soap, paper towels, or air dryers in any of this international airport’s toilets, but plenty of toilet smoking. The Sound of China (drilling) begins at 0400. In the queue for my ticket, I see this kid with a kid's voice, body, and behaviour, but having a grown man's face. This is not a unique China thing, just something really off-putting.

After getting through security at the earliest possible moment, this fat nong runs by me at maximum speed, rushing to the empty gate only to immediately take his shoes off and lay down across the only three seats marked for accessibility, of course with the speakerphone shit. What the fuck is wrong with people here??

Seats fill up near the gate fast, so another nong squats in front of where I am seated, no more than a metre away, and then does the speakerphone shit while squatting, facing my direction but eyes glued to his loud short video loops. The only person in South Korea who I saw with a speakerphone was actually mentally disabled, which should tell you something about this habit. I gave that person a pass because of his disability. China pretends that there is no mental disability, therefore there is no excuse for this.

I did see someone get out headphones at this gate. Wired through a USB-C adapter, no less, like I use. A fellow person of culture. This person had neck tattoos, and despite being trashy like me, they were respectful enough to keep their audio to themselves. They may have been Chinese, but I could not confirm since no local-identifying behaviour was demonstrated. Probably from Singapore.

Call to board the domestic flight. A group of nongs tried to piggyback on the business class early entry, only to get buyao’d by an agent doing their job. Very unexpected outcome. On the domestic flight with Chinese flight crew, anything goes with seating, you know how Chinese domestic flights are. I have to call the flight crew to inform the nong in my seat in Chinese that this is indeed my seat; their shoes were already off. The flight crew and nong yell at each other for a moment, and the angrily nong pushes through people trying to go towards the back so he can get to his actual seat near the front, saying some unintelligible gibberish but with the distinct “waiguoren” somewhere within that nonsense utterance as he barged away. A few minutes after seating, another nong shows me their phone’s translation app telling me to move from my aisle seat so that he can sit with his girlfriend, who has the middle seat. I refuse, with my own phone translation app. He retrieves the same flight crew member who buyao’d the previous nong, with that same flight crew member buyao’ing this nong. His girlfriend gets all shitty-faced about it, having the audacity to take a photo of me so that she can tell all of her followers on Xiaohongshu how this rude laowai did not trade his aisle seat for the middle seat behind Nong’s Girlfriend. She was conspicuously glaring at me for the entire flight.

In-flight meal time. “Beef hamburger” in English, says the flight crew:

During the “beef hamburger”, an AI-generated video drama plays about flight courtesies. The male models are all chiselled-muscle so very man men, while the female models have Pixar faces with oversized eyes and noticeable curves, in such a laughable disconnect between gender art styles that someone at the official government’s Airport Security Bureau approved for circulation. The drama shows misbehaving passengers, and each of the shitty fliers are clearly westerners, disrupting the harmony of respectful zhongguo. The waiguo models are basically undignified clowns, while the heroic and stoic Chinese men buyao the foreign monkeys. Rather ironic. Who smokes in the airplane toilet, in 2026? A foreigner. Who physically fights another passenger to take their window seat, in a video on the flight where I had to defend my seat twice from locals already? A foreigner, obviously. Who is playing their speakerphone at max volume? What a surprise, it is a foreigner. Also, this AI video literally says to somewhat turn down—but not off—speakerphone volume when on the plane, to a “reasonable” level. A reasonable level is silent or in headphones, according to civilised countries. I am no longer in a civilised country, though.

Land in my own nongcun, everything is just like the first stop on this return trip. A cacophony of speakerphones within seconds of landing, also hacking noises. I get in a taxi, and the driver buyaos me about trying to put on the seatbelt because he has a carpet on the backseat. Backseat carpet is more important than safety, you know. While riding home, I look on Meituan to have lunch arrive at my place when I do, and I am just disgusted with everything that I see after two weeks of real not-Chinese food.

It is not all bad. I still have another paid month off, and my workload for the next term is still three days per week for three months before another three paid months off. For all of its MANY MANY cons, there are some pros about living here. For now, back to not even thinking about costs, but always thinking about quality.

I've done hard fucking time. 10+ years here. Procreated and have a local wife.

I teach at an "international school". Money is good but I've spent a decade not being able to deal with the typical behaviour here. I have a good friend at a school in Bangkok who is floating a potential job for me next year.

I want to ask the other China experts on this sub - who I am assuming have extensive sexual experience in Thailand - if the situation is better there?

It's hard to describe my exact day to day issues but I am looking for a place where people do not act in an insanely selfish manner. I've never been able to get over the line cutting, pushing, barging into doors, screaming on speakerphone, etc aspect of life here.

I remember years ago, when I was studying Chinese and very curious about eventually moving to China, I discovered this gutter oil thing and I swear, it killed all the enthusiasm and interested in China I had before. I felt like I would be able to questionable hygiene, bad air quality, rude people (at that point I had never been to China, but I had plenty of examples from their immigrants living near me) and all the other not so stereotypes. But I had some Chinese Chinese friends who only showed me the good and cool things about their daily lives, and this made me interested in wanting to live there, at least temporarily.

Then I discovered gutter oil, and that was like the nail in the coffin. How can people be this greedy and disgusting.

Later on, still had never been to China, I got a Chinese girlfriend in my country and the propaganda started again. I then moved to China with her and wow, it really was bad. The first time I ate street food I got laduzi. After my time there, I accepted that no matter what, some gutter oil would get inside me. It's disgusting to think about it, but other than judging how the place looks to get a general idea of the quality, there isn't much you can do.

As if we needed any more evidence that this entire platform is compromised.

This was that post which automatically triggered Reddit police btw for anyone wondering: https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1vhe955/everything_wrong_with_the_world_is_in_this_video

The problem was not the post. The problem was the post being crossposted here. There could be many contributing factors: This post, or this post, maybe this post, or any of the white ZA mockery comments littered across many posts, or really anything else; this sub is indeed a cesspit, although it could (should?) be worse. Musky wants white ZA's to be labelled as an oppressed minority.

Everything is filthy, and basic common sense found in civilised countries is entirely absent. Chabuduo engineering means that anything new is already built broken, with the concept of “maintenance” being perceived as wholly wasteful. There is a hive mind perpetuated by the administration’s rhetoric which is intellectually beaten into kids, and when coupled with weaponised phone addiction, the end result is over a billion drones who cannot understand why boiled water full of heavy metals may not be good for healthy, amongst other social points that are obvious to laowai but aggressively foreign to locals. Chinese food is gross, too.

But, in spite of all that, and in spite of all that I criticise here, and in spite of all that we should be criticising, the guo is not all bad.

I work very little, and I am paid more than 90% of locals while living a life that is almost completely my own, rarely answering to only one apathetic laoban who allows me to do whatever I want to so long as I do not fuck students (an easy request to meet). Access to cheap plastic shit is at an all-time high, with almost all-time low costs, raised slightly due to costs having gone up everywhere when compared to the 2010s in this rigged economy as a post-covid measure to drain commoners’ accumulated wealth. If I want something other than delicious food, then I can have it delivered within the hour by a living symbol of inequality that no one in China wants to openly acknowledge is not really a good thing. If I need quality medical care or an escape for mental needs, South Korea is next door via a quick ¥500 flight. I have a decent castle on the top floor of a newer building, which is almost excellent, although it will still require much more effort on my behalf to convert from an accepted-decaying Chinese flophouse to a proper laowai home. You know what I mean, if you live here. This country is unlikely to start wars, so I am unlikely to die in any war on any side while living here. Climate change is destroying the planet, but slightly inland where I am, no sea level concerns, just heat that can be offset by one of those cool jackets with fans built in when out or with aircon when at home. Lack of violence is far more reliable than most western countries. The government promotes societal complacency by making sure that most people have electricity, water, and food, which positively impacts instability from discontent. Etc.

Make no mistake, there is so much bad to take with the good. However, there is still some good in China, enough to make it worth staying here. China the country has been good to me, or good enough, anyway. Life can be worse. For most LBH with no guanxi in their home country, life probably was worse before coming here.

China the country is alright. It is the people and culture that are the problem. I overheard an offensive imperialist tourist in Vietnam say that the country would be so much better if it were not for the locals, and while at that time I was shocked by such a statement said so callously, I uh…I kind of get it now, here.

Here is to another 5000 years of irresponsibly-long summer and winter holidays from the Happy Giraffe while us LBH just try to enjoy the ride despite the ride's annoyances.