I vaguely remember a trip to Hong Kong… visiting from mainland China.

Like I remember the double decker bus… the 輕鐵, 纜車…

I remember a Hotel Room and it need some keycard thing to unlock the door and you need the keycard placed in the… idk what you call it… like a slot you leave the keycard in order for the electricity to work, I guess they want to save electricity, since you need to the keycard to get back in. I remember a bunch of relatives being there but its all a blur.

Idk when the trip happened honestly, but saw some photos in a photo album and the date printed is something like 2005 (I think?, I kinda doubt my memories of looking at the photos), and I was born in 2002, so my earliest memories is about 3 years old I guess…

I vaguely remember kindergarden, remember having naps there…

1st 2nd grade slightly more to remember… but its still blurry.

Remember one time going to McDonalds…

Sometimes visiting parents villages

Some memories at the store/supermarket

The mall area

Exploring the mountains with dad

Honestly every memory before arriving in the US is all a blur, its like a past life.

Well I have a traumatic memory at around age 6 when I was in China… I commented that a lot here you can search through post history, but basically my older brother chased me around the apartment so I ran out the apartment and out the building… idk what exactly I was thinking at the time but probably something like home scary so I ended up going to my mom’s workplace only to find here not there, when I got home, there was a bunch of cops looking for me since I was reported missing.

…

Anyways my most vibrant memories are of NYC, its merely like 3-4 years and those were my happiest and most interesting memories.

I felt like my life really began in NYC at 8 years old…

Perhaps that traumatic incident made it hard to remember China

Edit: I still remember the layout of the apartment I used to live in…

Hasan Piker is that you?

Moving on from Dogs to Children huh?

“It was a dark and story night… and I don’t wanna go on anymore”

-Last journal entry

But since you mentioned nationality, this reminds me:

Every time there is snowing, it reminds of the the happiness and novelty I felt when I first arrived in the US and saw snow in NYC. I was from southern China and never saw snow before.

My brain now correlated “Snow” = “NYC 2010”

So snow sometimes can bring happiness… but its more like nostalgia then I miss childhood and get depressed I can’t be a child anymore… just not have any expectations of you.

Bruh I don’t have ads on my phone either.

Fennec + uBlock Origin

Yes, 3x3 and 4x4… I think I grew old of it and never tried 5x5… maybe I should try it again and do up to like 7x7 or something lol

I think… not sure… but I think I had those in China too, but I never had internet to look it up so it was never solved… so it just existed in a perpetual state of chaos… just like my life 🙃

I think I had at least 2 more 3x3 cubes in NYC… but either that’s before I got internet or somehow I never thought of looking it up.

I remember this one time… was either birthday or christmas or some sort of holiday… my mom got me a 3x3 cube… and like I think I asked for it some time ago… that was the only special “gift moment” that I thought was most memorable… cuz I rarely get what I ask for lol, I remember being in some store asking for legos or something… cuz I think I saw classmates have it, and I asked mom to get those, and nope rejected cuz “these are boring and expensive”, I remember asking for Battleships so I could play with my older brother and she got the cheaper knockoff version 🙃

I mean my classmates have fucking Nintendo DSes but I get born to a poor family :( so yea I had low self esteem from feeling ashames of being poor and coupled with the lack of confidence in English and the anxiety of "not feelint like I belong, I didn’t have much friends…

I remember when I got that 3x3 (not my first one btw, I got like probably 2 or more 3x3s before) I was at that greyhound-like bus stop waiting for the bus to go back to Philly after vising NYC for some reason? (Visiting relative maybe? Forgot lol) So mom was like “hey guess what I got you” and pulls out the 3x3 cube in the original packaging… I think I felt hapoy in that moment. I tried to use her phone to look it up but the data was so shit it keeps taking forever to load and never loaded I think I tried looking up non-video instruxtions so it loads faster but I think it was too confusing to follow, and so I think I had to wait till I get home to look up the youtube video (memory’s all a blur forgot how exactly it went down)… I think at one time I got so frustrated I took it apart to reassemble it xD.

Then later I got the 4x4 and solved that too.

I remember bringing it to school and then someone else (who’s so Chinese American) also brought their cube… I think it was in middle school like 8th grade or something… I played with it during class and teacher casually walks up and like “lemme have that” and confiscated both of our cubes for the duration of class lol. Math class btw… very fitting to be playing with rubick’s cubes…

What?

Never heard of this.

The first image of “masculine” I think of is Arnold Schwarzengger, who is not a “Christian Nerd”

This is why everyone hates moral philosophy professors

Oh no, my puddle of depression is gonna become a tsunami of depression.

A society of "me"s is cooked. Unable to do anything because its too scary to go outside.

Yeah, I think pretty much everyone in China is gonna have it better nowadays. No 红卫兵 to harass you, 开放改革 allows more movement. Freedom to emigrate.

People used to have to do farming, then it opened up to the world and cities have jobs.

My mom would not ever stop mentioning it. “Stop being so picky with food, when I was your age I had to help your grandma with the farming, we barely had anything to eat” 🫠 (Paraphrased from Cantonese)

She also said something like “你们已经很幸福了” … something something “要懂得珍惜/感谢我们”

Always trying to make me feel guilty.

I think when I see those “good old days” memes that westerners make, I’m always like 🤔

My parents didn’t get degrees and they managed to get an apartment in Guangzhou somehow…

Oh you know how people say 90% home ownership in China? I think those accounted for rural houses… which is kinda worthless since you can’t find jobs, so they go to cities then its the same thing, you need to rent an apartment. Most people do.

After we emigrated, my parents managed to save up money for a house in Philadelphia, PA. NYC was way too expensive so its impossible, rent was going up, so we had to move…

But the ramifications is that I get bullied a lot more often in Philly schools due to less Asians so more racism… lots of emotional damage…

“你已经很幸福了，很多人偷渡来的没身份，你能得到公民身份” is used to shut me up if I ever try to voice dissent at home

I mean I do appreciate how much better I have it, but my mental health is still horrible. Emotions just boxed up and suppressed all these years.

Can’t buy cigarettes at 18 is a US-specific thing right?

Is HK test the same as GaoKao?

Lol funny that I didn’t even have to take the SAT/ACT (US Standarized Tests) to get accepted to a state college because of COVID changed the requirements.

But then I have depression and had to withdraw 🙃

Now I have self esteen issues.

If I was still in mainland, I would’ve felt even worse because you know how much education is valued. The competition is so much worse, labor protection is horrible. 1.4 billion people, ugh cant even breathe in that air (literally and figuratively).

I feel like the US is more like relaxed when it comes to stuff like college, I think I can re-enroll later once I get my depression fixed. I think in China, they just don’t ever let you do college again once you’re past the normal age for college. Also mental health is sooo stigmitized…

Anyways, the pizza thing… is that like very special?

Cuz from my perspective, that’s just an average dinner here in the US lolol.

I mean I guess if things are uncommon, it becomes special.

I have faint memories of being in McDonalds in Guangzhou… I think those always felt special… I mean I guess its cuz its foreign and its full of 味精… felt like a past life ngl, was so long ago.

When I first arrive in the US, I went to McDonalds a lot, its like a treat basically, now those stuff taste so bad (inflation maybe? lower quality stuff?), I just go to Chinese restaurant sometimes instead lol

Every time I see your comment, I just wonder like “what would my life have been life if I never emigrated” like the “alternate timeline” type of thing… yea I overthinkg life too much sometimes.

You know, I never technically even graduated highschool, I had fight school where a 鬼佬 kid instigated a fight and I got in trouble when I was 17, so I ended up hating school. So in the US, there are theses things called the “GED” where like you can just take these tests in Math Reading Writing Science and get school done with. My GED test scores are better then my GPA in school (Grade Point Average)

School in Philly suck so much… so much 種族歧視.

My mom had to move us away from NYC. NYC was so memorable. Literally like 1/4 to 1/2 of the class is Asian, a lot of Cantonese speakers, a few occasional Mandarin speakers too, so I felt more comfortable there… I mean bullying still exists, but at least I never was in a situation where I felt like was the only Asian kid in the room.

Democracy is bad. Y’all should just let me take charge, surely I could do better than y’all fools making silly decisions.

Lmao I think lemmy.world bans anyone admitting to be under 18 so if admins see this, you’d be banned for a day lol

But anyways, when I was 18… I was kinda in an existential crisis so I kindabinged watched The Good Place… don’t remember doing any thing special…

Don’t think I got a birthday cake… I mean I didnt even ask for one, cakes arent even that good once you get older and like sweet things are kinda overwhelming for taste buds sort of

I think I might have went to a Chinese restaurant and had dim sum or something. Or maybe like ordered food… forgot what I did… but these things like ordering food are common enough that it didn’t exactly feel special (first world problems?) (I think restaurants were kinds closed during covid, so I think we just ordered food, don’t think I got a cake since I didn’t really care)

Like ever since I got to like… idk 10 or something… I don’t remember birthdays becoming that important… it’s mostly just like:

mom: “hey, what do you want for your birthday? want a cake?” like just so casual…

then mom be like, “oh btw did you know I had to go through a C-Section to give birth to you, do you feel grateful that I sacrificed so much for you? 🤗” “Also I had to pay a lot of fines for giving birth to you against one child policy”

Oh yeah, elections…

I wasn’t old enough for primaries but I was old enough for the 2020 US presidential election and good thing my mom got citizenship so I didn’t have to go through that myself so I was already citizen… cuz the naturalization would’ve taken so long that I’d miss the chance to vote in 2020, so yea good thing I didn’t have to spend so much time go through naturalizarion. I voted Biden obviously, dickhead trump literally wants to deport me lol

Had 4 years of relief then this shit happened again FFS 🤦‍♂️

Do not trust your admins or moderators

(politicians and cops)

Weird timeline…

I mean I wonder how humanity even survived coldwar…

Heard of Vasily Arkhipov? Stannislav Petrov? What if they weren’t there. Someone else was in control?

We’s be dead.

How the fuck does humanity even exist. Like dozens of “close calls” jesus christ.

My theory is there are 100s of timelines where humanity nuked itself. 100s of timelines where I was never born, or got kidnapped during that “running away” incident, or got murdered by my brother during a fight, or died of suicide.

Sometimes… I wonder if there’s a “plan” for me… if “god” exists… maybe the universe doesn’t let me die.

Like some pre-destination thing. Like how in time travel shows, someone tries to commit suicide but it fails because they are alive in the future so its impossible to die in the past. Like Steins;Gate with Okabe. Or like Final Destination where deaths have to happem in order…

it’s “not my time to die” yet… so death doesn’t let me die till its time.

Just a theory… 🤷‍♂️

Oh jeez… heads up: a lot of racism and very vile unhinged shit being described: (seriously, it’s gonna make your blood boil if you read this, last warning):

So my older brother is a racial supremacist and hates black and brown people.

And I already know what you’re thinking when you hear the term “racist”: “must be a white dude in southern rural US”

No, no no no. We are a family of immigrants. We are non-white. We’re from China.

The first time I heard about this was like sometime around 2017 to 2020. My older brother was complaining about African Migrant workers living in China… a country he no longer has citizenship status in… because he went through the US citizenship process to become a citizen of a multi-racial immigrant country…

So… to reiterate: a non-white immigrant is complaining about other races in his ancestral country that he has no citizenship in… let that sink in…

Literally “White Replacement” Conspiracy Theory, but replace the term “White” with “Han Chinese”.

He complains about ethnic minorities in China “getting special privilages” (aka: “affirmative action”) 🧐

So he dislikes CCP, not because of human rights violations against minorities… no no no, not that, but because CCP is “doing too much to help minorities” (in his view at least, whether or not the CCP actually help minorities in reality is a whole another thing)

He believes there’s a secret plan by the CCP to replace China with African Migrants because of the population crisis… so he thinks the government just wanna fill up the loss of population with random foreigners…

And he calls black people “cockroaches” that “keep spreading too much” by “having too many kids”

But guess what: HE FUCKING COMPLAINS ABOUT TRUMP BEING RACIST AGAINST ASIANS 🤦‍♂️ fucking irony lmfao (he’s a registered Democrat… I’m pretty sure… supports progressive polities when it comes to wealth, but opposes progressive social policies… so… a social conservative but fiscal liberal??? (is that even a term?)

Dude is so fucking lost into conspiracies, they make my parents look like saints. My parents used to be very prejudiced, but eventually come to be more accepting of multi-culturalism and the idea of living in diversity after spending so much time in the US. And now my mom has to be the one to shut down my brother’s bullshit rhetoric he spews in the livingroom.

Oh, also kinda anti-vax about the Covid vaccine, but somehow okay with a tetnaus shot when he stepped on a nail.

And this is this is also the brother that abused me as a child… constantly fighting me… then want to play with me when bored and has no friends to talk to… then wanna fight me and discard me after he uses me.

Seriously idk why he even became a US Citizen…

The only reason he didn’t vote for trump (or so he says, it’s not like I know what he marked in his ballot) is because he isn’t white, had he been born into a white family, he’d totally vote trump.

I’m so glad, I didn’t end up being brainwashed by those insane beliefs, jesus fucking christ.

No idea where the fuck he got that shit from… so fucking vile…

But then again, he was abusing me when I was around 5 or 6… he used zipties to restrain me when he deemed me “annoying”, played with fire at home, maybe his psycopathy is a gene, maybe a gene that luckily I didn’t get? Random mutation?

Idk… my parents aren’t even this vile in their worst moments, must be a random mutation. Or maybe its environment. Or maybe the internet’s fault.

Honestly with all these Drone = CCP rhetoric in the news… I’m kinda scared to fly drones nowadays especially under this admin since… well I’m ethnic Chinese and I was born in China so I have this paranoid of being falsely accused of being a “CCP Spy” or some bullshit like that… idk if I’d feel safe flying drones anymore… not since january 2025 … not in the forseeable future…

so um… pls white dudes that were born here… use your privilage to your advantage, I’m counting on y’all

You know… be the SovCit that we need in these trying times… law is just a piece of paper… let y’all drones fly free

based

I thought about the tree thing alot.

I mean coffins seem so lame… tree is new life, its kinda beautiful in a way that is hard ti explain

China too.