My mom is over 6 feet tall, very broad-shouldered and just sort of big all over, and STILL has so many food/appearance issues for failing at being dainty and feminine, and she’s 65.

Yep, I used to see it all the time growing up in Michigan, and I knew exactly what it meant. We were a Union state, FFS.

I was employed directly by my school. I found a job through a recruitment agency called Network ESL (there are many recruitment agencies in China, with verying degrees of honesty, so you do have to be a bit careful.)

Oh god, first the thigh gap, now this?

I taught ESL for 2 years at a college in China. I made the equivalent of 1,100 USD a month (though sometimes I would double that with private tutoring gigs), but had a free (crummy) apartment on campus and basically no expenses. I was not just out of college, either— I was over 30 and between jobs in the US and…

Haha, good point!

We gave our DJ a flash drive full of music, and said “set up your equipment, play this music, take some requests, keep it simple.” He supplemented his own music (lots of hard-core rap, weird since he was a while guy from NH), ignored requests, and then pulled this.

Yep, totally random!

I don’t know, this is way less awkward than when our wedding DJ (who was already doing a terrible job and not playing our playlist) stopped the dancing, and made me sit in the middle of tha dance floor to seranade me to “Sitting by the dock of the Bay”. He was an extremely obese guy who moved awkwardly and also…

Yep, this was how I learned to cook when I lived in Southern China. Stuff was rarely strictly vegetarian (to the dismay of some of my Western colleagues), but meat was mostly used for flavor, or maybe 1 or 2 main dishes in a huge multi-dish family style meal.

Yes, that’s absolutely true. I guess what I was trying to articulate is that I think Kara is saying oversharing is somehow related to nosiness, and I think in general, oversharing helps destigmatize more than it hurts anyone. As another commenter pointed out, there’s a difference between offering up information and…

That's true. But the article seems to conflate over sharing with nosiness.

I agree, though sometimes “now is not the time/place” can just be a derailing tactic. I think it’s more nuanced than Kara’s piece makes it out to be.

Yeah, I think it’s not clear cut at all. But I really don’t mind the culture of over-sharing. I think it ultimately helps to destigmatize a lot of things.

That's a really good point. I think more openness will eventually lead to this kind of stigma easing, but this is definitely a situation where people need to let it go.

But being open about some things is really helpful. The sort of “tact” that keeps us from asking how much money people make keeps those who make less oppressed, since they are often in the dark about how much they should be making.

China doesn’t have universal healthcare, though. When people were employed by the state, people received healthcare through their work unit (called a danwei). Now fewer and fewer people are employed by the state, and must buy insurance for themselves. It's actually a huge mess.

Classic LL Bean backpack FTW. My last one visited over 10 counties, and held up for 10 years.

Also, you might not be surprised that while we were dating his favorite rant was about how much hot women ignored NICE GUYS and LOVED ASSHOLES.

I know, right?