Hospital Stuff

So despite what everybody likes to pretend, health care does cost money in places outside of the U.S. -- sometimes, that healthcare is even extremely fucking expensive, which is the case in China. While you may have access to socialized care, that's dependent on a number of different factors including but not limited to whether your job pays into your social insurance (until literally the last month, this was not a requirement) and if you have "hukou" or "residence" where you're receiving medical treatment.

Let's assume Wu Suowei (WSW) is a local, and therefore has hukou and social insurance -- as would his mother -- in the hospital where she's treated. Assuming that, while some of the costs would be compensated, if she's using imported medication -- read: anything developed outside of China -- there's a massive surcharge on the cost of that treatment, and her social insurance would only pay for certain parts of her stay, and at a given point, potentially run out.

Momma Wu is clearly pitched up in a private room, which would be hugely expensive. Standard she'd be sharing with most frequently five to three other patients in an either six- or four-bed configuration with curtained dividers for a modicum of privacy. (Those of you who watch a lot of kdramas or other modern cdramas know exactly what I'm talking about. Think Hospital Playlist.)

All this is to say -- I'm reasonably sure Chi Cheng (CC) paid for a lot of Momma Wu's medical care. Even if their shared company was making better money by that point, WSW would have access to the books, and also just diverting massive amounts of revenue to private use is active embezzlement. Either way, it wouldn't be a secret. Her treatment, her private hospital room, the round-the-clock additional carers she'd have needed (see below) would not have come cheap and had to come from somewhere, and I think her other son, CC, quietly paid the bills.

Final note that really differentiates the Chinese hospital experience: expectations around the type of support nurses offer is very different. While bedside nursing in the U.S. is both medical, comfort and hygiene, that's not necessarily provided in China. Most families with in-patient members end up either doing shifts at the hospital to provide hygiene and care support, or hire someone to do the same if they're not able to be on hand directly.

Given that during the time Momma Wu was ill, CC and WSW are still running around trying to get their company going, I think it's fair to assume one of two outcomes: either CC paid for her to have additional nursing support provided by a private hospital alongside the private room, or that he was taking the night and day shifts where he was able to help her stay cleaned up, wash her hair, help her to and from the bathroom, and hiring someone else to stay by her side when he couldn't be there with her.

There's a lot of grief and devotion in this. When my grandfather was in his final days, his children slept in rotation with a hired carer in a cot by his bedside, making sure he didn't get pressure sores, bathing him, trying to coax him to eat. And I think it makes the tenderness CC clearly feels toward Momma Wu even more acute when you look at it through this lens, and gives additional weight to that wreath he left at her services -- in every way that really means something, he was her son: he must have brushed and braided her hair, brought her dinners, washed her feet. He must have truly, truly loved her.

Money Stuff

Guo Chengyu (GCY) explicitly references "caili" in these final episodes while cuddling up with Jiang Xiaoshuai (JXS), which are basically gifts you give to your bride as part of your marriage agreement. This wouldn't be a formalized contract or anything the way we think of a pre-nup, but it would be a pretty formalized discussion between both families. To be super clear: this is both a new and ancient practice. In the distant past, ciali would be given to compensate a family for the loss of their daughter, and it's become more generally popular to expect this in marriage negotiations in recent years as life's gotten more expensive, and as people have actually started having money to give. In total candor: does this make me uncomfortable as fuck? Hell yeah! It's absolutely more or less selling your daughters -- to my Westernized sensibilities! But I have to force myself to remember that for a very long time post WWII, China was in the agonizing throes of revolution, civil war, mass starvation, authoritarian counterintellectual movements and like 1700 other shitfucks going simultaneously. People were fucking poor. People were literally starving to death. Universities were shuttered. Professors and journalists were tortured. When I was born, my parents got ration tickets for how much milk they were allotted per month because they'd had a child, how many eggs. I'm an old millennial -- this vast poverty, the absolute lack of abundance that so many people in other parts of the world don't recognize as a privilege, it's not so far away. So yeah, Chinese people are deeply, deeply weird about money. See: WSW literally getting bribed to let CC hang out for Lunar New Year dinner.

CC getting downgraded from 30RMB cell phone top ups to 10RMB a month is HARROWING. As a reminder: like a grande latte is 27RMB in China, so homeboy was not joking about literally not being able to afford to buy or refill his lighter. It's also so completely over the top broke for him to be that this has to be some sort of weird financial domination kink like this man cannot afford to buy four bus tickets.

Random Language Stuff Oh God This Is So Long

CC calling GCY "gege" in that one episode is the most repulsive thing I've ever heard in my life. I think I actively screamed on my sofa in @waldorph's ear when he did it and just thinking about it now sends shivers down my spine. It's hard for me to explain exactly why it was the worst thing I'd ever had to hear with my human ears, other than to say it's for use when you're flirting like a brothel tart, or you're actively being cute at your boyfriend, but that CC's barely lilted dead on arrival delivery triggered some sort of brain stem lizard disgust that made me want to chew off one of my own salamander legs and flee for my life. Vile. Jail for Snake Daddy. Jail for 1,000 years. But while this has done me -- a person who wants to see them fuck -- lasting psychological damage, it also underscores my ongoing repeated point about how violently fucky calling anybody "gege" is as an adult. I just engaged in a thought exercise about referring to one of my adult cousins by [Their Name]-gege and just threw up inside my mouth. I hope GCY lights CC's car on fire. GROSS.

This one was discussed all over but still bears repeating that after being kidnapped by CC's father (ha ha, this family, amirite?), WSW nearly gives the man an aneurysm by referring to him as "lao zhangren," or the flavor of father-in-law you use when you refer to your wife's dad. A wife would use "gong gong" for her father-in-law. (And yes, for the eagle eyed folks who watch harem dramas, it is the same gong gong as you'd use for the eunuchs.)

This is something he keeps up consistently though! When WSW talks to his parents at their graveside, he consistently refers to CC as their daughter-in-law, but also by using an extremely colloquial "媳妇," technical pinyin "xifu," common putonghua pronunciation "xi-fu'er." This is the sort of thing gruff dudes who are a little rough around the edges refer to their wives as to other people. I can't think of a truly appropriate parallel pet name schema in English unfortunately. But it may be helpful to know that there's a long legacy in Chinese culture of avoiding names or words for respect. It's disrespectful to use the character from your parents' or grandparents' names in a child's name; it's disrespectful to write your mother's name in common conversation -- to avoid it, you'd adjust the character some way, drop a dash, a line, a dot. These are all really old fashioned and not well-adhered to any longer, but feed into a long-ago term called "neizhi," which translates to "inner one," which was the way men used to refer to their wives, so jealously hoarded that even to say their names or their titles was too revealing to people outside of their families. Those things most loved, most cherished, were kept most jealously. Using xifu in the modern context has a little echo of this: intrinsically possessive. WSW's not happy just to tell people about CC, he has to make sure that every single reference to CC, people know who CC is, which is WSW's person.

CC's version of this is in no way less possessive and gross, as he has his nephew call WSW "jiu ma," or "auntie." Specifically, the title you use for the wife of your mom's younger brother, because Chinese has different titles for every single fucking person you are related to, so anybody hearing this adorable kid being like WSW-jiuma! knows instantly that kid's mom's younger brother is a homotron888 and has a weakness for anime legs.

I can't remember what episode this happened in but there's one stellar "you absolute cowards" translation puss-out where the on-screen says "darn" and in the in-episode is literally "fuck your mom," so you know, A+ to everybody for that one.

The conversation at the campground where CC is asking GCY if he ate well wasn't just a convenient euphemism for sex, it's one of the more common ways people elide to fucking. So if you ever listen to people on the Chinese internet asking salaciously about how many dishes someone had last night, they're asking about rounds. So, "did you eat?" = "did you guys fuck?" and "did you guys make dishes? how many?" = "did you guys fuck? how many times?"

In the note CC has GCY bring WSW back from the jail (wtf even was this show seriously), the subtitles said "I don't hate you. I just can't let it go" or something to that effect. It's not a good translation, but I don't blame them, because it warrants an old school anime fan-translation-hit-pause-to-read-the-paragraph-here. The actual line CC writes is, "我舍不得." This concept of "she bu de," (the last three characters) is so layered and complicated and so, so tender. It means, "I can't bear it. I can't bear to see you suffer in any way." In this context, it specifically means that you ache for someone you love, that you can't endure any discomfort, unhappiness, fear to darken their day. So the note, in a very few short sentences, serves as an apology, but also an agonized confession that WSW's love has left CC a wreck. In Chinese, I can think of no more heart-felt confession of love than to say 我舍不得你, "I can't bear it, when it's you," and all that implies. Y'all I swooned when I saw that note I don't even want to talk about it.

Oh my God. Okay. I'm rolling up my sleeves on this last one I'm so sorry. SO. @biochemjess asked me to explain the exchange that GCY and CC have while WSW is sleeping for 100 days at the very end of the episode, where CGY calls CC "ye" and then refers to WSW as "zhu zhong." So before I can even explain what either of those mean, the first thing I have to explain is the concept of deference to your betters and elders. Most cultures respect their forebears, but in China we have active ancestor worship, and even during the most misogynist periods of history, the most powerful person in a given household was oftentimes the mother of the head of family, whose word was iron. So related to this, there's this conceptual idea of "服了," or "fu le," which translates sort of into "to obey," but in general context is used in the sense of, "I have no means of countering your demands or your behavior." So a lot of parents say they "fu le" their kids or "fu le" their insane friends who are doing something unstoppably goblin-ish or they're "fu le" with their own parents, because wtf are they going to do to keep them from buying insane shit off of WeChat live streams, right? SO WITH THIS CONTEXT: this conversation is GCY trying to get CC to get up and eat something, or wake up WSW and have them both eat something, and CC openly telling him to fuck right off in a way that leaves GCY "fu le" of him, like what the fuck is he even going to do with this guy? And thus, he refers to CC as his "ye," or paternal grandfather -- who, as a reminder -- is someone he'd have to defer for all o the above, and then, when CC asks if he's the grandfather, then what does that make WSW in the hierarchy? That's why GCY calls him "zhu zhong," which means ancient ancestor, someone even more of an immovable object and irresistible force in this circumstance. Was that context worth reading this entire word vomit? Only you can decide!!!!

Random Final Thoughts

I've seen some discussion about CC's father not being willing to support his son, and I have a different lens on it. One of the most important fundamental things to understand about Chinese parent-child relationships is that they are not going to model the expected rhythms of a Westernized or U.S. contextualized relationship. Your parents are not going to say they're proud of you. They're not going to tell you they love you no matter what. That's not something anybody even expects, and most Chinese kids would wonder if there was some kind of brain tumor or body snatching involved if a declaration of pride, support and tenderness burst forth from their parents -- especially our fathers -- without some extremely specific context. Like genuinely if my dad said he was proud of me I would ask if he was dying. CC's dad was never going to tell him that he supported his objectively insane lifestyle and is going to wear a rainbow flag in front of his friends and colleagues, and not even just because queerness is nowhere near as widely accepted in China as it in other places. The love of a Chinese parent in enduring, in worry, in action. CC's father has absolutely no reason to be supportive of his son being a raging snake-hoarding homosexual. His son -- based on photographs in the house -- who once upon a time seemed to have a pretty good relationship with his family, fell in with a man in college and went completely off the fucking rails. Bad enough he dated this guy for three years -- after breaking up he became a weird hermit in a fucking overheated basement with 700 snakes and slept with a revolving door of everybody in the city with a pulse while being actively fucking miserable. When he and CC have their confrontation about WSW and their relationship, of course there's a measure of, "what am I going to say to my colleagues about this?" but his questions are more complicated in nature: your little company can't sustain you; you won't be able to have children, who will care care of you when you're older? More than anything, to me, these are questions he asks because he desperately, desperately loves his son. It's the same reason that Momma Wu told CC in her some of her dying moments that she knew, she knew all along, but that she was scared for them. It's the exact same sentiment, packaged in different ways, delivered better and worse, in harsher and softer tones. If this is the life CC wants, he's going to have to prove it by being happy in it. This is the ultimate thesis of any parent-child fight in a Chinese household: your parents aren't going to be supportive because they're scared of how it might hurt you either today or in the future. The only way out is through, by being more stubborn, by proving to them that what you've chosen will make you happy. That's exactly what CC does. You'd think that if his father was so unsupportive, he'd fuck off and stop spending time with his family again the way we see at the beginning of the series, when they have a horrendous relationship and they have to pretend his mother in the hospital to get him to visit. Instead, CC brings WSW over, he introduces WSW to his nephew! As his aunt! And nobody stops him! Nobody's particularly happy about it in that moment, and everyone's awkward, but nobody's throwing anybody out of the house! CC's dad isn't supportive, neither is his mother, but they're giving him and WSW the space to prove that this fucking insane life they've chosen will actually make them happy, and that's familial love, Chinese style.

I also thought it was hilarious how we meet his mom and dad when she's talking about how once he gets a girlfriend -- CC will get his shit together and come back into the familial fold. And that's sort of exactly what happened. He got his man wife and started hanging out with his family again. Incredible.

A lot of the various manipulations that our besties and worsties get up to I think have echoes of the Chinese concept of “下台," or stepping off the stage. It's this idea that it's really hard and embarrassing to admit you're wrong, to admit that you do want something after all, and that the people around you should allow you opportunities to step off stage without having to openly admit those things because it's a kindness and we're civilized people who don't need to say things so frankly. The best example of this is that the only way the absolutely unhinged shenanigans around trying to get JXS to sleep with GCY makes sense is if WSW is basically constructing an elaborate series of excuses for JXS to bluster and say, "oh yeah! well! if you're going to claim my bestie is dirty for putting out, I'll put out, too! yeah! that's the only reason I am going to go find and fuck my boyfriend! with whom I have struggled for complicated reasons to advance in intimacy with! I'll show you!" Anyway all four of them are nuts and I love them.