When I picked up my daughter from school yesterday, she was in a bad mood. Her history homework had been marked as failing. I asked whether she had too many wrong answers. No, she said—she had too few.
Her history teacher, it turned out, was worried about students copying answers, so the rule was simple: any assignment with no mistakes automatically failed. My daughter had tried to avoid that trap by deliberately choosing one wrong answer. She ended up with exactly one mistake, and that was enough to fail. Meanwhile, students who got three or four wrong were given “excellent” marks.
At the supermarket, I remembered we were out of ham sausage—the kind I add to fried rice now and then. A 750g pack of Shuanghui Wangzhongwang was 28 yuan. I quietly walked away.
Pork was only around ten-odd yuan a jin. This sausage, which is mostly starch, costs more than pork. Who do you even complain to about that?
In the afternoon I went to the community office to submit the annual review materials for the one-child reward fee. The whole thing consisted of someone copying my information from a 2021 form and pasting it into another form. For that tiny task, I still had to show up in person.
For 240 yuan a year—not even the “300-something” I first thought—it was quite a commitment. Still, children born now won’t get this benefit at all. Seen that way, the trip felt almost worth it.
On Monday, my daughter’s English class held a parent meeting on DingTalk. It went on for more than an hour, though it could have been summed up in a few sentences: times are hard, going nonprofit is even harder, so they’re closing down and pivoting to reading with children. They’ve opened a reading center. Reading is very important, and so on. As for tuition already paid, families could choose online classes or a refund.
It made me wonder about my own studio. In a climate that keeps getting worse, how should I pivot? Where is my future?