re: What's the biggest eye opener that you've had while visiting another state/country etc?

Don’t get me started on China, but the biggest eye opener was my final day there. I was in the middle of Beijing’s biggest mall and I was flying back for good the next morning. About fifteen feet in front of me there was this man with his wife and I’d guess a three year old kid who was crying. The father finally had enough of the boy crying so he kicks the shite out of the kid thrusting him forward onto the ground. His wife then slaps her husband crying hysterically before he knocks her hard in the face and then for good measure kicks the kid again in the ribs once he’s on the ground. And I’m talking this kick was hard enough where I’m certain the father broke some of the kids ribs. He then picks his son up by the hair and pushes him and his wife forward as they cry hysterically.

Now if this happened in America at the time, I’m certain 15 men would be there instantly and beat this piece of shite within an inch of his life. There were around 300 Chinese people and three security guards within sight of this. What did they do? They briefly look at the horror that is happening for half a second stopping cold in their tracks… but then they carry on as if nothing is happening. Keep walking as if these people weren’t there.

Now there were three other Westerners in the middle of this outdoor mall and we look at each other just appalled at what just happened. But we all knew something else as well: if any of us went and confronted this man, all the Chinese people around us would then take notice and then beat the foreign enemy in defense of this man even if they knew we were in the right here. We knew there was nothing we could do without getting a trip to the hospital from 20 Chinese men who would beat the shite out of us, and of note the Chinese are particularly fond of knives which put that on the table.

I decided to go up to the security guards instead who saw this happen and tell them to detain him. Their response: “What a man does with his family is his own business.” Didn’t do shite.

That has stayed with me, and after all the atrocities that has been done on mass to people over Covid, especially the serial child abuse, I think if that happened in a major American mall and someone confronted this man, they would scold the person taking up for the child due to the defender not wearing a mask and possibly infecting the child. We have gone into full fledged Chinese Maoist insanity at this point. We are being groomed to ignore mass atrocities and to loathe the outsider and each other. You can’t unsee it. While I’m confident if an American did that here 10 years ago he’d be eating through a feeding tube for the rest of his life, now I think we’d ignore it and just say “Rules are rules.” I will never shake that final day in China.