131
Why do some Americans "feel ashamed" for being American even when it's not their fault?
(sh.itjust.works)
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
131 points (90.2% liked)
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When's the last time you were in China? I wouldn't be surprised if it was just a pushed social media post, but it seems like every city I've never even heard of in China looks even better than the best city America has these days. I get wanting to announce your citizenship in defense, but it does seem like it's in, well, defense. Like how Cuban immigrants were cheering their love for Trump, then got deported anyway. Is it just thinking the leapards wouldn't eat your face? This, again, bring me back to, why be proud of this? It does just seem like a forced defensive shut-up-and-smile kinda deal. Oddly enough, very much North Korean :/
Around 2010. Guangzhou.
The actual city part doesn't look too bad, but I lives in a slum neighborhood of Guangzhou that most tourists don't really see. It was very dirty and you go through narrow alleyways. Like, according to Baidu Maps, its a 10 minutes walk from the main street, in my memory, it always felt like a 20-30 minute walk for some reasons, it felt so distant, the walk was always boring af. It's as if through through that short walk, you time travel back in time 20-50 years. The school I went to was the worst school I ever went to. Even worst than the shittist American school I went to with a rating of like 4/10 looked better.
Although, it could've be my Hukou issue. The school I went to was not a public school, it was one for children of migrant parents that parents have to pay for. Kids without Guangzhou Hukou were not allowed Guangzhou's public schools.
So far, the worst places I've stayed at was the small apartment in Guangzhou, and the ancestral homes in parents villages in Taishan.
I mean, China looks so great? Sure, only if you are privilaged enough to live in the good parts, which my family wasn't able to. In China, most people have homes in their villages, but if they wanma find work, they'd have to go to cities, and then they'd have to rent some shitty apartment. Landlords are still a thing, but they don't call them 地主 (di4 zhu3), but instead 房东 (fang2 dong1), people "buy" (not really "buy", more like 70 years permission to use, but you get what I'm saying) housing, then lease it, kinda profits off it.
In Guangzhou, we were second-class residents.
China isn't really one united country when you really think about it. It's a bunch of different countries with different internal passports in a trench coat. Y'all can leave your red state shitholes and go to a blue city, in a blue state, and you are treated as any other resident.
In China, my ancestors are from Taishan, so I'm always a 台山人 Taishanese due to Hukou, even though I was born in Guangzhou and speak both Cantonese and Mandarin.