Yesterday, my wife and I were craving some authentic local Shanghai cuisine, so we headed to a modest little restaurant on Nanjing Road — the kind of place where you can eat well for around a hundred yuan per person.
In this day and age, finding a restaurant where you can still eat decently at that price is something that should genuinely make you happy.
But what I witnessed ruined the experience entirely. The mother and daughter sitting next to me subjected me to what I can only describe as sitting on a bed of needles for the entire meal.
At first glance, this mother-daughter pair looked completely ordinary — the mother especially came across as somewhat timid and meek.
Yet the words that came out of this mother’s mouth during their meal left me stunned:
“Why are you on your phone at school? You must be thinking about dropping out, aren’t you? Why not just say so — at least that way I wouldn’t have to exhaust myself.”
“You know how much each tutoring session costs, right? So you must love watching your parents burn money for you, don’t you?”
“With your attitude, which company is going to want you when you enter the workforce? Are you planning to live off your parents? Just say it out loud.”
“I genuinely feel sorry for your future husband and children. Do they know you’re going to be a burden and a liability? Tell me — what do you think?”
“Do you have any idea how hard I work? Or are you deliberately trying to work me to death just to watch? You’d love that, wouldn’t you?”
“I’ve already told your father — there’s no way we’re counting on you to support us in old age. When I’m old, I’ll just check myself into a nursing home and wait to die. At least you’ll have your peace. What do you think?”
Every single one of these sentences was free of profanity. Yet every one of them cut like a blade — sharp, bitter, reeking like fetid, putrid venom.
And you had to — reluctantly — “admire” this woman’s precision. Every sentence had its rhythm, its intonation, its calculated snideness. That particular flavor of barbed sarcasm, that sense of being strategically cruel — she wielded it with masterful control.
One degree more and it would have been crude violence. One degree less and it would have lost its sting.
Meanwhile, the daughter sat across from her, staring blankly at a plate of water spinach with fermented tofu, eating one small chopstick-full at a time.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that expression — the look of someone who has completely surrendered the will to fight. That “I don’t want to resist anymore, do whatever you want, I’m here for you to vent on” look. Eyes hollow. No light behind them. Not a trace of the radiance a young girl should have. That was her.
I honestly wanted to walk over and ask: “Ma’am, that is your daughter. Your flesh and blood. The life you carried and brought into this world. What exactly has she done that is so unforgivable that you need to humiliate her, degrade her, and assault her dignity with such vicious language?
From your own words, at worst — at most — she isn’t the strongest student. She likes her phone after school. She enjoys games and pop idols.
She is a person. She is a healthy, growing young girl. Is that such a crime?”
I really wanted to ask. Because Master Chi genuinely didn’t understand. But it wasn’t my place — she isn’t my child.
Still, as they say: observe a person’s words, and you know their character. And so you can already see what kind of person this mother is — almost certainly a pitiful creature herself.
Someone like this would only ever dare unleash her most venomous behavior on the family members closest to her.
Put her in front of her boss or colleagues and ask her to stand her ground? She’d slink away like a beaten stray dog, whimpering in retreat.
The same logic applies to men who commit domestic violence. That is the character. That is the nature of it.
How can Master Chi be so certain?
Because only the perennial weakling — the one who has spent a lifetime being stepped on and overlooked — will, upon the rare discovery of someone even weaker, feel a sudden intoxicating thrill: I finally have a chance to taste what it feels like to have power over someone. And that thrill, so long denied, becomes an addiction. Day after day, they chase the pleasure of dominating someone even more helpless than themselves.
Even if that helpless someone is their own wife or child.
So is this woman pitiable? Her destiny, too, must be a deeply pitiable one.
You can see it in her bearing, in her manner — a middle-aged woman whose life has not gone as she hoped. A troubled marriage. A thankless job that no one notices. A life lived in nervous, careful smallness.
She has never known luxury. Never experienced the unconstrained satisfaction of material abundance. By her own capacity, everything in her life has always exceeded what she could grasp and control.
And so the passive aggression, the pointed insinuations, the emotional dysregulation — all of it fuses into a seamless whole and becomes her philosophy of parenting.
Petty, difficult people are always petty and difficult. Even when they become parents, they remain the tormenting goblins of their children’s lives. A change in role does not change the nature beneath.
Now — do you think Master Chi has sympathy for this girl? Absolutely. Who doesn’t have a conscience?
But do I hold hope for this girl?
Honestly? I have serious doubts about whether this girl will manage a normal life.
Because the girl who is today the victim of this family’s toxic worldview will, in all probability, absorb her mother’s bitterness and cruelty through years of exposure — and then carry it forward into her own life.
None of this is her fault. It is purely the result of her “luck” in being given this mother, this family of origin. She “lucked into” this womb. She had no choice and no escape. And so she must endure — for at least eighteen years — the ongoing destruction, until this toxic inheritance is etched into her bones.
When she has children of her own, the cycle begins again.
At this point, many people push back and say: how can the character of a family of origin pass down like a hereditary disease, generation after generation? Won’t children recognize their own suffering and reflect on it?
To those who ask this, Master Chi can only say: “Friend, your understanding of human nature is a little shallow.”
The finest seed, if watered with poison for its first eighteen years, may look normal on the outside — but the inside will be thoroughly rotted.
There is a Chinese saying: gen shen di gu — roots deep, hold firm. Read those four characters a few times.
I don’t know if you’ve encountered that kind of young person — one who radiates insecurity from their core, filled with dread and anxiety. Someone who amplifies the most offhand remark into something enormous. Someone who, at the slightest emotional pressure from another person, becomes flustered and desperate to please without limit or self-respect — reduced to the kind of spineless people-pleaser that society looks down upon.
Master Chi has known many successful, outstanding people. Regardless of gender, they carry a full, vivid life force — especially that relentless drive to make things happen, never running dry.
Master Chi has also known many failed, dispirited people. Without exception, their worldview is saturated with defeat and self-abandonment — always primed for retreat.
Looking at them, you can feel it clearly: this dejection did not develop overnight. It came from years of sustained pressure and the relentless degradation of their personhood.
A thousand miles of ice does not form in a single day. Who else but one’s parents and family of origin could build that kind of cold — layer by layer, from childhood?
And so Master Chi insists: failures cannot raise exceptional children. A person who cannot build a single worthwhile endeavor — how could they possibly cultivate a powerful, capable next generation? Think about it. It simply doesn’t hold up.
If you, as a child, have achieved something in life, that achievement belongs entirely to your own talent and ability — a gift bestowed by Heaven. I also find it remarkable how parents who have made a complete mess of their own lives will, the moment a child achieves something, congratulate themselves on their superior parenting. They genuinely believe that their child’s social intelligence, adaptability, and strategic depth were somehow taught to them by parents who spent years being hysterical, useless, and persistently failing at everything. I truly don’t know where they find that confidence.
Master Chi has said something difficult before: the gap between children will begin to become a devastating gap starting with the generation born after 2000.
That is to say, children from quality families will genuinely crush the children from impoverished backgrounds who spent years grinding through exams — to the point where those grinders will question whether those years of sacrifice meant anything at all.
What is the winning formula for the former?
They win because, growing up, they had two parents at home who were like two living wisdoms — always available to consult, to learn from, to think through problems with. For every major or minor decision in life, there were always three minds working together. Always one step ahead. Always seeing one degree further.
They win because from childhood they had the inner confidence to connect with others, to engage without fear of loss and without fear of ill will — so that in career and in love, they are never paralyzed by anxiety. They can act decisively. They dare to love fiercely and let go cleanly.
In Closing: A friend once discussed this topic with Master Chi and asked whether there was any way to save young people poisoned by the destructive mindset of a broken family. My immediate answer was: I can’t fix that. No series of articles — not even tens of thousands of words — can undo that kind of damage.
You must understand: when a person’s parents palace in the destiny chart (命盘) is severely afflicted, it will inevitably drag down the palaces of virtue and career — and then the malevolent stars will close in on the marriage palace too. If there is a starting point for the collapse of a person’s destiny, the parents palace is always the first domino to fall.
So even if healing is possible in theory, it is extraordinarily difficult in practice. Those who have been devastated by their family of origin for more than a decade are almost universally people who are — at their core — not fundamentally broken, yet somehow never quite break through. Forever caught just below the threshold. Pitiful.
Unless — unless — the person themselves has the courage and the will to scrape down to the bone and purge the poison. To summon a rare, shattering self-awareness. To tear open their own flesh, wash themselves completely clean, and squeeze out every last drop of rot.