The "spam" thread

[Chibi Rachy]

Snickerdoodle!...

I forget what those taste like... not often anyone makes them around here

[FanChan]

It tastes like a very fluffy sugar cookie dipped in cinammon sugar. Mine often look like little pillows, like this, rather than as your typical flat disc cookies.


Apparently snickerdoodle muffins have become very popular, though.

[TheWendybird]

Oh my gawd...I never even knew Snickerdoodle was an actual word...back in 2002 I was writing a silly story about a friendly dragon and it was just a silly little thing..and I called the dragon Snickerdoodle cause the word just came to me and I thought it sounded silly OMG lol I can't believe it's actually a food..I must try this LOL wow...

[WishBear2001]

Tickled Pink decides to dress as Red Butler one Halloween with color clashing results:

LOL!

[WishBear2001]

Stormy2009 has not been at our house much to use our computer...
or on the forums much

[Wolf Ranger]

Wolf Ranger has been having life issues...So I don't like to talk a whole lot.

[TheWendybird]

Tickled Pink decides to dress as Red Butler one Halloween with color clashing results:

LOL!

CUTE!!!!!!!!!

[Chibi Rachy]

*flails* I start a long term sub stint in kindergarten tomorrow! Day before school starts and apparently I have an open house in the afternoon! */end flail*

[FanChan]

This breaks my heart T-T

Li Aihai, happily married and the mother of a 2½-year-old girl, had a problem. She was four months pregnant with her second child. Sihui county family planning officials had come to her home and told her what she already knew: She had gotten pregnant too soon. She hadn’t waited until her daughter was four years old, as Chinese law required of rural couples. The officials assured her that, because her first child had been a girl, she would eventually be allowed a second child. But they were equally insistent that she would have to abort this one. It was January, 2000.²

She pleaded that she had not intended to get pregnant. She was still wearing the IUD that they had implanted in her after the birth of her first child, as the law required. They were unsympathetic. Report to the family planning clinic tomorrow morning, they told her as they were leaving. We’ll be expecting you.


Aihai had other plans. Leaving her little daughter in the care of her husband, she quietly packed her things and went to stay with relatives in a neighboring county. She would hide until she brought her baby safely into the world. Childbirth-on-the-run, it was called.

When the county family planning officials discovered that Aihai had disappeared, they began arresting her relatives. While her father-in-law managed to escape with her daughter, her mother-in-law and brother-in-law were arrested. Her own mother and father, brother and sister, and three other relatives were also imprisoned over the next few weeks. In all nine members of her extended family were arrested, hostages to the abortion that was being demanded of her.

But Aihai, knowing that her family supported her pregnancy, stayed in hiding. And her relatives, each refusing to tell the officials where she had gone to ground, stayed in jail.

Three months later the family planning officials struck again. The date they chose, April 5, was an important one on the Chinese traditional calendar. It was the festival of Qingming, or “bright and clear,” a day on which rural Chinese men, by ancient custom, “sweep the graves” of their ancestors. Starting with the grave of their own deceased parents, they visit in turn the graves of grandparents, great-grandparents, and ancestors even further removed. At each stop they first clean off the headstones and weed the plot, and then set out a feast for the deceased, complete with bowls of rice, cups of rice liquor, and sticks of incense.

Why did the family planning officials pick this day of all days? Was it a further insult to the Li family, several of whom were languishing in their jail? Or was the day chosen for a very practical reason: With most of the men and boys away in the hills feting their ancestors, the village would be half-deserted, and they could carry out their plan without opposition.

The family planning officials came to the village in the company of a wrecking crew armed with crowbars and jackhammers. These fell upon Aihai’s home like a horde of angry locusts. They shattered her living room and bedroom furniture into pieces. They ripped window frames out of walls and doors off of hinges. Then the jackhammers began to pound, shattering the brick walls, and to knocking great holes in the cement roof and floors. By the time they completed their work of destruction, you could stand on the first floor of Aihai’s home and look up through two stories and the roof to the blue sky above. The wrecking crew then moved on to her parents’ house, and then to her in-laws’. At day’s end, three homes lay in ruins. The family planning officials confiscated the family’s livestock and poultry, and then disappeared.

Aihai remained in hiding, out of reach of the family planning officials, for two more months. It wasn’t until her child was actually born, she knew, that he would be safe. Abortions in China are performed up to the very point of parturition, and it is not uncommon for babies to be killed by lethal injection even as they descend in the birth canal. Only after she had given birth—to a beautiful baby boy—did she make plans to return home.

Aihai came back to find her family in prison, her home destroyed, and family planning officials furious that she had thwarted their will. Underlying their anger was hard calculation: Every “illegal” child born in their county was a black mark on their performance, depressing annual bonuses and threatening future promotions. But family planning officials, like most Chinese officials, have access to other sources of income. If you want your relatives released, they now told Aihai, you must pay a fine of 17,000 Renminbi (RMB) (about US$2,000). Now this is a huge sum by Chinese standards, the equivalent of two or three years' income. It was many days before she was able to beg and borrow enough from family and friends to satisfy the officials’ demands, and win her family’s release.

No sooner had she paid one fine than she was told she owed another, if she wanted to regularize her son’s status. He was currently a “black child,” family planning officials explained to her. Because he was conceived outside of the family planning law, he did not exist in the eyes of the state. As a nonperson, he would be turned away from the government clinic if he fell ill, barred from attending a government school of any kind, and not considered for any kind of government employment later in life. He would not even be allowed to marry or start a family of his own. The government had decreed that “black children” would not be allowed to reproduce; one generation of illegals was enough. There was an out, however. If she were able to pay another fine of 17,000 RMB, however, her son would be issued a national identity number, and would be treated like everyone else—almost. She would still be required to pay double fees for his school supplies.

She was not surprised when she was ordered to report for sterilization. The population control regulations, she knew, were unyielding in this regard. Two children and your tubes are tied. This time she made no effort to resist the authorities. Having a second child had bankrupted her family. Having a third was out of the question. Her newborn son would have no younger siblings.

Even so, Aihai considers herself far more fortunate than Ah Fang, the wife of a neighboring villager. Married at 19 to an older man in a time-honored village ceremony in front of dozens of relatives and friends, Ah Fang is considered by everyone she knows to be his wife. Everyone, that is, but the local Communist authorities, whose unbending family planning regulations prohibit women from marrying until they reach the age of 23.

When Ah Fang became pregnant there was no chance that she would be allowed to carry her child to term, even though it would have been her first. The one-child policy does not apply to couples who are, in the view of the Chinese state, merely cohabiting. For them—and for single mothers of all ages—there is a zero-child policy. Ah Fang was ordered to present herself at the local clinic for an abortion. She went in as instructed on September 27, 2001. She has been careful not to criticize the authorities, but her friends have been less reticent. “She wanted to keep her baby,” they complain openly, “but the law forbade it.”³

[WishBear2001]

sad story FanChan
I finally have a camera and here's some random pics