- A woman filmed throwing a tantrum and then hurling items at her parents in a shoe shop in China after they refused to buy her footwear has gone viral on mainland social media
- Many who commented on the video were shocked at the parents’ refusal after it was revealed they control her salary
A 28-year-old woman’s hysterical crying in a shoe store after her parents refused to buy her a pair of shoes worth about 200 yuan (US$29) has trended on mainland Chinese social media, with many people sympathising with her.
The incident happened in a shoe store in Shaoxing, eastern Zhejiang province, on March 5, Lishui TV reported.
In a viral video of the scene, upon hearing her parents refusing to buy her the footwear, the woman begged: “Only one pair [of shoes], OK? Are my legs so cheap?”
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“Isn’t there plenty of money? The money [I earn] is saved by you for me. You are so strange,” she shouted at her parents.
“Please behave in a normal way,” her father responded.
The woman then angrily threw several small items at her parents. Her parents ignored her and left the store, leaving their daughter kneeling on the floor crying.
A store assistant came over to hold the woman’s shoulders to comfort her.
The woman was later seen standing beside a guard rail in a shopping centre, sobbing: “I just want a pair of average-quality shoes. Why are they so cruel to me?”
The video soon gained traction on the internet, with 20,000 comments left on Douyin and Weibo.
“We should ask: for a person aged 28 who does not have the right to dispose of 200 yuan, where does the problem come from?” one person said.
“It’s horrific. She is 28 but is still under the control of her parents. She can’t even have the freedom to buy shoes for only 200 yuan. I feel suffocated when thinking of this,” another person commented.
A third person added: “Anyone with these kinds of parents will break down. Her father told her to be normal. I want to tell her parents that they should be normal.”
“I guess she has a brother in the family. Her parents told her to hand over her salaries so they would pass the money to support her brother,” a comment that received 100 likes said, hinting at many Chinese families’ tradition of preferring male offspring over females.
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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