Woman Forced to Literally Sleep With One Eye Open After Botched Plastic Surgery

A Chinese woman claims she has had to use a strip of tape to sleep at night after botched double eyelid surgery left her unable to completely close her eyes.

The woman, referred to by Chinese media only as Ms. Ma, reportedly paid 20,000 yuan ($2,800) for a double eyelid surgery at the Jimei Plastic Hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in September of 2018. The cosmetic procedure artificially creates the Western style creases on the upper eyelids, and is very popular among Asian women who don’t naturally have them. Unfortunately, in Ms. Ma’s case, the procedure didn’t turn out as well as she expected it to, so she went under the knife for second time, only to have this procedure turn out even worse than before. The woman was shocked to realize that she was no longer unable to close her eyes completely.

Read More »

Man Returns Home After Seven Months, Finds It Taken Over by House Plants

A Chinese man who spent seven months away from his apartment in Langfang, Hebei Province, recently returned to find his home had transformed into a small botanical garden.

The unnamed man took to social media to share videos and photos of what he found when he entered his home, after being away for almost seven months, since before the Covid-19 crisis. You can see vines lining the walls of the apartment, using hanging photos, the TV set and furniture as supports to advance further into the home, and even some stems hanging from the roof. The video of this small botanical garden quickly went viral, leaving many social media users wondering how the plants grew so much without him to look after them. It seems the man’s brother had a part to play as well.

Read More »

How an Internet Meme Ruined a Photo Model’s Career and Private Life

A Taiwanese female model spent years battling online harassment after an innocent photo she shot for a photo agency was used for a completely unrelated news report and later turned into a meme.

In 2012, international media (OC included) featured the story of a Chinese businessman who had allegedly sued his wife for misleading him into thinking that she was naturally beautiful. The man claimed that his wife’s good looks were the result of plastic surgery and that he had only learned about it after confronting the woman, because their daughter didn’t seem to have inherited either of their good looks. In terms of wow factor, it wasn’t the best story we’ve ever featured, but it was funny and crazy enough to go viral. At the time, no one imagined that the photo used by Chinese media for illustration purposes only would one day end up ruining the female protagonist’s life…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last eight years, you’ve probably seen this photo online at least once. It shows a ridiculously good-looking couple with three not so good-looking children. This was the photo used in the original Chinese news article and the one that Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh claims ruined her professional modelling career and caused personal issues as well.

Read More »

Aquarium Draws Criticism for Writing Popular Surnames on Live Fish

In a bid to make its exotic fish tank more appealing to visitors, an aquarium in the Chinese city of Guizhou wrote popular Chinese surnames on the live fish, attracting the wrong kind of attention in the process.

Staff at the Guizhou Polar Ocean World thought they had struck gold when they came up with the idea of writing common surnames like “Zhao,” “Hu” or “Wu” on dozens of live fish in an exotic fish tank, but the response wasn’t as positive as they had hoped. Photos and videos of the yellow fish with bright red Chinese characters painted on their bodies quickly went viral on social media and inspiring thousands of critical comments from the general public.

Overwhelmed by the negative feedback, the Guizhou Polar Ocean World recently put out a statement saying that their exotic fish tank was generally overlooked by most visitors, and that the painted surnames were supposed to make the fish more appealing to the public.

Read More »

Real-Life Breaking Bad: Former Chemistry Sets Up Drug Labs, Tries to Sell Product Online

A former chemistry teacher in Ukraine has been dubbed a real-life version of Breaking Bad’s Walter White after he was caught cooking large quantities of amphetamine in two separate drug labs, and trying to sell them online.

Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) recently announced the bust of a drug operation in the Kiev area and the capture of its leader, a former chemistry teacher at one of the most prestigious higher learning institutions in the country’s capital. According to a preliminary investigation, the teacher had put together a criminal organization that specialized in the production and distribution of synthetic drugs like amphetamine and cathinone, as well as several precursors. The illegal products were sold on a dedicated website as well as on social media.

Read More »

Patient’s Persistent Cough Turns Out to Be Caused by Chicken Bone Stuck in Lung for 14 Years

A 22-year-old Chinese woman who suffered from a persistent cough was shocked to learn that she had a piece of chicken bone lodged in her lung.

After 14 years of checkups and X-rays to figure out what had been causing her persistent coughing for the last 14 years, a 22-year-old unnamed woman from China recently learned that it had all been caused by a chicken bone. The woman’s problems started after she suffered a serious coughing fit when she was seven or eight years old, and despite numerous hospital visits, no one could spot any anomalies that might be causing her uncontrollable coughing.

Read More »

The Shady Japanese Religion That Offers Spiritual Covid-19 Cures

If you thought America was the only country where a bogus religion like Scientology could thrive, you were wrong. Japan has its own version, it’s called Happy Science, and it apparently offers spiritual Covid-19 cures, for a fee, of course.

Happy Science is the creation of a Wall Street trader turned spiritual leader named Ryuho Okawa, who during the 1990s came to believe that he was in contact with religious figures like Buddha and Jesus. They apparently told Okawa that like them and others throughout human history, he was the reincarnation of a creator god from Venus named El Cantare and had been chosen to save the world from ruin. He wrote a couple of popular books on metaphysical subjects, entitled  “The Terrifying Revelations of Nostradamus” and “The Great Warnings of Allah,” and before he knew it, the former trader had a sizeable following.

Read More »

Buy One, Get Two Free: Unlucky Man Quarantined Three Times in a Row

A luckless Chinese man who reportedly spent almost two months in his home after being quarantined three times in a row became a trending topic on Chinese social media this week.

Mr Xiong, from the city of Jining, in East China’s Shandong Province, spent almost the whole month of February and half of March cooped up in his home in an unlucky triple quarantine that the media hilariously dubbed “buy one, get two free”. The first time Xiong was confined to his apartment was when Jining went into lockdown on February 8th, two days after returning from the Philippines. He was forbidden from leaving his home for 14 days, which was tough, but not as tough as spending 50 days inside…

Read More »

Parents of Girl Who Dropped Apple From Balcony Ordered to Pay Compensation for Freak Accident

In March of 2018, an 11-year-old girl accidentally dropped an apple from the balcony of her family’s 24th floor apartment in Dongguan, China. This simple act ended up costing a toddler its future and the girl’s parents a fortune in compensation…

On March 9, 2018, the unnamed girl was reportedly trying to feed the family dog while holding an apple on the balcony of their apartment, when she accidentally dropped the fruit. At the same exact time, 3-month-old Tongtong was in the arms of her grandmother, taking a walk around that same apartment building in Dongguan. As fate would have it, the dropped apple plummeted down and landed straight on the toddler’s head, rendering her unconscious. She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors notified her family that she had suffered severe head trauma, skull fractures, ruptured blood vessels in the skull, and traumatic shock. Tongtong underwent surgery to stop the bleeding in her brain, but she remained in a coma.

Read More »

Pet Cat Survives 40 Days Locked in Apartment After Human Family Is Hospitalized with Coronavirus

Le Le, a British Shorthair cat from Wuhan, China, has become a symbol of resistance during the current pandemic, showing us human that if she could survive by herself in a locked apartment for 40 days, then we can handle a bit of social distancing and isolation too.

This story of feline endurance and survival began in January of 2020, when the Covid-19 crisis in Wuhan was still in its infancy. One by one, Le Le’s human family had to be hospitalized after becoming infected with the coronavirus, and before the Chinese New Year (January 25) rolled up, the heavily pregnant cat had been left by herself. Her owners had decided not to hire someone look after her, or even check in on her from time to time, because they didn’t known whether their home was contaminated with the virus or not. So they just opened a bag of cat food and hoped for thee best.

Read More »

Online Shopper Pays $6 Million for His Own Commercial Rocket Launch

They say you can buy just about anything on China’s leading online shopping platform, Taobao. Well, you can now add “commercial rocket launch” to that list as well.

In what was originally deemed an April 1st joke, Chinese media recently reported that an anonymous online shopper paid 40 million yuan ($5.6 million) for his very own rocket launch. The unique online auction was hosted by Chinese celebrity sales anchor Wei Ya and over two million people tuned in to watch the sale live on Taobao. Bidder swere told that winning the auction would allow them to paint the body of the commercial rocket and the launch platform, as well as the chance to visit the launch site and control the launch.

Read More »

Controversial “Class of Life” Has Primary School Children Eating Fish They Helped Raise

Japan’s “Class of Life” is a controversial school project that aims to teach students about valuing their food and the environment by having them raise and then eat animals like fish and chicken.

We first featured the Class of Life a couple of years ago, when a video showcasing its implementation at an agricultural high-school in Japan’s Shimano Prefecture went viral on Chinese social media, leaving most viewers in a state of shock. The footage showed students preparing chicken eggs for hatching, raising the chicks for several months, and finally killing, cooking and eating the chickens. The Class of Life has been a part of Japanese curriculum at certain schools for over six decades, so most Japanese people are familiar with it, but even they were stunned recently when they saw elementary school children taking part in the class.

Read More »

Dad Creates Custom Baby Safety Pod to Protect His Child from Coronavirus Infection

A young Chinese dad spent a month converting a cat carrier backpack into a safety pod for his baby. His invention allegedly protects the child from infection and pumps purified air into the pod with an electronic fan system.

30-year-old Cao Junjie, a tech-savvy father from Shanghai, China, wanted something that would allow him and his wife, Fang, to take their two-month old son on walks without worrying that he might get infected with the novel coronavirus. Even though babies and young people in general usually experience mild symptoms, they didn’t want to take a chance, so Junjie came up with a solution inspired by Hideo Kojima’s latest video game (Death Stranding), a carrier pod completely isolated form the outside.

Read More »

Creepy Alien-Like Scene Is Not At All What It Looks Like

Photos of what looks like an Alien scene featuring dozens of xenomorph eggs ready to burst have gone viral on Japanese social media, but there’s nothing alien about it.

If you’ve ever seen Sigourney Weaver blasting xenomorph in any of the classic Alien movies, you probably get goose bumps just looking at the photos below. I can’t blame you, seeing those creepy Facehuggers bursting out of slimy Ovomorphs was one of the most disturbing experiences of my childhood, but the things pictured in these photos are perfectly natural. Posted on Twitter by a Japanese farmer, the viral pics simply depict Chinese cabbages in the early days of Spring, when the water in the outer layer freezes, giving the common vegetable an eerie look.

Read More »

The Exquisite Fondant Sculptures of China’s Sugar King

When it comes to fondant modelling, there are few food artists in the world who can even hold a candle to Zhou Yi, China’s famous “Sugar King”. His amazing sculptures are so incredibly detailed that even though they’re edible, they definitely qualify as ‘too good to eat’.

The first time we featured Sugar King on Oddity Central was in early 2018, just after he blew everyone’s minds at the International Cake Competition, where he and his team managed to win three gold medals and one bronze, with an incredible cake featuring an awe-inspiring fondant sculpture of Empress Wu Zetian, the only female ruler in China’s history, as a young woman. It was so detailed that judges could literally count her eyelashes. He was the first Chinese artist to get a gold medal, and even though he was already very popular on Chinese social media, his fame grew even more after being featured in national and international news outlets.

Read More »