A man in Liuzhou, China’s Guanxi Autonomous Region, recently made national news headlines after getting his arm stuck in a squat toilet while trying to retrieve his iPhone 8.

The man, surnamed Tang, had been drinking with some friends at a local hotel’s cafe, last weekend. At one point he had to go to the bathroom and apparently decided that checking his phone while relieving himself in a squat toilet was a good idea. It never is, particularly if you’ve bee drinking. As you’ve probably already anticipated, Tang fumbled, and dropped his new iPhone 8 in the toilet.

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When it  comes to making sure that her disabled grandson gets the education he deserves, there’s nothing 76-year-old Shi Yuying won’t do. The elderly woman has been making eight daily trips pushing Jiang Haowen to and from his school in Guangxi Province, for the past 4 years, and plans to continue doing it for as long as she can walk.

9-year-old Jiang Haowen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was 2-years-old, and his parents divorced a couple of years later. His mother remarried several times and his father went to work in Guilin to support the boy and pay for his treatments. So he fell in the care of his grandmother, Shi Yuying. She not only pushes the boy to and from school several times a day, but she also massages his limbs, prepares all kinds of herbal medicines for him in hopes of improving his condition, and also pushes him to walk with support. Pretty much everything she does is for Haowen.

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A newly married Chinese couple has been making waves on the internet for their unorthodox match- she is a wealthy 38-year-old mother of one, and he is a 23-year-old whose mother is only a year older than his bride. The wedding, which was filmed on Jan. 10, took place in Qionghai, Hainan, China, where it first went viral and stirred up controversy.

The woman apparently fell pregnant after a romance with the younger man, after which he proposed marriage. Initially, the groom’s parents opposed the wedding, citing the 15 year age difference between them, as well as the bride’s 14-year-old child from a previous marriage. However, the bride – a wealthy real estate businesswoman – offered them a dowry of 660,000 yuan (USD 104,273) in cash, a real estate lot, and a Ferrari sports car, altogether worth an estimated a 5,000,000 yuan (USD 789,950). The parents gave their blessing immediately following the generous offer.

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A 49-year-old man in South West China has spent the past decade living rough under a bridge trying to break the lottery code.

Wang Chengzhou used to work construction in Sichuan Province, but moved to Chongqing in 2008 after suffering a work-related injury. Instead of using the $50,000 yuan he had received as compensation from his former employer to start a new life, Wang spent it all on his obsession – cracking the lottery code. He cut off all communication with his family and settled under a bridge where he has been working hard on figuring out the algorithms behind the lottery. After 10 years of hard work, he claims to have finally cracked the secret to getting filthy rich overnight.

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Five years ago, a compassionate Shanghai policeman took on the role of son to help comfort an elderly couple he had never met before. They had lost their own son in a tragic accident 15 years ago, and the policeman’s similar appearance helped comfort them.

In 2003, Liang Qiaoying and her son, Liang Yu, from North China’s Shanxi province, were exposed to poison gas, during a freak accident. The woman survived, but her young son did not. Liang, a former schoolteacher, was left paralyzed and mentally impaired following the accident, and her husband, Xia Zhanhai, could not bear to tell her the truth about their son. Instead, whenever his wife asked to see Liang Yu, he kept saying that he had gone to work in another city.

In 2010, while watching a television show about police work in Shanghai, Xia Zhanhai was stunned to see an officer that looked just like his deceased son. He immediately knew that the young man was the answer to making his wife smile again, but he had know idea how to get in touch with him. He hadn’t caught his name, and all he had to go by was that he was stationed in Pudong, 1,500 km away. But that wasn’t going to stop him.

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A former nanny in China recently confessed to abducting a boy from her employers in Chongqing and raising him as her own son for the past 26 years. He Xiaoping, 48, from Nanchong, in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, confessed the kidnapping to local authorities, last August. Police have been investigating her story ever since, but are unable to open a criminal case based solely on her claim.

Xiaoping claims that after giving birth to two children and losing both in their infancy, she approached elders in her village for advice. They told her that the only way for her to have a child of her own, would be to raise one from another family. In 1992, Xiaoping went to the city of Chongqing with a fake ID card and found a job as a nanny for a 1-year-old boy. She claims that after working for three days, she took the boy back to Nanchong with her. She named the boy Liu Jinxin after her second son.

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A Chinese divorced mother-of-one was left shocked and devastated after her live-in boyfriend of more than a year vanished without a trace. What she uncovered a short time later stunned her even more – her “boyfriend” was, in fact, a woman in disguise.

Wang Qi, 41, from the Zhejiang Province of China, had met the younger “man,” surname Qian, online in 2016. Although they hit it off, Wang initially resisted Qian’s advances, explaining that they would not be compatible because he was too young for her and she was divorced with a child. Qian would not be dissuaded, however, and by June of 2016, the two were officially dating. By 2017 the pair had moved in together, and Qian had even brought Wang to “his” home city of Haikou to introduce her to his parents. Qian insisted that although they could be affectionate and sleep in the same bed, that they should hold off on intercourse until they married.

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A suspected murderer who had evaded capture for 12 years by pretending to be a mute has allegedly lost his ability to speak, Chinese media recently reported.

The Chinese man, identified only by his surname ‘Zheng’, had been charged with murdering his wife’s uncle, a Mr. Cao, in a dispute over a 500 yuan ($76) rent, back in 2005. During one of their heated arguments, Zheng, then 33, allegedly stabbed Mr. Cai, then ran from his home in Hangzhou, China’s Zhejiang Province, before authorities could apprehend him. The runaway murder suspect adopted the fake name of Wang Gui and started pretending to be a mute beggar in order to make ends meet.

Zheng eventually settled in a small village in Anhui Province, 700 km north of Hangzhou, where he began working in construction, while staying true to his mute persona. He even got a new wife and fathered a child, but never spoke a word to them, for fear of saying something that could blow his cover.

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If you’ve ever wondered why washing your pillow case every once in a while is so important, this case may give you an idea. A Chinese woman who, for some reason, hand’t washed her pillow case in five years recently turned up at a hospital in Wuhan, where doctors discovered over 100 mites living on her eyelashes.

The woman, known only as Ms. Xu, told doctors that her eyes had been red and itchy for around two years, but that she just simply got used to their condition and relied on over-the-counter eye drops to alleviate the symptoms, instead of seeing an ophthalmologist. It was only when the problem got so bad that her eyelashes and eyelids started getting stuck together that she finally decided it was time to get some professional help.

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If you still have any doubts that mobile devices have taken over our lives, this should make you a firm believer: smartphones and QR codes have become tools of the trade for Chinese beggars. If you’re feeling generous, you can simply whip out your phone, scan a a printed QR code and transfer some money to the beggar’s account.

Local media have spread news of mobile-savvy beggars in the city of Jinan, in China’s Shandong province. They gather in areas popular with tourists, holding begging bowls that contain a QR code printout. Anyone with Alipay, WeChat Wallet, or some other mobile payment app can scan the code and make a donation. Wait, beggars in China have mobile phones? Well, according to state media outlets, that’s not actually a rare thing.

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A 29-year-old man from Guangzhou, China experienced sudden paralysis of all four limbs after spending two consecutive days playing on his mobile phone. The man reportedly spent a lot of his time looking down at his handheld, but this latest gaming marathon was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Late last month, the yet unidentified gamer spent two consecutive days trying to advance as much as possible in the mobile video game he was so passionate about. In the early hours of the third day, he felt a sudden pain and stiffness in his neck. Within moments all four of his limbs went numb, and he found himself paralyzed. His family rushed him to the emergency department of Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, where, after an MRI and other tests, Shen Huiyong, the orthopedic specialist, diagnosed him with cervical spondylosis hematoma. That meant that his paralysis was caused by blood clots in his cervical spinal tube pressing against his spinal cord.

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It’s the stuff fairy tales are made off: parents are parted from their child, years or decades pass, and then chance or fate reunites them. This, however, is no fairy tale but a very real one and involves a Chinese couple and the daughter they had to give up to ensure her survival. And as it happens in real life, things don’t always go smoothly. Qian Fenxiang and her husband Xu Lida finally met their daughter Jingzhi, 22 years after they left her as a newborn baby in a vegetable market. The girl was adopted by an American family and grew up as Catherine Su Pohler, or Kati for short.

The Kodak moment reunion was made possible by the note Qian left with her baby girl. Kati’s adoptive parents, Ken and Ruth Pohler of Hudsonville, Michigan, were deeply moved by the contents and decided they would tell the girl one day if she wanted to know. When the day of the revelation came in 2016, Kati was 21 and a college student. It took another year before she got to meet her birth parents on the famed Broken Bridge in Hangzhou.

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A new Chinese app called Miao A or “Seconds” allows celebrities and socialites to sell their time to fans, by the second. The unusual service has recently come under scrutiny, however, as investors are also able to buy and trade celebrity time, causing the app to operate as an illegal stock exchange.

The Beijing-based app describes itself as the first time-trading platform that helps fans get access to their favorite celebs. The company buys time in bulk from stars or their agents and then sells it in one-second packets to the public. The platform charges a 3% service fee on all exchanges, and all transactions managed through the Chinese online payment platform NetEase. An average month sees an exchange of 300 to 400 million yuan ($45-60 million) worth of celebrities’ time.

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The untimely death of a 20-year-old video game streamer from China who used to play an insanely popular online game for 9 hours straight every night recently brought the addictive nature of video games into debate.

“Lonely King” was one of the most successful streamers of “King of Glory”, an incredibly successful mobile game with 200 million monthly active players. The 20-year-old reportedly had over 170,000 fans on his streaming platform, and used to showcase his gaming sessions for many hours on end, every single day. Lonely King’s last live playing session occurred on November 2nd, after which he simply disappeared. Used to watching his live streams at least once every 24 hours, Lonely King’s fans started speculating about his well-being several days after noticing his continued absence. Many of them anticipated that he might have succumbed to exhaustion, seeing as he had drastically altered his video game playing schedule – streaming from midnight to 9 in the morning, every night – since July.

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A mysterious condition has left a 30-year-old man in rural eastern China looking and behaving like a small child. He cannot speak, can only stand for short periods of time and needs round-the-clock care that his loving mother is happy to provide.

Looking at Wang Tianfang, you would swear that he couldn’t be a day over 4-years-old, but he was actually born in 1987, which makes him 30. His mother, Chu Xiaoping, says that both Wang’s physical and intellectual development stopped when he was between 2 and 3-years-old, and that despite being consulted by several doctors, the reason for his stagnation remains a mystery. The 30-year-old man is only 80-cm-high and is unable to speak or feed himself.

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