this post was submitted on 13 May 2025
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It's the Chinese expat version of drop bears, then?
Sort of? Except it's not like a rite of passage. You just occasionally, for at least 15 years, stumbled over someone who would swear that it happened to them. At least the drop bear gag is so frequent you know it's a joke pretty quickly.
Did you ever challenge them on it? Point out that you'd heard an identical story from multiple other people? If so, how did they react?
I have found that doing so is counter-productive most times. (When it is productive, it's productive in the sense of a little fact to remember for future ambushes.) People get very, very, very defensive when you point out that they're probably confabulating and that their memory is flawed and likely deeply fooled.
Oh that's interesting. I never would have presented the question as challenging their memory because it never even occurred to me that they may genuinely believe what they were saying. Is it your experience that they do actually sell to believe that story happened directly to themselves?
It's a well-researched phenomenon, actually, confabulation is. There's even some evidence that a particular part of the brain does it. Our memories are actually kind of shitty. Things that get repeated often enough turn into "truth" if not quickly corrected when they show up. (This is how in the '80s, during the Satanic Panic, memories of "Satanic abuse" that would be physically impossible were generated and held by the unfortunate victims of unscrupulous lawyers and psychologists.) And once there, it's "confrontational" to face them with reality.
So I'm pretty sure the people I talked to believed the story after repeating it likely dozens to hundreds of times.
Oh yeah, I know that memory is incredibly fallible. It just didn't occur to me that it would be what's going on here.
If it was a bit more common I'd assume it was just a joke. The fact that it was widely spread, but not omnipresent is what makes me think they believed what they were saying.