articles
China Elevator Stories
The Story Behind My Blog: How It All Started
The idea for my blog came to me after some unforgettable conversations with strangers in a new city.
04/09/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
I started writing this blog in November 2011. The idea came to me after having a few conversations with people in Shenzhen. Strangers in China can be surprisingly friendly and social, and many genuinely enjoy talking with foreigners, sharing personal stories, or offering life advice.
No matter where I went—whether in the supermarket, the elevator, the subway, or at a restaurant—strangers would start up a chat.
Some of the advice I received was truly insightful. It often came not from wealthy people or managers, but from ordinary workers—like the man repairing bikes on the street corner or a cab driver earning only a modest salary.
This is something I’ve always appreciated about China. In Austria, people sometimes talk openly too, but there it can also feel different. Once you share private details, some people become nosy or try to control your life by giving unsolicited advice. For me, sharing something personal is not an invitation for others to interfere, but a way to exchange opinions or life experiences.
That’s what I have found so meaningful in China: when I shared my stories, people often responded by sharing theirs. More often than not, they would tell me about their lives, their thoughts, and the challenges they had faced. I love this kind of exchange—simply listening and learning about someone else’s journey. Often, I didn’t even have to talk about myself, and I truly enjoyed those moments. In Austria, by contrast, I was often forced to talk about what had happened to me by nosy strangers. Once they had gathered enough details, they would start judging me as weak, incompetent at living life, or somehow flawed—especially compared to people who hadn’t experienced the same things I had.
When sharing your story leads to attack instead of compassion, you stop opening up. That was my experience in Austria, where I rarely found a compassionate listener.
I don’t always share what happened to me with people in China, but when I do, it’s fascinating to see people’s reactions. For example, cab drivers in Shandong Province often responded with compassion—some were shocked at what my ex-husband had done to me and our children.
That, to me, is empathy: the ability to feel for children who have gone through something so painful, or to say, “I would never do something like that.” In Austria, I too often encountered coldness and cruelty instead.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, empathy is …
the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.
When I shared my story in Austria—often because I was asked, not because I truly wanted to—I realized that many people lacked empathy. It wasn’t just a small absence; it seemed completely missing. I found this shocking, since I am an empathetic person myself and would never blame a woman for having ended up in an abusive relationship, for enduring what I have endured, or for having been stalked or almost killed.
Some people have even broken off contact with me immediately after I shared my story. If you understand why someone would feel the need to cut ties with a person who has lost access to her children, please let me know. This kind of behavior feels completely alien to me, yet it seems normal to quite a few of my countrymen.
Of course, not everyone in China reacts in an empathetic way, but I met enough people who made it clear that stealing children from their mother was not something they considered normal.
I stopped blogging for a few years after my ex-husband took my blog offline in 2017. It wasn’t until 2022 that I was able to bring it back online. I have also experienced writer’s block several times during my blogging career, as many bloggers do. Often, when bloggers start out, they are full of ideas and can’t get enough of writing. But after a few years, or when facing difficult life experiences, they may feel completely blocked, unsure what to write about, or reluctant to share these negative experiences.
These past few years, video has overtaken blogging. As a result, many blogs are no longer online because bloggers have stopped writing, and some people don’t even start a blog because video has become the dominant medium. Personally, I still enjoy a well-written article and don’t think bloggers should stop writing just because vlogging is more popular.
Anyway, the first story I shared on my blog was called ‘Are you Chinese?’ Feel free to check it out here.
Have you ever started a blog?