Donations handed to beggars or homeless individuals are sometimes collected by criminal organizations.

We got enough food to have a filling breakfast for four adults with plenty left over for ten yuan, or $1.67
I ate an entire pigeon, including its brain. I had cow lung, brain, heart, kidney… Weirdest dish I think was frog stir fry. This wasn’t frog legs, this was just frogs cut in half and stir fried with a lot of szechuan seasoning. I also had silkworm cocoons, just living silkworms in the process of metamorphosis that you fry in some sesame oil. They tasted like prebuttered lobster honestly.
To answer the question, the sheer variety of meats was my wtf China moment

I was working in Shanghai when my colleagues told me we’d have to work through the weekend to make up for the two days off at New Year’s.
I thought they were joking — I laughed.
They weren’t. They were dead serious.

The first time I was in Beijing, back in 2010, I went to a restaurant with a local friend who invited me, so I didn’t even check if I had enough cash. The place was huge and pretty upscale—not some small family spot in a hutong.
When we finished, the bill came to about 350 RMB if I remember correctly, but apparently my friend only had around 180 on her. I was thinking, “Oh no, what now?” but she stayed calm and just said, “Um, well, dunno,” which didn’t exactly reassure me.
She tried calling a friend who lived nearby but couldn’t reach her. I could chip in about 50 RMB, and that was it. Then she talked with the waitress for a bit, handed over all the cash we had, and we just left. I was totally confused.
Later I asked what happened, and she said she could just come back and pay the rest another day. I was stunned — in China, I’d expected people to be way more competitive and trying to rip you off if you weren’t careful. And here we were, basically getting off the hook like that!
The funniest part was when I asked if the waitress got her details or something, and she said, “Yeah, she got my last name”—just the last name, in a country where it feels like there are only about ten surnames and they all sound pretty similar: Gong, Dong, Li, Zhang…
I’m sorry it’s not a more dramatic story, but this moment stuck with me because it felt so out of place.