The story of an elderly woman being hit by a child-size toy car is trending on Chinese social media not because the accident is interesting, but due to the reaction of the senior citizen.
In the video, an elderly lady seated on the floor was engaging in heated debate with a woman and her young daughter. The older woman could be heard saying, “I was here, and you knocked me over.” During the argument, the young girl gazed around curiously at the gathering crowd of onlookers.
The incident took place at Wushan County in Sichuan, a province in the southwest of China, on March 21, according to online Chinese news website The Paper. The woman, 78, was eventually persuaded to board an ambulance to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a fractured arm.
On Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, netizens were also engaged in a heated debate: Was the old lady really injured, or merely pretending?
One netizen from Guangdong wrote: “Let me tell you this old woman is smart. Nowadays, cars have dashboard cameras. But toy cars don’t have them … so blackmail works!”
“It’s not that seniors have become bad. It’s that hooligans have become old,” commented netizen “YIN_RIN” from Beijing.
“What damage can a car that only goes 1 to 2 kilometers per hour inflict? Now we have so many hooligans. They want money when they are barely scratched,” wrote “Endless 6682010” from Xinjiang.
“The sense of trust is lost in the society because of past incidents,” added a netizen with the moniker “A Hui F” from Shandong.
Chinese media is replete with stories of scamming old folks in China who fall to the ground at the slightest contact, or not at all in some cases, and demand monetary compensation to treat their “injuries.”
In one notable incident last August, Xiao He, a middle school student, extended a helping hand to an elderly man who had tumbled to the ground. However, the old man turned around and accused the boy of charging him head on and tripping him up. The incident was finally resolved after footage showed that the two were a distance apart when the accident happened.
As for this recent case, the elderly woman turned down an offer from the girl’s family members to have a caretaker look after her, according to The Paper. It is unclear if the elderly woman had accepted any other forms of compensation.
