When Mum Found Out the Salary Was 1,260 Yuan a Month
A constructed mother-daughter chat about a 1,260-yuan first salary became one of Weibo's most-liked posts this week — and beneath the durian jokes, a real argument about what entry-level work in China now pays.
The WeChat exchange that hundreds of thousands of people laughed at this week begins with a number. "Mum, I got my first pay: 1,260.18 yuan," a young woman messages her mother — about 175 US dollars for a month of work. The mother's reply, after a pause: is that in RMB? My income tax deduction alone is more than that. Then, rallying: "Cheap things aren't good." The daughter sends back a meme of a small dog asking life to be kind to twenty-somethings.
The post, shared under the hashtag #当老妈知道我工资1260后# — "When Mum found out I earn 1,260" — is the work of a popular humour account, and the conversation is constructed comedy rather than a real payslip. That has not stopped it from behaving like a social document. Its follow-up instalments had the mother asking what her daughter eats at lunch on 1,260 yuan ("ten meats and ten vegetables, I suppose", the daughter replies, over a photo of malatang), urging her to take three days off for a trip to Jiuzhaigou while she keeps saying she has to work, and fielding a request for durian with the flat verdict: "Too expensive, you can't afford it." A running gag about fruit prices turned out to be the thread's most quoted beat.
The joke, and the thing under it
The comment section under the hashtag is where the comedy stops being only comedy. "It used to be 'the family can't afford to keep me in school'," one of the most-liked replies ran; "now it's 'the family can't afford to keep me employed.'" Another asked the question that clearly travels beyond this one thread: do you tell your parents what you actually earn? "If I tell them they'll worry; if I don't, I feel off balance. Impossible either way."
The number itself explains the resonance. 1,260 yuan a month sits below the statutory minimum wage in most Chinese cities, which suggests a probation or internship salary of the kind now common at small private firms — and lands, this month, next to headlines about AI interns paid 5,000 yuan a day at China's tech giants. Both numbers are true of the same labour market, which is precisely the gap the thread pokes at. Social media has been running the argument for months — the viral claim that a 10,000-yuan salary is really six times a 5,000-yuan one was another round of it — because entry wages have detached from what young people (and their parents) assumed a job comes with.
The thread's own ending stays inside the joke: the mother, weighing whether her daughter can afford durian, concludes the instalment with "I shouldn't have thought highly of you." The laughs are real. So is the reason a first payslip of 1,260 yuan could be told as a joke only slightly larger than itself.