In China, there’s something known as “pengci,” which is basically when someone runs in front of a moving vehicle, pretends to have been struck by it, and “demands compensation” from the driver. While NPR reports “the advent of dash cameras has helped shame the guilty parties” and decrease the popularity of pengci, people occasionally give it a shot anyway. But they’re not always good at it.
Take this woman for example, who attempts the con not in a single fluid motion, but a sort of three-act play that’s broken up by brief intermissions. She runs in front of a moving car. The car stops. She pauses. (INTERMISSION.) She falls. She peeks up to see if the driver is reacting. She goes down, then up, then down again. (INTERMISSION.) She rises to her feet to confront the driver, and the footage ends before we’re given a satisfactory conclusion to the story.
Did she run away soon after realizing her pengci had been caught by the driver’s dashcam? Did she attempt to “demand compensation” regardless? Will she start studying the teachings of Lee Strasberg? We’ll never know, but we’ll always have this beautiful memory: