The Crying Place: Shanghai, China

I wonder if anyone can help me research this: in Shanghai, China, I've heard there is a kind of tea room that is called The Crying Place, and the customers pay a fee to go in, sit at a table with a box of tissues, and cry. The establishment is supposedly quite popular and always filled to capacity. I heard a pastor mention this in a sermon a couple of years ago.

How many churches, I wonder, offer a place for someone to come and cry. A place where it would be acceptable to cry--to shed tears of confession and repentance, or tears of sorrow and grief, tears of remorse, or tears of joy..?

My Eastern Kentucky Baptist-turned-Pentecostal-minister Dad told me once he never trusted a dry-eyed, emotionally aloof and cold conversion to Christ.

He would ask,"How could the regenerative and transformational epiphane in the Holy Spirit--being drawn to God, the Father--having the revelation of The Cross of Christ and His atoning blood as propitiation for the seeker's sin--be responded to in an aloof, perfunctory, matter-of-fact, emotionally cold manner..?"

The truly stable and mentally healthy person in Christ will have the liberty (in Christ) to humbly, vulnerably, sincerely weep before God in the wholesome catharsis that expresses the comfort of the Comforter--in sorrow or in joy. And s/he will have the Spirit's empathy in rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.

Psychopathy, according to Drs. Meloy and Hare, experts in the study, shows its presence in many ways in the human personality. Some symptoms manifest as glibness, superficiality, emotional coldness, and lack of empathy--qualities, by the way, often exalted in the Hollywood Star System and American popular culture.

Perhaps there is just no need for a Crying Place here...