10/10/23 - Luo Changfu demanded that Mei make up for this financial loss
“Sorry to take up everyone’s time. I’ve wanted to write about me and my wife for a while now. I’m just kinda lazy so I kept putting it off since it wasn’t that urgent. Until yesterday, she texted me and threatened to take me to court.
Seems like I’ve got to deal with this divorce somehow. Can’t keep holding it off. But she’s very strong-willed about the financial split and won’t take any steps back. I just wanted to ask anyone with experience, what should I do with this situation?
Here’s the basic details of my marriage. Sorry for taking up your time:
I got a marriage certificate with my wife in August of 2019, then we held a ceremony in October. Before we got the marriage certificate, her family demanded that I buy a house, and she also expressed that she won’t marry me if I didn’t have a house. Chengdu’s house purchase policy just came out at the time (neither me nor my parents have paid any social security in Chengdu), so my wife demands that the house has to be under her father’s name. As for why it’s not under her name, she says it’s because she’s already got a house under her name taking up her quota. She’s not allowed to buy more. I’m still not sure if she was telling the truth, and I have no idea if she actually has other houses. She’s never brought it up in conversation.
Without thinking to much about it, my parents and I bought a unit in Chengdu. It took all of our savings. The down payment was about a million. I’ve been paying the mortgage every month by wiring the money to my girlfriend, and having her pay it. Because there’s a limit on her dad’s age for buying houses, we paid 50% for the down payment, and have to pay 6500 RMB per month for 15 years to pay off the rest of the mortgage.
I’ve calculated it a little, and over the last four years, I’ve wired her about 660K. Minus the mortgage for four years: 48x6500=312,000. That’s about 350K extra that I’ve just given to her.
I’ve tried negotiating with her, that if she’s asking for a divorce, she just needs to give me the down payment my parents paid for the house plus the remodelling money, roughly 900K. But she refuses and texted me the following:
“That’s impossible. I need some guarantees too. I need to think for myself. Maybe you can just give me 2 million and you can have the house. Don’t think you’ve given me a lot. Our savings are in the negatives as of the last month. It’s not only your money that’s in that account. Some of that money was mine too. And most of our savings went to our mortgage, which still has 11 years left on it. I’m just looking for the rest of my life here.”
OP: “I’ve given you everything I have. You haven’t even worked all these years. I’m the only one trying to maintain this household. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
Wife: “The reason I didn’t work is because that’s what we agreed on before we got married. You agreed to the idea too, so don’t bring it up now. Although I don’t have work, I still have money from my parents that I’ve put into our household. Don’t think that you’re the only one working hard here. Prices are going up every year. What kind of lifestyle can we have on just your wages alone? Have my cake and eat it too, lol. Let’s just see each other in court. I’ll go along with whatever the judge decides.”
OP: “We’re husband and wife after all. I don’t want to take this all the way to court unless we absolutely have to. Let’s leave each other some dignity.”
Wife: “The above split is the only scenario I can accept. I won’t take anything else.”
Since we’ve been married, we’ve never had sex. Yes. Never!
Sometimes, seeing posts here talking about banging, I get so jealous.
While we were dating, out of respect, whenever we went out vacationing, I always got hotel rooms with two beds. The night of our wedding ceremony, we slept in the same bed, but because we were both exhausted (anyone who’s went through a wedding gets it), I just slept all night. The next morning, I found her sleeping on the couch. I asked, and she said she couldn’t stand my snoring. Then I told her to go to bed, and I slept on the couch.
The same thing happened the next night, and by then, I knew she didn’t want to have intercourse with me. So by the third night, we officially started sleeping in separate rooms. To take care of her emotions, I even said that since my snoring is so bad, I’ll move to the guest bedroom, and she happily agreed.
Since then, we’ve never talked about sex and we’ve always slept in separate rooms. (I work in Shenzhen, and she lives in Chengdu, and every time I’d return home from work, we’d still sleep in separate rooms.)
After marriage, my wife has never allowed me to move my hukou to Chengdu. Right now, I’m still on my parents’ hukou.
Some of you might be asking if she ever visited Shenzhen to see me. Yeah, she’s done it a couple of times. I can count it on one hand. Every time, she stays for a month or two and leaves. And the whole time, we’d sleep in separate rooms, like some sort of unspoken agreement.
After all these years, I can feel quite clearly that she doesn’t feel anything towards me. She doesn’t actually want to hangout with me in Shenzhen. And covid happened to happen, so we both kind of used it as an excuse to be long-distance long-term. To protect our parents’ emotions, I’ve been helping her maintain the lie. Even before we married, she’s told me that she really enjoys long-distance and living by herself.
I just want to know, when the deed to the house is under her dad’s name and was bought before marriage, and we’ve never had intercourse, and we’re not on the same hukou, and we’ve been long-distance for a long time, if I sue for divorce, how can I guarantee I can win the case? Right now, I at least want my down payment and remodelling money returned. If I can get the other money I gave her over these four years back, that’d be even better.
And also, is it possible to file this divorce in Shenzhen? My hukou is in Mianyang. I’ve been paying social security in Shenzhen for 10+ years, and I have a resident ID. Her hukou is in Chengdu, dunno if she’s been paying social security. She’s never worked after getting married.
Comments say, “It’s super annoying, but he can probably get his money back. Thank god he never actually had intercourse with her. So long as she also admits to it, I mean. But what a pathetic guy.”
“Wow, what a legendary cuck. It’s not your wife’s fault your life is a mess.”
“You should be grateful you never slept with her, or else you’d be accused of rape too.”
A story from Sohu News, “28-year-old Hua has packed up her bag and left her house, with her smart watch with location services, two sets of clothing, and a fedex bubblewrap envelope. While the car moved along the bumpy mountain roads of rural Jiangxi, she stayed curled up against the car door, too afraid to lift her head. It was the 16th of September. Hua, who is second-degree intellectually disabled, has ran away from her wedding. In a little bit, her father is going to come home. Her father wants to marry her off. Her sister, Mei, had hurried over from Guangzhou to stop this wedding. She’d fought him countless times. Finally, Mei decided to run away with Hua.
Hua is the second of five children. She’s been staying at home for 7 years now since her last marriage ended.
Her little brother says that Hua is like a little kid. She loves cartoons, especially shows that teach numbers, pinyin, and characters. Hua’s 8-year-old son also loves learning these, but the child is with her ex-husband. She’s almost never seen him.
Over these years, many people have come over to ask about Hua’s marriage. Her father, Luo Changfu, says that the men were either too old, in their fifties, or they’re disabled. That was until their fellow villager, Chen Ruifeng, came along.
The two families met for the first time in March this year. Soon afterwards, Chen’s family held an engagement dinner, and gave 61,200 in bride price. There’s another 169,000 in bride price to come after the marriage is through.
In order to prepare for their future DIL, Chen Qingli went to the bank to withdraw cash, and hid it in the empty pickle jars at home. Chen Qingli went out of her way to ask a doctor, whether “retardation” could be heritable. And the doctor said that he couldn’t say for sure.
Ten years ago, Chen Ruifeng had had another marriage. His wife had epilepsy and needed to take medicine every day, and therefore couldn’t get pregnant. His family felt like it was too much work to take care of a patient with epilepsy, “so my mom returned her to her original family,” Chen Ruifeng said. He’s accepted the situation now, “I mean, she’d have to go back sooner or later.”
Mei cannot accept her sister marrying off again.
The first time her sister married, Mei felt like most of her relatives, that if Hua can find a decent family, that wouldn’t be a bad way for her to live her life.
Labour Day Weekend in 2015, a couple of days before the wedding, their auntie slept with a 20-year-old Hua for several nights, “watching her constantly, afraid that she’d make a run for it,” Mei explained.
Throughout the entire wedding, Hua never smiled once. Everyone comforted her, “Don’t be scared. Everything’ll get better once you marry over.” Then, the groom, Zhang Wenhui, picked her up and carried her to the wedding car.
The 24-year-old Zhang Wenhui had Neurofibromatosis (a disease with a high rate of heritability). There are multiple tumours along his left arm. His left hand is so deformed that he can’t close it all the way. His father, Zhang Maozhong, had taken him to all kinds of hospitals around the country, to the point that he dropped out in middle school. But his condition was declared incurable, and so they gave up.
He spent a couple of months scavenging for trash, but didn’t keep going because he felt ashamed doing it. A couple of months before the marriage, he found a job at a packaging and delivery company that paid about 2000 a month. The wedding took 130K, mostly from the savings his father had from working on construction fields.
His family couldn’t understand a lot of Hua’s actions at all. She’ll throw away freshly washed clothes and sheets and other things around the house. She’s constantly running away from home, stealing money to take a taxi back to her original family. Then, she’d get off the car before it got to its destination to wander around aimlessly. Not even getting pregnant stopped her from running away.
Zhang Cuiping (Zhang Wenhui’s mom) asked Hua why she kept running away, “And she said she was afraid of his hand. She thinks it’s scary.” But Zhang Maozhong was pretty sure she just wanted to go back to her family.
After Hua gave birth to her kid, Zhang Cuiping was worried that she’d take the baby with her the next time she ran away, so every time Zhang Cuiping went grocery shopping, she’d take the baby with her and lock Hua at home.
But Hua still took every opportunity to run away. In 2017, she was missing for half a month before she was found. Zhang Maozhong returned her to her family then, and the two families have never talked since.
“I’m not sure if it’ll turn out well for Hua or not once she marries again. It’s all up to her fate,” Luo Changfu said.
“It’s was way too hard looking for her. I never want to go through it again.” In Mei’s memory, her sister’s like playing “hide and seek” since ten years old. She liked to run to relative’s houses, but she would never knock on their doors. She’d just stand at their doorstep, or hide in their pig pen or cow shack, curling up in their straw bales. Usually, they would have to search for her for several days.
After marriage, Hua tried running away much more frequently, “about once every couple of months,” Mei said.
Once, Mei and her father spent a whole Full Moon Festival looking for her on the streets. She told herself in despair, “We must’ve owed her a lot in a past life, and we’re paying it back now.”
Once they found her, Luo Changfu was so furious that he beat Hua. He asked her why she ran away, and she wouldn’t say anything. So he began locking her up at home. But she would break the locks with a screwdriver.
One time, he found a chain and chained her legs down, but after a couple of days, she figured out how to break the chains too.
While Mei was in middle school, their mother Li Chunyan was checking Hua’s underwear, and found some wet spot on it that might’ve been blood. When asked about this, Li Chunyan was reluctant to give us any statements, and only said that, “The culprit ran away and never got caught. The results of the hospital checkup was that she wasn’t raped.”
The next time Hua was suspected to have been abused was when her in-laws suspected her child wasn’t actually their bloodline. She only married into the Zhang family in May of 2015, but her pregnancy checkup reveals her impregnation date didn’t line up. Their mother hurried to call Mei home and asked her to figure out what happened.
Mei had to patiently go question by question, piecing the event together with difficulty, from how her clothes were taken off, to the details of the rape.
On a street in the countryside, a man riding a motorcycle chatted her up, pulled her to an abandoned house by the side of the road, and raped her. No one expected that Hus would get pregnant.
In 2017, Zhang Maozhong finally decided they didn’t have the energy to keep watching over Hua, and decided to send her back home. He accidentally lost her in a train station, and only found her after half a month and took her home.
After getting home, Hua told Li Chunyan, that while she was staying a night at a family in her in-laws’ village, she was raped again. Soon afterwards, Li Chunyan discovered her period had stopped once again, and Mei was called home yet again to help her sister get an abortion.
In Luo Changfu’s eyes, there’s not much hope in calling the cops. “She can’t even figure out who did it. We wouldn’t know who to press charges against.”
The night of the 10th of September, Mei got into a heated argument again with Luo Changfu. Weeping, she demanded to know if he had done anything at all when her sister was raped before.
During the whole time, Luo Changfu just kept smoking and never said a word.
14th of September, still waiting for the details to be nailed down, Cheng Qingli decided to drop the engagement. She took her son to demand back the bride price. “This is money we worked hard for. We can’t let it be scammed from us.”
Luo Changfu demanded that Mei make up for this financial loss, but Mei wouldn’t back down at all. While they were at a standoff, Li Chunyan returned the bride price, and had Mei pay back the value of the gifts they received. And that’s how the conflict came toan end.
The whole time, Chen Ruifeng waited outside the door. He knew his marriage had fallen through. “It’s no good overthinking it,” He comforted himself. He’s got a coworker who married a disabled wife and his life is a catastrophe. “Maybe it’s for the best that she never comes to my family, you know?”
Comments say, “”Marry off”, what a delightful euphemism.”
“What a sad story. Every line is written full of “eating women”.”
“”My mom returned her to her original family”. Returned? Are women merchandise? If you’re not satisfied, you’ve got a 30-year return policy?”