A university graduate in Beijing, she is still the dutiful daughter,
and within a week packed off to a poor village outside Harbin. Already
shattered by leaving everything behind including the man she cared
for, she was slapped around by her husband to be. He may not have
meant it — he was complete drunk every night. She spent several weeks
trying to deal with all this and was unable to really eat or sleep.

Finally she made a desperate call to my friend who agreed to pay the
debt — which the “groom” tried to raise to 100,000 RMB. Finally they
negotiated down to 65,000. They let her go and she returned last week.
The man let her go because she was uncooperative and “no good”.

While cynics would try to say this is a scam, I know these people and
know the girl is sincere — she is still very shaken by the whole
thing.

She said that if she couldn’t get out of it she was going to kill herself.

This got me thinking about the whole issue so I did a little research:

* China has the highest female suicide rate in the world
* A woman kills herself every four minutes in China
* The deal this girl’s mother made is absolutely illegal in modern China

I contacted a China women’s rights group — and they responded not
with the usual platitudes and quotations of the law but with phone
numbers of agencies in Harbin and a desire to get more information to
help this girl. I was impressed with the response.

In in the end, I guess it worked out OK, but how many others are there like this? Certainly tens of millions. Indeed, China’s dirty family “secret”.