Contact The Editor
Articles By This Author
• Misunderstandings: (1) "Mr. L," 31, a Chinese tourist visiting Dulmen, Germany, in July, went to a police station to report his stolen wallet, but signed the wrong form and was logged in as requesting asylum, setting off a bureaucratic nightmare that left him confined for 12 days at a migrant hostel before the error was rectified. (2) In August at a hospital in Shenyang, China, "Wang," 29, awaiting his wife's childbirth, was reported (by People's Daily via Shanghaiist.com) to have allowed a nurse to wave him into a room for anesthesia and hemorrhoid surgery -- a procedure that took 40 minutes. (The hospital quickly offered to pay a settlement -- but insisted that, no matter his purpose at the hospital, he in fact had hemorrhoids, and they were removed.) [The Guardian (London), 8-8-2016] [Shanghaiist.com, 8-17-2016]
• Evidently, many Chinese wives who suspect their husbands of affairs have difficulty in confronting them, for a profession has risen recently of "mistress dispellers" whose job instead is to contact the mistress and persuade her, sometimes through an elaborate ruse, to break off the relationship. For a fee (a New York Times dispatch said it could be "tens of thousands of dollars"), the dispeller will "subtly infiltrate the mistress's life" and ultimately convince her to move on. A leading dispeller agency in Shanghai, translated as the "Weiqing International Marriage Hospital Emotion Clinic Group," served one wife by persuading the mistress to take a higher-paying job in another city. [New York Times, 7-29-2016]