After unexpectedly failing an interview I was sure I had in the bag, I wandered around in a daze and stumbled upon my wife and her best friend splurging at a luxury boutique.
As I wondered what was going on, I heard her friend ask:
“Are you really going to keep pretending to be poor and hiding it from Bi Cong? Doesn’t he love you? You even had his child. Is this all just a game to you?!”
My wife gave a teasing laugh. “Of course! I only pretend to be poor because I don’t want to spend money on him. We’re not even married, after all. But I think I’ve fallen for his younger brother, and now I’m kind of reluctant to leave.”
“Ah! No wonder you got HR to reserve that position for his younger brother. I remember your husband interviewed for it too! What if he finds out?”
She still didn’t care. “So what? We’re not even married. If he finds out, that’s a perfect excuse to dump him.”
The year she became pregnant, after graduating from a top university, I had no choice but to give up my fresh-graduate status to care for her. I was stuck at home looking after her and our daughter for five years.
She called me useless, yet had someone reserve the high-paying job that should have been mine for her younger brother, just to make him happy. Then she accused me of being petty.
Our daughter would gaze enviously at her cousin’s princess dresses and solid-gold safety lock, never realizing they were gifts from her “poor” mother, who bought them for her niece to win her favor.
I finally gave up. I took my daughter and flew to Beijing that very night.
