My Mother-in-Law Called Me a Hen Who Couldn’t Lay Eggs

Six months into my marriage, with no pregnancy, my mother-in-law, Li Fengying, moved in from the countryside. Bowl after bowl of bitter “fertility medicine” and insult after insult, calling me a “barren hen,” turned my marriage into a torture chamber of forced childbearing.

When the hospital diagnosed me with permanent uterine damage, my husband, Chen Jianguo, was showing off a new house to a woman his mother had picked out for him. As I writhed in pain in my hospital bed, my mother urged me to “turn a blind eye” and accept my husband having a child with another woman. And when I gathered evidence to fight back, I discovered that my mother-in-law had already been asking around for a psychiatrist, planning to brand me a “madwoman” and throw me out.

From meekly enduring everything to fighting back with my back against the wall, I am up against more than a vicious mother-in-law and a spineless husband. I am also confronting a tradition that has objectified women as tools for reproduction for thousands of years. In this war without gunfire, I will reclaim not only my dignity and freedom, but also the most basic rights of any human being: to be seen, to be heard, and to be respected.