On the twenty-ninth day of the divorce cooling-off period, Shen Ruoqing felt that he had finished all the bad luck in his life. Ex-husband Chen Xudong got into a white BMW at the door of the Civil Affairs Bureau without looking back. His female secretary was sitting in the passenger seat, and the two embraced each other in the car. Shen Ruoqing didn't cry, not because he didn't want to cry, but because the tears had soaked in his stomach and turned into a pot of sour soup, which he couldn't spit out or swallow. She stood on the steps in front of the Civil Affairs Bureau, holding her five-year-old son Chen Xiaoye in her left hand, and carrying a woven bag in her right hand. Inside was all the belongings she had packed away from the home where she had lived for seven years - a few changes of clothes, a stack of bankbooks, household register, marriage certificate (now invalidated), divorce certificate (still warm from the oven), and Xiaoye's favorite stuffed rabbit, whose ears had long been bitten to pieces.
