Overseas "temporary couples": Are they out of helplessness or ruthlessness?

More and more people are rushing out of the country and living alone overseas. There are many inhumane aspects. "Temporary couples" have emerged as the times require. Is it immoral? Illegal? Is the struggle between human nature and morality an annotation of the emotional life of this generation?

Although the proportion of "temporary couples" among Chinese in the United States is not high, the impact they have is not small.

As the saying goes: Every family has a hard-to-recite scripture. People always have to face reality, but it is so "realistic" that in order to solve some practical problems of life in the United States, they treat the marriage contract as a piece of paper, regardless of the consequences this will have on the uninformed domestic spouse and innocent children. What kind of harm makes people sigh again and again. Many people have the illusion that as long as they hide the fact that they are living together from their spouse, there will be no "side effects." But not to mention that with China's opening up, Sino-US economic, trade and cultural exchanges have become more frequent, and information circulation has become more and more convenient. It has become increasingly impossible to hide the truth. Even if it is true, the hearts of the "temporary couple" cannot be immune. distortion.

Mr. Xu: Gentleman’s Agreement

Mr. Xu from Tianjin came to the United States alone five years ago in the name of visiting relatives, while his wife and five-year-old son stayed in China. Before going abroad, Mr. Xu was the Chinese agent of a French cosmetics company, earning an annual income of nearly 200,000 yuan. According to his friends, the reason why Mr. Xu chose to go abroad was probably because he was afraid of being punished due to financial problems. In order to retain his legal status, after staying in New York for half a year, Mr. Xu went to Long Island University to study language at his own expense. He met Ms. Wu, who was studying for an MBA, and began an open cohabitation life.

According to Mr. Xu, the day after he met Ms. Wu, the two parties reached an agreement on living together. The reason should be analyzed from two aspects. First, he has been lonely for more than half a year. He went to Flushing to find a "Chinese Miss" to satisfy his physical needs, but there was only passion and no emotion. Secondly, he wanted to learn English and needed a teacher, and Miss Wu had both of these conditions. Ms. Wu also had her own difficulties at the time. One was that she was about to graduate. She wanted to find a job in Manhattan and was preparing to leave Long Island. Mr. Xu was living alone in Queens with relatives who could provide him with accommodation; At that time, her husband's study visa was rejected again. She felt that she "had to return to reality from the dream", so she chose a cohabitation that could solve real life problems.

Mr. Xu’s friends revealed that before they lived together with Ms. Wu, they had a “gentleman’s agreement”: if a family member of one party came to the United States, the cohabitation relationship would end immediately. From then on, the two people participated in various activities in the name of "husband and wife". At first, their relatives and friends were surprised that the two of them did not shy away from or deny that they had families in China. As time went by, they became accustomed to it. .

Mr. Xu said that he and Ms. Wu still have phone calls or send e-mails to their families in China once a week, and they also send some money back to their families every once in a while. Ms. Wu, who is currently working in a telephone company, said that she was under a lot of psychological pressure when living together at the beginning, and she did not want more people to know about it. But as time went by, everything became natural, and her life and work became relatively stable. The feelings have also deepened to a certain extent. What she doesn't dare to face is that if one day her husband or Mr. Xu's wife comes from China, how should this cohabitation relationship end? "Because the person I know best now is him (Mr. Xu), not my husband in China. Besides, if he really comes over, will he be able to adapt to life here? What if he really knows that I am with other people here?" A man has lived together, can he accept this reality? ”

Mr. Ma: From cohabitation to marriage

Mr. Ma had the same experience as Mr. Xu, but the results were very different. Six years ago, he went to the United States with a TV crew to film a film, and then refused to return to Beijing. Although his wife and daughter at home objected to this, he decided to stay in the United States and make a wish, and said to his wife and daughter, We will get them here within a few years.

Mr. Ma emphasized that before living together, he told Ms. Li that his wife and daughter were both in China and would come over sooner or later. He and his wife had a very good relationship, and choosing to live together was just to solve the immediate problem. question. But in the subsequent days of living together, as the relationship between the two gradually deepened, Ms. Li repeatedly requested that he divorce his domestic wife, but she never received Ma's consent, so Ms. Li moved out in the name of "going to school." This ended nearly a year of cohabitation.

After more than a year of hard work, Mr. Ma had some savings, and like other New York street painters, he began to go out of New York and rent counters in shopping malls in other states. In Mr. Ma's words, it was a transition from "guerrilla warfare" to "positional warfare", and relatively speaking, the income has increased significantly. Mr. Ma first chose Pennsylvania and painted there for more than a year. During this period, he met Miss Jiang from Taiwan and lived together for more than half a year.

Mr. Ma introduced that Ms. Jiang opened a large-scale beauty salon in the local area. The business was good and the person was nice and reasonable. When she learned that Ma didn't have a green card yet, she sympathized and suggested getting married, but the condition was that Mr. Ma would close his business and come over to help her take care of it.

Mr. Ma said that he knew that Miss Jiang proposed such a condition for his own good, but the reason he could not accept it was that he did not want to make others laugh at him for a green card, nor did he want to be manipulated by others for the rest of his life. The second cohabitation ended in an amicable breakup. Mr. Ma subsequently left Pennsylvania and moved to California.

On Christmas two years ago, Mr. Ma brought a Russian girl back to New York and had dinner with the reporter. During the dinner, it was learned that half a year after he and the Russian girl lived together, the two parties had held a wedding.

When the reporter was surprised, Mr. Ma explained that this time he did not just stay in cohabitation. The reason was very simple: his wife filed for divorce and the daughter was awarded to him and has been given to his parents to take care of. Mr. Ma said that after four years in the United States, the President sent back US$60,000 to his ex-wife and daughter, which can be regarded as "fulfilling the obligations of a husband and father." He also heard that his ex-wife had been living with someone else for a long time in China. However, comparing his feelings with her, he said that he could understand this. "Everyone has this physiological need."

After living together several times, Mr. Ma said deeply: Chinese people are too tired to live, and living together is even more tiring. You have to take care of both sides (domestic and foreign) at the same time, and in the end you can really settle down. There are very few stories with happy endings. Fortunately, I woke up earlier and now I should live for myself.

Miss Wu: It’s a waste of money

Miss Wu, who now works for a large company in South Carolina, looks very virtuous and quiet, and does not look like a deviant in the relationship between men and women. When she talked to reporters about the past of more than a year when she and Mr. Cheng lived together when she was a graduate student in New Jersey, her words were more bitter. Mr. Cheng from Guangzhou is a visiting scholar sent by the government. He is enthusiastic, cheerful and helpful. He has a very warm relationship with everyone in the department. He is very popular among the girls in the department and has many close friends around him. Miss Wu knew that his beautiful wife and eight-year-old son were both in Guangzhou. When he arranged for them to come to visit relatives, he made some mistakes in the documents, and their arrival in the United States was delayed.

Ms. Wu said that she was also going through the procedures for her husband and son to come to the United States to visit relatives. She often consulted the experienced Mr. Cheng, and they became closer and closer with each other. She was very busy with her homework at the time and didn't have much energy to work. She had no choice but to cut back on expenses if she couldn't make money. She didn't want to spend $350 a month on rent. All the troubles came together: she was defrauded when buying a car, and she met a particularly harsh Professor Diao... She said that she and her husband were quite affectionate in the past, but she was alone in a foreign country, and her husband " "Water from afar cannot quench the thirst of the nearer." I am really overwhelmed by these annoying facts. After thinking about it, we moved in with Mr. Cheng in his apartment. Both parties also made it clear at the time: This was all about helping each other when they were away from home. If their "other halves" came, they would go their separate ways.

The two of them lived together secretly, and they still appeared as "roommates" to the outside world. But paper can't contain the fire, no matter how good the actor is, he can't act everywhere all the time. People with a discerning eye have long seen their close relationship. According to Ms. Wu, there were actually nosy people who wrote "informant letters" to her husband and Mr. Cheng's wife respectively, but these two people have been holding back in order to avoid causing trouble when they came to the United States. Mr. Cheng's wife came to the United States first, and his family was the first to disintegrate. Mr. Cheng came to discuss with her and asked her if she could get a divorce and the two of them could form a new family. At this moment, she felt sorry for her husband, who was also packing his bags to come to the United States, so she refused. Unexpectedly, when her husband came, he would show his cards to her and use his own hard-working story of working and raising children to accuse her of being heartless. Her heart skipped a beat and she said, let’s get a divorce! But when she went to find Mr. Cheng again, he saw a good opportunity in China and returned to China for development.

A cohabitation had a serious impact on the lives of six people in two families.