Another case of abuse on women went viral on Sina Weibo, but unlike the last two cases when apparently unknown men attacked two different women on the street and a hotel lobby, the perpetrator is the husband.
And it is not a case of the man slapping or hitting the woman, but worse than that. The Zhejiang man capped years of domestic abuse on Li Yun, the wife, by cutting off her nose in April 2015. Li Yun sought the help of netizens by asking for money to defray the cost of reconstructive surgery.
Li Yin shared on Weibo on Tuesday how she suffered in silence for the past eight years being married to an abusive husband. But she endured it for the sake of their daughter.
The drunk husband wanted to go to his native village in the middle of the night, but Li Yin opposed the plan. The man was aware that Li Yun’s best feature was her nose, she he used her razor blade to cut it off. She initially thought he used his fingers to scrape her nose, but she felt blood rushing out.
Not content with what he did, the husband grabbed a towel and strapped it around Li Yun’s neck. “I could do nothing but try and pull the towel away with my hand when he heartlessly tore my nose down,” recalled the abused wife.
Li Yun woke up her sleeping daughter which made the husband from hell let go of the towel. She then called an emergency number, but it was too late for the hospital to save her nose. A specialist in Wenzhou she consulted told the battered woman that to reconstruct her face, they would create an artificial nose which would cost more than 300,000 yuan ($46,000).
With 60,000 yuan she borrowed from friends, Li Yun had the first surgery. For the second surgery and to send her daughter to school, Li Yun crowdfunded online. She explained that she needed to make her nose look normal enough so she could find work and support her daughter.
Her story became viral that by Wednesday, more than 480,000 Chinese netizens read her plight and responded by expressing their support for Li Yun. Her abusive husband has been placed on the wanted list since June 2015, but he has not been arrested and is likely hiding.
Li Yun’s story prompted one Weibo user to comment, “I thought that domestic violence which led to a woman’s disability could only happen in Afghanistan,” quoted China.org. She was referring to Aisha, an Afghan woman, whose ears and nose were cut by her Taliban husband.
Because of the growing number of domestic abuse, some netizens noted that many single Chinese women now fear a family life in the hands of an abusive husband.