After China Abuse Scandal, Celebrity Teacher’s American Wife Files for Divorce

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Associated Press

Li Yang, creator of Crazy English, speaks at a middle school in Chengdu, southwestern China’s Sichuan province Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

Sina Weibo

A screenshot shows a message posted to Kim Lee’s account on Sina Weibo on October 24, 2011 in which she announces plans to divorce her husband, “Crazy English” founder Li Yang.

The American wife of China’s most famous English teacher has filed for divorce after a months-long public battle between the two that ignited a rare public debate in the country around domestic violence.
Kim Lee, wife of “Crazy English” founder Li Yang, filed for divorce with the Beijing Chaoyang District Court, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported Thursday, citing the court.
Ms. Lee had posted a message earlier this week on her account on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo microblogging service announcing that she was headed to divorce court. “Happiness will find me. I will leave the past behind me. Today my life begins,” she wrote, attaching a picture of a pair rings laid on top of a “Memorandum of Reconciliation” apparently written by Mr. Li on Sept. 9 in which he vowed never again to use violence against his wife.
The controversy over Mr. Li’s treatment of his wife exploded at the end of August when Ms. Lee posted a photo of her bruised and swollen forehead, writing in Chinese “I love losing face = I love hitting my wife’s face?” – an apparent reference to a message her husband had posted to his own Weibo account the same day in which he’d laid out the “Crazy English credo”: “I enjoy losing face! I enjoy making mistakes! I enjoy being laughed at. I love practicing English. The more mistakes you make, the more progress you will make!”
Over the next few days, Ms. Lee would go on to post additional photos of injuries she’d sustained, accusing Mr. Li of being violent with her in front of their children. In one post, she accused him of slamming her head into the floor.
Mr. Li publicly acknowledged hitting his wife roughly a week later, apologizing to her and the pair’s children while saying he had agreed to undergo counseling.
The revelation that Mr. Li – whose messianic persona and immensely successful English-teaching empire have earned him fame even outside China (he was the subject of a 6,000-word profile in the New Yorker in 2008) – launched a widespread debate about domestic violence on the Chinese Internet. Mr. Li helped fan the debate himself by saying in subsequent interviews he was surprised at the controversy. “Our problem involves character and cultural differences,” he told the China Daily on Sept. 13. “I hit her sometimes but I never thought she would make it public since it’s not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders.”
While a reluctance to air dirty household laundry in public is common the world over, women’s rights activists, sociologists and others concerned with protecting the rights of the abused in China have long lamented the effect the “keep it in the family” ethos has had in stifling discussion of domestic violence in the country.
That reticence also makes it difficult to judge the accuracy of domestic violence statistics. According to a report by the All-China Women’s Federation and the National Bureau of Statistics released earlier this month, nearly 25% of Chinese women have experienced domestic violence – roughly the same rate as in the U.S. according to the most recent available statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Justice (pdf).
Roughly 80 million Chinese households have been affected by domestic abuse, China Daily reported in September, citing the All-China Women’s Federation.
Further complicating the effort to address domestic violence, Chinese women’s rights advocates say, is the failure of legislators to approve a long-discussed law that would establish guidelines for the handling of domestic abuse cases and create a support system for domestic abuse victims.
Ms. Lee’s travails – and Mr. Li’s highly erratic handling of the controversy – may help speed up the passage of that law. Despite trumpeting traditional Chinese discretion, the language teacher has seemed all too eager to discuss the details of his family’s deterioration, most recently during a salty on-air show-down with reality show star Jin Xing during which he matter-of-factly described battering his wife’s head against the floor.
For her part, Ms. Lee has responded by documenting her struggles with Mr. Li on Weibo and in letters translated and posted online by an anti-domestic violence NGO. “Even if I could not remain safely at home, I have the option of returning to my own country. This is not a choice for Chinese women,” she wrote in one letter posted Oct. 16. “If I can help to change the very wrong concepts that domestic violence is ‘common, acceptable, should not be disclosed, the fault of the wife, part of Chinese culture’ then I feel both honored and obligated to do so.”
Ms. Lee has requested custody of the couple’s three daughters and 50-50 split of their joint property, Xinhua said.

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