In trying to help her cope with her anger issues and get outside support for her, I reached out to her mother Chun Dai and explained to her Dai’s sporadic fits of anger. Chun Dai was willing to help initially by having talks with Dai, and things were okay. But quickly Dai started to point her finger back at me, accusing me of being the cause of her irregular bouts of temper. Her mother grew unwilling to intervene as well, saying that I should be more patient with Dai because I am a man.
I logged into Dai’s Facebook account in November 2016 and downloaded a copy of her chat log. I was able to do that because Dai’s Facebook password was a password we used for our common accounts, including Amazon, her college application site, and other sites. I came up with that password. I was morally shocked and disgusted by what I saw.
These messages run backwards, from bottom skyward, as that is how downloaded Facebook chat history looked like, at least at the time I downloaded it in 2016. The snippets I publicize here don’t necessarily have a chronological order.
Upon discovering my log-ins, Dai immediately started deleting her Facebook chats in bulk, because the last thing she wanted was to let other people see them. There were signs indicating earlier history expunging as well: extended periods missing in her chats with several white male individuals. She also set up a new Facebook account and told her friends that I was cyber-harassing her, inciting new waves of hatred against me. Afraid that I would show other people these outrageous messages filled with hate, racism, and sexism, she deepened my isolation by telling my friends I had mental issues and asking her friends and my friends not to believe anything I said.
Throughout my relationship with Dai Li, I have only once made a record of her messages after seeing her horrifying and inexcusable chats. That was reviled by her and her white male friends as “making things up” and “cyber attacks”. When she needed a temporary phone for a few days, I gave her one of my old phones, on which she discovered my chat logs with my ex from several years ago. She flipped at those messages, transferring a copy of them to her computer and yelling at me. I guess I will be talking more about this under the Power and Control Wheel.
I will be posting some screenshots from her chat history. Due to the vastness of her Facebook chat log, I couldn’t possibly go through everything. I have only been able to snap the most direct, paradigmatic, and morally appalling messages and put them here. Apart from overt suggestions of violence, there are a lot of other messages fraught with subtle racism and abusive language directed toward me. I might be able to add them to this blog gradually.
I have decided against redacting the names in these chats, because I know otherwise Dai would insist I made up these chat logs. I defy these people to come out and own up to their words. I defy them to call me a CHINK, a DOUCHE, a LIAR, despicable and myriad other things again. If you harbor intensive hate against an Asian person who you have never met, so much so you never hesitate to make death threats to them, why not make it public? I am lucky I have not been lynched, like Emmett Till was.
This is what happened, how it happened, when it happened, where it happened; and I am not leaving out the who. I know by doing so I am making myself susceptible to new waves of racist attacks, but I really have no other option.
This is from four days after she severely injured my nose, causing permanent deformation in the cartilage. She was telling a white guy I “casually hated and detested” her.This is a white guy allegedly in his 40s with a persistent fantasy about raping petite Asian girls. According to Dai, he sold tea in Durham. Incidentally, he is actually Facebook friends with most of my Asian female friends. Go figure!This is a white fraternity guy that Dai frequently threatened me with. Dai even told him that I was afraid of Dai’s male friends like him.This is another fraternity guy who on multiple occasions suggested to Dai that he would like to physically assault me, for Dai.Yet another white guy; yet another prejudiced comment
I came across this article while trying to write a critique of Hollywood white ethnocentric narratives myself. It is a must-read. Very germane to the racist ordeal I am going through.
Behold the trailer for “No Escape,” a tale of one American family’s struggle to survive against faceless Southeast Asian hordes.
Have you watched it yet? Good. So now you know the plot: A dad played by Owen Wilson naively relocates his wife and kids to the Asian tropics. Big mistake! The savages revolt and start shooting at white people from helicopters.
It’s essentially a xenophobic nightmare brought to life with A-list actors and a multi-million dollar production budget.
The villains appear to be a melange of various foreign rebels. They’re like a neo-Khmer Rouge, with an ISIS-style glee for murdering Americans, set loose in a World War Z landscape with a few Buddhist temples and Hawaiian shirts.
“No Escape” takes place in a fictional Southeast Asian country that bears a strong likeness to Thailand. The movie was shot in Chiang Mai, a serene city in the north. It was originally called “The Coup” — a prescient title given that Thailand’s military decided to seize power in May 2014 not too long after filming wrapped up. (Not that coups are so unusual here.)
That coup, while tragically reverting Thailand to a mismanaged authoritarian state, did not entail mowing down foreigners block by block. The “coup” movie title didn’t last long, anyway. It was changed because, according to the gossip site Hollywood Reporter, it “tested poorly with audiences that didn’t know what the heck a ‘coup’ was.” (my note: but they apparently understood the horror of their privileged place of leisure swarming with savage Asians)
Hollywood has no obligation to the truth. Even films that claim to depict real-life events, such as “Argo,” can mangle facts and still win top prizes at the Academy Awards.
“No Escape” is fiction, of course, so it can warp reality with abandon. But the film still looks like a movie designed to tap into America’s ugly fear of the so-called “third world,” an imagined place of chaos where life is cheap and Americans are easy prey.
This fear is pervasive: 1 in 3 Americans are afraid of international travel. It’s also wildly overblown. Roughly 68 million Americans traveled abroad last year. Guess how many died from non-natural causes? About 800, mostly from traffic accidents.
It’s unfair to judge a film by its trailer alone. Maybe “No Escape” is full of nuance and insight. Or maybe it’s a film for Americans so sheltered that they don’t know what a coup is.
In retrospect, I don’t regret standing up to Tenzing or calling him out for his horrendous sexism and misogyny. But I do realize by being stubbornly firm in my stance in defending and protecting Dai Li and her mother, I actually allowed myself to be abused by Dai. Dai later seized on the cracks in my relationship with Tenzing, used to her advantage the lustful intentions of Tenzing’s friend Chris on her, and further alienated my relationship with Tenzing. I might talk about a period of my life under daily humiliation and abuse from Chris, Dai, and Tenzing in another post if I have energy left.
I would later realize, while reading my old chats with Dai Li, that three weeks from the incident she had told me a guy was asking her out. Oblivious to that Asian fetished white guy’s intentions, I actually encouraged her to go and meet new people. That guy was later revealed in Dai’s Facebook history to be Jack Gillette, a white senior student with an Asian fetish.
After being on edge for three hours, I was simply told “Dai has to be independent”. This is how her mother deals with similar things. Every time I have to take care of Dai. If anything goes awry, I am responsible. Both of them took my help, my life, and my time for granted. In retrospect, I was treated my like a servant than a boyfriend.
Dai told her mother she was not in danger. When I tried to get to the bottom of the incident, Dai’s mother told me to “leave it to Dai.”This chat is dug out of Dai’s Facebook history, showing Jack Gillette inviting Dai to his part on Central Campus.This is the day after.I had always encouraged Dai to meet new people.Dai asked me if she should go eat with a “white guy” who had asked her out to eat. She sounded unsure about going, but I convinced her she should go.
I decided to leave Dai multiple times and cut off lines of communication with her. Whenever that happened, she would mass message my friends and tell them that I was having mental issues, or that she couldn’t get in touch with me and was very worried about me, and all the while she would spam my phone, my email inbox, and Gchat with messages begging me to come back to her.
Dai Li messages a friend of mine, telling him she can’t find me and is worried about me.This is a screenshot my friend sent to me of a conversation they had with Dai Li. Dai says “I have sent him over 20 emails, but he is not responding. He must be having some misunderstanding about me. Please help me contact him!”
I stood up for what I believed in. And the consequence was racist oppression and violence.
I used to naively consider that day a turning point of sorts, a watershed, if you will, that partitions my relationship with Dai Li into two two separate chapters, and everything from there started to fall apart. But in reality, things had been going downhill before that point in time. One of my domestic violence counselors suggested that abusive relationships normal have early signs and a manipulative partner could act totally differently during the honeymoon period. Indeed, Dai became irascible and emotional volatile several months after we started dating, and started showing physical tendencies in mid-2015.
For the most part of September 2015, I was in China. Having just finished an internship at a human rights organization in Tokyo, I was enjoying my time with friends and family. Dai Li had just started her new college life at Duke. Dai had applied to live off campus on psychological ground, and had given the Office of Housing and Residential Life information regarding her unstable mental states and sensitive temper, which is one of the reasons she asked me to live with her and take care of her at Duke. By the time Dai was about to board her plane to Durham, she hadn’t looked for housing. I asked my then best friend Tenzing Thondup Thabkhe if he would let Dai stay in his spare room while I kept looking for another place for Dai. Tenzing is from a prominent and affluent Tibetan family. He and I met during our freshman year at Duke, and despite our differences in family backgrounds and personalities, we bonded over an insatiable curiosity to know anything and everything about religion, history, culture, and Asian philosophical traditions and languages. So Dai moved into an apartment with Tenzing and Tenzing’s roommate Chris. I didn’t know Chris that well, but I was grateful for them taking Dai in.
So began our long distance relationship. WeChat and Facebook messaging was the tie that linked our lives together. We were busy and happy for the most part, but we also had our fair share of squabbles. When we did squabble, I often decided take a chill pill. It was not uncommon that I decided to cool things down by disengaging from an argument with her on the phone and occupying myself with other things. However, more often than not my disengagement from an argument didn’t have its intended effect. A lot of times, Dai would get even more upset and very agitated with my radio silence and tell her mother she “wanted to die” because I wouldn’t talk to her. Then I would get pressure from her mother forcing me to talk to Dai. I think I have uploaded some screenshots of what her mother said to me, and what Dai sent to her mother, and screenshots Dai’s mother sent to me to tell me Dai was distressed by me not talking to her. Those chats are in Chinese.
In the days after our spat in late September 2015, Dai also tried various ways to get my attention. But I was prepared to have more time for the both of us to cool down and reflect. On the early morning of September 28, Beijing time, around 10 A.M., (10 P.M. EDT), Dai called me on WeChat, and I missed it. After several missed calls, she sent me an unsettling message, telling me she was in extreme danger.
In Chinese, she said “I am in danger. Now will you pick up?” 萤萤 is her nickname. I took this screenshot and sent it to Dai’s mother the following day at her demand.
She then initiated another WeChat call to me. I picked up. My WeChat history shows the call lasted for about 13 minutes. I recall her sounding immensely distraught, crying and yelling at me “I am in danger! Don’t you care? Don’t you care at all?” I tried to calm her down and get her to give me a lowdown on the state of affairs. I couldn’t get a whole lot of information out of her, except that she was at a party on Central Campus, and she had been drugged. She felt increasingly unsafe, she said. Duke’s Central Campus is where all the fraternities and sororities cluster. If you are a fan of The Hunting Ground like I am, you’d know the notoriety of rampant rape on American college campuses, and you’d understand why I was immediately worried.
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t get her to give me any more information. She kept telling me she had been drugged and was in immediate danger. I asked her to call Tenzing, but she claimed she had call and Tenzing had refused to take the situation seriously. Concerned, I asked who else was there at the party. I remember her saying she was alone in a room and there were male strangers outside. I couldn’t get clear answers from her on anything else. Sounding distressed, she kept crying and asking if I “still loved her.” “You don’t care about me at all!” She declared and then hung up the phone.
I at once called her back, but it wasn’t answered. I tried again a couple times, and also on Facebook, Gchat, and her mobile phone, to no avail. At that point, I became more rattled. Being on the other side of the planet, my hands were tied and the things I could do to help her were limited. My first response was to contact Tenzing Thondup Thabkhe, my then best friend and Dai’s flatmate. Knowing him well and counting him as one of my closest friends, I thought he would straightaway grasp the gravity of the situation. I made haste to try to lay hold of Tenzing on WeChat and Gchat.
Note: the dates in some of the screenshots I am posting here are off, because I have changed my phones over the years and migrated these chat logs several times. Some of the screenshots are from my current phone while other were taken on an older phone. It seems to be a WeChat glitch that data migration combined with timezone changes will likely cause time stamp drifts. Therefore some of the time stamps are off by 24 hours.
The date stamp on this screenshot is early by a day as a result of chat log migration I think.
Tenzing was not immediately responsive, so thinking on my feet I tried another friend from college, Emily Feng, who was close to both of us, hoping she would have better luck tracking Tenzing down. Emily worked in Beijing at the time, and we spent a lot of time together in those days. Although I knew she couldn’t be of immediate help to Dai, my time was running out.
I also alerted Dai’s mother Chun Dai and tried to reach out to Ralph Litzinger, a Duke professor that I was close to, who also happened to know Chun Dai too. (Chun Dai is very well-connected.) Understandably my messages put Chun Dai back on her heels.
I talked to Dai Li’s mother 戴春 on the phone about what Dai just told me.
As I kept trying to find other people in Durham to help Dai, I finally grabbed hold of Tenzing online. I asked him to call 911. Tenzing sounded reluctant and unconcerned, and was slow in responding. I kept pressuring him and messaging him about what I thought could be done to get hold of Dai. Almost an hour later, Tenzing replied that he is “having a discussion” with Chris, his roommate, on what, if anything, should be done. I was frustrated by his inaction. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t called the police yet, despite knowing a girl was in physical danger. Tenzing told me to calm down and said Dai had mentioned something about being on her period that morning. “So she is probably fine, just feeling dizzy from her natural hormonal activity.” said Tenzing, advising me to take a chill pill and not get my panties in a bunch. I was immediately incensed, telling Tenzing that is not an excuse for his apathy and insisting that he call 911 right away.
With Tenzing not responding, I felt a growing anxiety and vexation at his total lack of concern for someone in harm’s way. I kept bombarding him with messages, telling him even if Dai was not really in danger, he should still go check on her or have the police check on her. I asked him to go over to Central Campus to locate Dai if he was unwilling to contact the police. “Can’t, this phone call may die, also both me and Chris are under the influence and liable to crash the car.” Tenzing said. Disquieted by Tenzing’s nonchalance and disinterest, I retorted, “It must be so hard to get an Uber, I am sure.” “Wtf?!” Tenzing seemed pissed.
Meanwhile Emily, Dai’s mother Chun Dai, and I kept in touch with Ralph Litzinger. Dai’s mother was getting increasingly fretful and uneasy, questioning me why my friend Tenzing wouldn’t budge and call the police to help Dai.
Dai’s mother is saying, “Why is your friend not calling the police?”
Ralph decided that he was going to touch base with Tenzing and have Tenzing call the police. At Ralph’s request, Tenzing finally made a call to Duke Police Department, one and a half hours after Dai’s distressed call to me.
When Duke police finally located Dai Li in a central campus apartment, much to everyone’s surprise, Dai claimed she was fine and was not in danger in any way. Dai’s mother Chun Dai sent Dai multiple messages asking her what exactly had happened. Dai replied she had been at a party and had been totally fine. Turning distrustful, Chun Dai asked me to show her proof that Dai had indeed asked me for help. I did.
I sent Dai Li’s mother screenshots of Dai crying to me for help on WeChat.
Later that night Dai responded to my messages by reassuring that she had indeed faced danger but couldn’t possibly tell her mother that. She explained that she didn’t want her mother to worry. I relayed that message to her mother Chun Dai.
This is me relaying what I had heard from Dai to her mother Chun Dai. Dai claimed to me that she had escaped rape but she didn’t want to tell her mother the truth.
I was also under heat from Tenzing for sounding “false alarm” and forcing him to call the police for nothing. Tenzing is livid at the pressure I put on him and accused me of “being rude and inconsiderate.” Livid that I twisted his arms and made a big deal out of nothing, Tenzing demanded an apology from me. He insisted that it was not his responsibility to look after Dai, and I had no right to demand him either calling the police or driving to check in on Dai. “If she wants to go out alone at night and gets raped, it’s on her. It’s her own fault to get into situations like that.” Tenzing declared, “I opened my home to you with generosity and kindness, and this is how you repaid me?? Causing me trouble and making unreasonable demands??”
Without hesitation I rejected his interpretation of the event and told him in the case of rape it is never a woman’s fault when she goes out at night regardless if she is alone or how late it is, or where she goes. For me, it was a matter of principle, as clear as day. Victim-blaming is more harmful than apathy and inaction, and it destroys the victim’s last bit of self-esteem and confidence. I just wouldn’t tolerate victim blaming. (Ironically, I later would fall victim to malicious and hateful victim blaming in my own case of domestic violence, simply because being a staunch feminist I stood by a woman who then seized on it and used it as a weakness of mine to manipulate our relationship.)
Trying to get me to see it his way and apologize for my rudeness, Tenzing also suggested that Dai “cried wolf” on me and I shouldn’t have gotten worked up. Tenzing insisted he was just being rational about the whole thing.
Tenzing and I had a protracted argument on WeChat and Gchat, with me insisting the situation called for immediate response and calls to the authorities. I also told him how worried Dai’s mother and I had been upon hearing the news from Dai, hoping he would understand a mother’s worries about her daughter, to which Tenzing responded:
Fuming at what I saw as pure sexism and misogyny, I decided to stand my ground. I told him that was way out of line and utterly uncalled for. That was the beginning of the eventual ferocious collapse of our friendship, a relationship that lasted for over four years and eventually came crumbling down because I refused to apologize for my holding on to what I saw as feminist principles.
Tenzing still demanded an apology from me, a demand I saw as unjustified and firmly refused to give in to. Tenzing then unfriended me on Facebook and WeChat.
It wasn’t until a year later when I accidentally logged into Dai’s Facebook and saw what she had said about that night.
This is a message Dai sent to a white fraternity guy involved in the party on September 27, 2015.
In retrospect, Tenzing Thondup Thabkhe was probably right that Dai was not really in danger. She only made a distress call to me to get my attention and get me worried, and then deliberately hung up her phone to make it that much more so. She later scornfully called the whole thing a “drama,” claiming I was being dramatic and made a scene for being “jealous”. That is what I got for standing up for what I believed in. Oh there is actually more. See the whole story in another post.
Also see this post for more details about that night.
Having been to 60+ hours of counselling, I am still straining to cope with a traumatic past and physical injuries. Most of my injuries are gone, leaving behind scattered bodily marks and dozens of photos that bear witness to my once blood-smeared face and bruises that covered different body parts at different times in a time span of over a year. They say “Time heals all wounds.” They say “In time everything will be okay.” But those are just what they say. I now have a permanent warp in my nose cartilage from a physical assault, causing severe breathing obstruction from time to time.
Some other things also don’t get better in time. Dozens of counseling sessions that aimed to help me overcome the emotional abuse and trauma have had some progress but have seemingly stopped working after a certain point. It is always in the still of the night that I jolt away to nightmares, which most of the time are not about the physical assault per se, but more often than not filled with immense anxiety arising from physical and emotional threats, intimidation, deliberate isolation, and indifference.
Gender-fluid and gender-neutral Power and Control Wheel
It wasn’t until I was shown this diagram by a domestic violence victim counselor that I started to fully appreciate the scale of the abuse I have been going through. Almost every DV therapist/advocate/social worker talks about the Power and Control Wheel. There are more than one version of it, but they share a basic structure aimed to facilitate understanding of power dynamics in domestic violence. I am using a particularly gender-neutral and gender-fluid one.
“Please look at the wheel and tell me which of them apply in your situation.” I remember being asked in a counseling room the first time I saw one of these.
A lot of them do. More than I had thought.
Reviewing the Power and Control Wheel was to become a routine in a conversation I was to have with every new counselor.
In other posts on this blog, I will detail the kind of abuse, violence, and isolation I have been subjected to, but here I just wanted to briefly go down the list and check off things as they come to mind. Most of the things I list here can be substantiated by screenshots from her own Facebook chats that I have uploaded or will be uploading.
Using privilege:
Treating me like a servant:
Yes. The relationship was missing reciprocity entirely. Dai told me without me taking care of her she couldn’t possibly keep on. But she would use very abusive, demeaning language in our daily communication, demanding I do things her way. She once told a white fraternity guy that I wasn’t her boyfriend but her chef instead, and my value was that I knew how to cook. There should be screenshots of this in the picture section.
Making all the big decisions:
For the most part of our dating, my life had to revolve around her. I took care of her, cooking and cleaning for her. The sad thing is I actually wanted to. I thought it was love.
Being the one to define gender roles
To this day I still believe we were subverting traditional heterosexual gender roles. I dedicated a part of my life to her betterment and convenience, which ironically became the reason for the intense hatred of her white male friends.
Using privilege to discredit me; putting me in danger;
Dai actively and very successfully tried to isolate me. She sought out my friends on Facebook, people I had introduced her to but didn’t know her, and added them. Then she began telling people I had mental issues. Her Facebook chat screenshots show she wanted to cut me off from the rest of the world by alienating me from my social contacts. She and her mother also take advantage of their class privilege to discredit and dehumanize me, making it impossible for me to seek justice.
Cutting off my access to resources
Yes. By Dai’s mother’s mere words, I was banished from several research groups and chat groups on China’s labor movement, for the simple reason that Dai’s mother is powerful and well-known in those circles. Dai’s mother cut off my access to my ongoing research on labor rights in China, while Dai cut off my access to my college professors. Several widely recognized Chinese labor activists have known Dai’s abusive behavior toward me for years, but when I, under threats of violence and constant abuse, turned to them for help, they all turned their back to me, simply because Chun Dai asked them to. I don’t have a powerful and influential mother or a well-heeled father, so I deserve to be physically assaulted by someone who does and brutalized by her white male friends?
Using the system against me
Yes. When I tried to report her plagiarism, I was met with physical and death threats. Dai also ordered me not to contact any of my college professors, accusing me of attempting to damage her relationships with “her professors”, people who I had introduced her to. She even gloated that my report of her plagiarism to a faculty member “enraged her professors” and “they all hated me” for that. She and her family, being well-connected, rich, and influential, have been able to employ the system against me, barring every possibility for me to even get my voice heard. Dai has used her connections with popular students, incidentally almost all of them white males, and Dai’s mother Chun Dai used her powerful and commanding ties with people in power to intimidate me and gag me into silence. Their juggernaut ability to mobilize the entire system and swing it to the side of white racism and oppression against a single socially vulnerable Asian person from a lower social class is beyond belief.
Isolation
Limiting my outside activities
I used to be active in Duke’s activist scene, especially among Asian American activist groups. People from my time should remember me attending and occasionally speak up at numerous events/panel discussions on race, gender, and social justice. To ensure I couldn’t get outside help, Dai ordered me not to go to these events any more and not to talk to friends I used to know very well.
Using jealousy to control
Dai was very jealous throughout our relationship. She stalked my ex-partners’ social media pages and often talked ill of them. “How could you date her? She is so not pretty.” She tried to confine my at home, removing me from social life. She also added my friends she barely knew on Facebook, telling them I “needed help” because I had “mental issues,” and asking them not to believe whatever I said. In the mean time, she kept her own friends hidden from me. Until I saw her Facebook messages, I had had no clue she was talking to multiple white guys, most them juniors and seniors at the time and fraternity members at Duke, and using highly abusive language to refer to me.
Controlling who I see or talk to
Yes. She did a lot of things to limit my interactions with people other than her. There was one time that I implied that I met people she knew, and she immediately started a witch hunt among her friends. She asked them if they were the people that had talked to me. See the uploaded screenshots for this part.
Saying no one will believe me
Yes. Dai Li repeatedly told me no one would ever believe me, regardless of all the photos of my own injuries. She eventually sent me an incensed email in late 2017 after learning about me filing a police report and telling on her plagiarism, stating that my attempts to “sabotage her relationship with her professors” would all fail.
Her friends popular, low life, family
Denying, minimizing, and blaming
Making light of the abuse
Yes. After she left a permanent injury in my nose, she said “Your nose was like that.” and then went on to comment that other injuries on my body were nothing serious.
Saying it didn’t happen
Yes! It was extremely upsetting for me to later come across the messages she sent to some friends on Facebook days after she severely injured my nose and my body. She joked about my injuries and said it was just some “old injuries”.
Shifting responsibility for abusive behavior
She always blamed me for her abusive behavior. In the beginning stages, she cited “You didn’t cherish me” as the reason for her change to more aggressive demeanor. Later it would become “How else would you expect me to treat you?”
Saying it was my fault; accusing me of “mutual abuse”
Yes. She told many of her friends and my friends that I was mentally unbalanced and abusive. In addition, she also told them I had protested her physical abuse and violent threats. Despite knowing my protests and my fear, her white male friends fervently agreed that I was a problem and volunteered to find me and assault me.
Saying women can’t abuse
Yes. This is actually coming from her male friends.
Saying “it was just fighting,” not abuse
Yes. In multiple occasions in her Facebook chats, she told her friends who were having “fights”.
Emotional abuse
Putting me down
Yes. One of her favorite things to do was comparing me with her white friends. “That guy is taller than you.” “He speaks better English than you.” She would ask me to explain passages from class readings and ideas in critical theory, and then would come to me the next day to tell me, “My friend said it meant something else. You were wrong. He is American, so he is getting it right.” She also belittled me for not speaking French. Ironically it was at my suggestion that she started taking French, first at Oberlin College, then at Duke. She made a hobby out of putting me down and frequently said things like “Armand said this. Did you even know that?” Armand was her French instructor at Duke, and a sense of superiority from learning French and from knowing popular people on campus permeated a lot of conversations she had with me.
Making me feel bad about myself
Apart from gas-lighting me, more than once Dai made comments about my grades at Duke. “You only got an A- in Michael Hardt’s class?! Everybody gets an A in that class.” “How did you even get a B+?” I didn’t know how to respond. But in fact that semester I was taking six classes AND sitting in on one, AND writing papers for her two Oberlin classes at the same time. Any slight mentions of these were met with vehement responses and more put-downs. She often took the same classes I did and gloated to and poured scorn on me after receiving higher scores than I did. I was happy for her, except that I took her take-home exam for Gareth Price’s Introduction to Linguistics, that I had to be on stand-by with ready-made answers and explanations for her class readings, and that I had to write her papers for a number of other classes. She also made frequent disparaging comments about my family means and social standing. “How could I be with some one like you from such a lowly family?” She said.
Name calling
Yes. She used the word BITCH to refer to me in her conversations with other people on Facebook. In those conversations, I have also been called CHINK, DOUCHE, LIAR, PETTY, PATHETIC.
Playing mind games
Yes. Initially she was just using the white guys to make me jealous and get my attention, or so I thought. Soon she seemed to start to enjoy her popularity among fraternity guys and being wanted and lusted after by them. When I tried to leave her, she spammed my phone and email inbox with profusely apologetic messages begging me to come back to her. There were over 500 text messages, WeChat messages, Facebook messages, Google Chat messages, and emails sent by her after I one-sidedly ended our relationship, left her, and stopped talking to her. She would keep calling my phone over 20 times in one hour after realizing I meant business. She always managed to persuade me to go back to her. In retrospect I shouldn’t have allowed her to yo-yo me back and forth. I am putting up some of the emails in screenshots. There is a lot more emails sitting in my inbox. Later in our relationship she would use different email accounts and Google accounts to try to contact me if I didn’t respond.
Making me feel guilty
Yes. As I was graduating from Duke, I made plans to work with a labor organization in China for a year, but Dai guilt-tripped me into staying with her and taking care of her at Duke. Initially it was just an irresistible pout, followed usually by such words as “So I don’t even know where you are going to be next year. How will the relationship work?” I remember an episode in 2015 when she found my years-old Google Chat messages with my ex and yelled at me, “You don’t love me!”
Intimidation
Displaying weapons
Yes. She pulled a knife on me a few times either when I asked her to leave the room but she refused or when I tried to leave. Scared for my safety and hoping to keep evidence, I did manage to snap a few pictures of that and I have sent the pictures to Durham Police Department when I first filed my report. A few other people have also seen those pictures. I am debating whether I should post those photos here.
Smashing things
Yes. I think I managed to snap some photos of this.
Coercion and threats
Making and carrying out threats to harm me
Yes. Eventually she did make good on her threats that her white male friends would “come get me”.
Threatening to commit suicide.
Yes. Many times when I expressed my wish to leave, either temporarily for same space or for good, she threatened to kill herself. She even pulled a knife, first threatened me with it, then threatened to kill herself.
Using economic abuse
Preventing me from keeping a job
I had to give up a number of opportunities I was presented with at graduation in order to stay with her and take care of her.
Keeping my name off joint assets
Yes. She never allowed my name to appear in our leases or subleases. She used that as a way to control and confine me. Because of that, multiple times in her Facebook chats fraternity guys eager to get involved volunteered to forcibly “remove me” or “kick me out”. In much the same way they talk about “removing illegals”. Toxic white masculinity at its best.
Also closely relevant to my case is this Power and Control Wheel for immigrants. After dating for almost two years, we got married in August 2016, in her hometown of Changsha, Hunan. I then changed my legal status in the U.S. to F2 spouse visa. Dai Li said she was overjoyed I could stay by her side, but since that time she has used her status as my visa sponsor (F1) to intimidate and control me.
Using legal status privilege
Threatening to withdraw papers:
Yes. More than once she ordered me to shut up, otherwise she would withdraw my papers. After she learned that I finally reported my abuse to the Domestic Violence Unit at Durham Police Department, Dai wrote an angry email to me and claimed that she only married me to “help me stay in the U.S.” She speaks of me, a Duke University graduate, as worthless and needing her to get legal status.
Intimidation
Hiding or destroying important papers:
Yes. After I reported Dai’s plagiarism to a faculty member, Dai swiftly learned about it and refused to let me get my passport along with my other belongings that I had left at her place. In desperation, I called and messaged her mother Chun Dai for help. As my WeChat screenshots obviously show, she completely ignored me. They withheld my passport for several weeks. Then a white guy started texting me and calling me in a very disdainful, hostile and aggressive manner, asking me to go to a location he designated to get my stuff. I feared for my safety and called Duke Police, which enraged Dai Li and her white male friends and unleashed torrential outpouring of violent threats.
Threats
Threatening to get me deported.
Dai made those threats multiple times after I told I couldn’t take her abuse any more and if she didn’t stop I would go to school officials about her fraudulent application to Duke and her plagiarism at Duke and Oberlin. In her Facebook chats, she told her fraternity friends that I was trying to get her kicked out of school. They responded by volunteering to “get involved” with me.
They call me a CHINK. 