For Spring Festival this year, a man finally brought his Shanghai girlfriend back to his home village to meet his family for the first time, only to get dumped when she didn’t like the food.
This tragic love story has gone viral on the Chinese Internet over the last few days after being shared by the woman herself. She states that she is a 27-year-old from a well-off family in Shanghai, working in HR at a foreign company. While her boyfriend comes from a poor village in Jiangxi province. The two had been together for a year, despite protests from her parents, who worried that her boyfriend wouldn’t be able to buy a house in Shanghai for their marriage, and is too poor anyway for their daughter.
Still, the woman says that she thought that things were good, but abruptly changed her mind when she visited his family’s home for Spring Festival this year and sat down at the dinner table. She writes: “This is what was put on the table for us to eat when we arrived today…”
The woman decided right then and there to call the whole thing off and catch the first train back to Shanghai.
With China’s rising wealth gap, the story has struck a chord with netizens who wonder if love between social classes is still possible outside of the movies. Nearly 150,000 comments have been made under the original post on Weibo, with many writing in to emphasize the importance of shared socioeconomic status in relationships:
“The families of a couple should be well-matched. I can see where she’s coming from,” one netizen commented.
“Breaking up was the right thing to do, but she should have been a little smoother about it,” another wrote in.
But that doesn’t mean that netizens are letting the woman off the hook, most have also criticized the woman for her lack of manners, while also taking some shots at “leftover women.”
“You say that you are such a high-class person, and then you go to someone’s house as an honored guest and behave like that?” commented one Weibo user.
“This looks like a good countryside meal, you’re just a bitch,” wrote in another.
“There is fish and meat, your mother-in-law must have worked really hard to prepare this for you,” said one netizen.
“Sister, you are already 27. You don’t have time to be so picky,” commented another.
Meanwhile, one netizen wrote in to say that the food was good, it just needs a little color:
[Images via Weibo]