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China Elevator Stories
Being Stalked By My Chinese Husband
After an incident in 2020, I realized I had been stalked by my Chinese ex, from whom I was separated but not yet divorced.
07/07/2023

Ruth Silbermayr
Author
In January 2020, I meet up with a former student whom I taught in Siping. I show him around Vienna, and we have dinner together. He tells me about his life as a student in Bonn. During our dinner at an Asian restaurant, he asks me to show him what a typical salary would be in Austria. I look it up online and hand him my phone for only a second so he can see it.
I was previously married to a Chinese man from Northeast China. A relationship like ours, between a Western woman and a Chinese man, is referred to as an ‘AMWF relationship.’
A few days after our meeting, my phone’s VPN is hacked, and my password is changed, so I can’t access my VPN anymore. My location is now trackable.

I assume my former student was sent by my Chinese husband to spy on me. My mother-in-law knew this student in person, and my husband and I had been separated at that time, but not yet divorced.
Months go by, and by the summer of the same year, emails mysteriously vanish from my inbox before I can open them and read them. A few times after this occurrence, and during Austria’s lockdowns, a blonde-haired stranger follows me around Vienna when I leave the house to visit a friend or to do grocery shopping.
The day my VPN was hacked, I knew my Chinese husband had installed stalkerware on my phone. I only found out later that certain spyware allows a stalker to delete a person’s emails from their inbox before the person can read them.
Stalking is notoriously hard to prove, so there was not much I could do.
Other Western women who have been in an ‘AMWF relationship,’ particularly those previously married to Chinese men, have also reported incidents of being stalked by their husbands or ex-husbands. Some have discovered surveillance devices installed and others have had their whereabouts tracked
Have you ever been stalked?