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China Elevator Stories
"My Ex-husband Also Had Affairs"
I chat with the owner of a hostel in Qingdao.
02/06/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
I talk with the owner of a hostel in Qingdao. She watched me have a video call with my younger son, and we had been talking a bit about my situation.
She tells me: “My parents also got divorced. But they agreed that each parent would raise one of us, and they always allowed the other parent to see their children.”
“When did they get divorced?”
“When I was one year old. I stayed with my father and was raised by him. I am also divorced, just like you. After I had been married for only a few months, my mother had a car accident, where she hurt her head badly. Therefore, I moved back in with my mother to take care of her. Just like you, my ex-husband also had affairs. I found out one time, when I visited him in our apartment and found him with another woman. But he had been doing this frequently.”
“Do you have children?”
“No, because I had to take care of my mother, and also because I had opened this hostel, I decided it would be better if I didn’t become pregnant, or I wouldn’t have been able to keep doing my work. I opened this hostel in 2019. Shortly after, COVID-19 started and I didn’t have any guests because people didn’t travel. Everything got better in 2023, and I could pay back the loan in 2024, but I wouldn’t have been able to do so if I had become pregnant. Actually, when my ex-husband and I divorced, the other woman was already pregnant with his child.”
Have you ever met someone who is divorced?