PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2013-11-07 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did a Man Sue His Wife Over Ugly Children? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • This item about a Chinese man named Jian Feng who supposedly sued his wife for bearing him ugly children has been kicking around the Internet since at least 2004. Example: An account published in the Heilongjiang Morning Post back in that year maintained that Feng's wife had undergone extensive cosmetic surgery prior to meeting him to disguise her less-than-desirable looks but had not disclosed that fact to him, and her secret was given away when she gave birth to an ugly baby daughter and confessed. Feng thereupon successfully sued his wife both for divorce and monetary damages over her deceit: This item really picked up steam in 2012 when someone finally attached a picture to the story, and it has now been circulating on the Internet for over a decade, periodically resurfacing when some news outlet unaware of its background picks it up and runs it as a current and true news story. More recent outbreaks of this tale typically reference children rather than a single daughter and are accompanied by the purported photograph of the family in question, comprising three children: Clearly this photograph could have nothing to do with the story to which later became attached, as in that narrative the Fengs supposedly divorced after the birth of their first child, a daughter, but this family portrait includes three children, the eldest of which is a boy. Indeed, this image is completely unrelated to the infamous news story about a man suing his wife over ugly children and actually originated with a 2012 advertisement for a Taiwanese plastic surgery center featuring Taiwanese model Heidi Yeh (Ye Wan Cheng). Yeh posed for a family shot with children whose appearances were later digitally altered in the finished photograph, which was used in an ad for the plastic surgery clinic with a caption reading The only thing you'll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids: Yeh has since reportedly filed a lawsuit over the misappropriation of her image: Regardless of the provenance of the unrelated photograph, no aspect of the underlying divorce story is true. It apparently originated as a single-source item printed in a Chinese newspaper (the Heilongjiang Morning Post) known for publishing urban-legend like tales without verification, such as its fictitious story about a man who arranged to meet his online girlfriend for their first real date only to discover that she was his son's wife: We'd guess that someone originally created this tale as a moral lesson on the follies of excessive vanity, and in typical urban legend fashion it quickly made the transition from being an instructive fable to a this really happened news story. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url