Hello selfie readers. My name is Wang Zhigang, and this is a group photo of me and my wife Rihanna. We met in May 2017 on a chat app and entered a happy marriage in March this year. 2 years is like a dream for me, before, from the countryside of Inner Mongolia, I never dared to think that one day I could marry a British girl. And now, we are working hard to run our little family and strive for tomorrow. Wang Zhigang/Dictation
In 1995, I was born in a rural family in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, with two children, my brother and me. This is a group photo of our brothers and father. My father was an authentic farmer and now this season my father grows corn at home and harvests it in October. My mother worked in a factory and was an ordinary worker.
After graduating from high school in 2013, I was admitted to a university that was not ideal, and I felt that there was no point in studying there, so I went through the withdrawal procedures and went home to wait for work. At that time, I even wanted to go to the stall. My brother is a college student, and I used to envy him, with a stable job and the ability to go all over the country to build subways and bridges. But it turned out that his job made it difficult for him to reach his girlfriend. In May 2014, after staying at home for more than half a year, I followed my parents' advice and went to Lanxiang to learn beauty salons. Parents feel that the beauty salon industry makes more money and can reduce the burden on the family. This is my practice perming my hair on the model's head.
In 2015, after graduating from Lanxiang, I was assigned to a hair salon in Shanghai to do hair design. When I first arrived in Shanghai, I could get 2500 yuan a month's salary, and I would like to save a little if I had eaten and lived. After work, you can also sing with your colleagues and play games in Internet cafes. But if you spend a lot of money, you need your parents to help you. But I am increasingly finding that the beauty salon industry is not very prosperous, the threshold is too low, the salary is not high, and the competition is too fierce. In May 2017, I quit my job to work as a security guard.
I have a well-known customer, is doing foreign trade, he often brings foreigners to me to do hairstyles, I asked him how he can do this line, he said first of all, English should be better. I thought that if I learned English well, I could be a tour guide even if I couldn't do foreign trade, so I taught myself English while working as a security guard. I started out looking for some English courses online, but the tuition fees for these courses were too expensive for me to afford. So I started using a chat software that talks to foreigners, starting with daily chats to practice speaking. Based on this consideration, I began to reach out to foreigners on the Internet.
Unexpectedly, in May 2017, on that chat dating app, I would meet my current wife, Rihanna from the UK. This is Rihanna's childhood photo. Rihanna was born in 1994 in Oldham, Greater Manchester, England, to a family of three older siblings, the youngest child in the family. Rihanna's family is British of Bengali descent.
His parents are in the restaurant business, and all three older brothers graduated from college. The eldest brother is a government official, the second brother is an engineer, and the third brother helps his parents run a restaurant at home. This is a photo of Rihanna with her family when she graduated from the University of Manchester in the summer of 2017. Rihanna's association with China predates our acquaintance. When Rihanna was studying at the University of Manchester, there were many students from China around, and Rihanna felt that the Chinese boys were very good to their girlfriends, and they were not as strict and easy to get along with in etiquette as Koreans and Japanese. Since then, she has developed a crush on Chinese.
In April 2017, Rihanna went to East China Normal University to participate in a student exchange program, which increased her strong interest in Chinese culture. "Bai Jing" is Rihanna's Chinese name, which is rihanna's exchange student at the Chinese teacher, she learned to write brush characters in culture class. Shortly after Rihanna returned to the UK, we met online. I tried to post some messages that I wanted to learn English, and soon someone replied to me, and I saw that it was a British girl and chatted. It started with text exchange, but in July, she said she could teach me English, so we started video chatting.
We mainly talk about some topics of daily life, such as the cultural customs of China and the United Kingdom, and the prices of goods in various places. As my English got better and better, we unconsciously developed feelings. But I've always felt that online dating is unreliable and doesn't take it too seriously. In June 2018, one day, Rihanna told me that she had bought a ticket to Shanghai and wanted to meet me. At that time, I did not believe that a foreign girl would travel thousands of miles to Shanghai alone to find a boy she had never met. This is a photo of Rihanna's life in England, playing with her nephew.
Unexpectedly, she actually came two months later. On August 31, I went to pick her up at Pudong Airport, and my excitement was greater than my nervousness. In the past, because the network was always not smooth, and the pixels of the mobile phone were not good enough, the video was somewhat dark. After meeting, I found her to be much cuter than I thought she was. When Rihanna finally stood in front of me, I felt like I was dreaming, and I even begged her to hit me to see if I was dreaming. It was my first close encounter with a foreigner, and it was a girl I liked. Our relationship officially landed from "online dating". This is Rihanna photographing me as she is dragging her suitcase.
She came to Shanghai on a tourist visa, only two months of stay, in order to accompany her, in the case of the company did not give me leave, I quit the property company security job. We stayed in Shanghai for ten days, and it was us going for a walk on the Bund together. Because Rihanna likes to read, I took her to the Shanghai library. I don't have much money, but I want to give her a good memory. Rihanna offered to see my family. Before taking her home, I was worried that because she was a foreigner, my family would not be able to accept her, so I lied to my parents that we were just ordinary friends, and this time I came home to take her to experience the customs and customs of Inner Mongolia.
We took the Z284 train back to Inner Mongolia, and the scenery in Inner Mongolia in September was beautiful. Rihanna told me that she had traveled to many places, Spain, Germany, etc., but it was the first time to travel by long-distance hard sleeper train, and it took 27 hours to get from Shanghai to Hohhot, which made her very uncomfortable. Her parents called her on the train, and after hearing that it would take a 27-hour train ride to my house, her parents were also surprised: such a long time should be able to travel across Europe. Of course, at that time, she also hid a lot from her parents, who only knew our relationship when we were friends.
As a sign of welcome to Rihanna, my dad cooked himself. After living at home for more than ten days, I couldn't help but "showdown" our relationship with my parents. They were not very surprised, but my mother could not help but have some worries, and quietly reminded me behind my back: You find a girlfriend who is so far away, where to get married, and how to take care of children in the future? How to live a life with different living habits? In the next process of getting along, my mother did not worry. My family is happy that I found love, and this is the group photo my eldest brother took for us. During the time she took Rihanna home, she suddenly became the "big news" in the village.
My grandmother showed off in the village, saying that I had come home with my foreign daughter-in-law. The elderly people of the village came to watch Rihanna. There was a great uncle in the village who came to see Rihanna, who happened to be taking a nap, and the uncle waited for an afternoon, and when she woke up, the uncle saw her and left satisfied. At first, I was a little nervous to take her home, because my family is in the countryside, the family conditions are average, the house is an ordinary brick house, and the yard is nearly 500 square meters. I had been worried that Rihanna would not be able to accept the conditions of the house, but when she went to my house, she felt that my house was much better than she thought.
It was Rihanna's first horse ride at a racecourse near our hometown. Compared to the monotonous life in Britain, she found life on my side much more interesting. In the UK, most of their free time is spent organising parties at home, without much entertainment.
During the month we spent in our hometown, she got along very well with my family. I often take her around the village, sometimes going to the market in the city to buy her small gifts, such as slippers, cosmetics, and power banks in Japanese and Korean stores on the street. In the UK, shops and supermarkets usually leave early, while on our side it's past ten o'clock and the nightlife is plentiful, which makes Rihanna feel fresh. Rihanna and I spent a happy and short 45 days together. On 16 October, Rihanna was returning to the UK early before her tourist visa expired.
After Rihanna returned home, I got another job as a security guard in Shanghai. After the separation, I was a little uncomfortable. A week back in the UK, she said on the phone that she wanted to marry me. Excited, I hesitated, not because I didn't want to get married, but because of the economic difficulties. I was influenced by the conventional wisdom that marriage must have a certain material basis. I had just quit my job and didn't have any money. But Rihanna made it clear that she would marry me even if I had nothing. I didn't know how to answer her. This is our WeChat chat history in December 2018. Although we are in a different place, we have phone calls and WeChat communication every day
As our relationship deepened, Rihanna decided to work and live directly in China after graduation, and in this case, we decided to get married. In March of this year, I was in Beijing with Rihanna, and I bought a ticket for her in advance. Before coming to China, Rihanna confessed to her parents that she wanted to marry a Chinese boy. Her parents knew I didn't have a car or a house, and they thought I just had a job and no bad habits. Rihanna's dad cried as she left because she was the youngest child in the family and her family saw her as a pearl in the palm of her hand, but her parents respected her choice.
On March 20, 2019, Rihanna landed in Beijing. To welcome Rihanna, I quit my second job on March 11, went back to my hometown to get my hukou book, and went to Beijing to meet Rihanna. My father was supportive, but my mother was always a little worried and advised me: What if I go to England and can't come back? But I never thought about going to england after marriage, and I think most of the people who go abroad are rich people, and it is not realistic for people like me who have no financial foundation. On the contrary, I think That China is quite good, especially in an international city like Shanghai, where life is very convenient, and foreign infrastructure construction is not necessarily better than Shanghai.
Because I got married in China, I only brought my ID card and hukou booklet, while Rihanna had already processed the bank statement before leaving the UK, and she also brought her passport and British IDENTITY. We went to the British Embassy to register the information. The embassy issued us her single certificate, household registration, and place of birth certificate, and we returned to the Civil Affairs Bureau in our hometown with these materials, and on March 25, we successfully received the marriage certificate. She didn't ask me for any conditions when she got married, but I bought her more than twenty thousand dollars of clothes and jewelry. She only has one small request, that is, she wants to sit in the same flower palanquin as in Chinese costume dramas at the wedding.
This is our wedding ring. We bought each other for each other before we got married. The standard for marriage in our hometown is "three gold", that is, gold rings, gold necklaces, gold bracelets, a suite and a car, in addition, there must be a stable job. Dowries range from 80,000 to 100,000. I have a friend in my hometown who has an income of four or five thousand yuan a month, a house and a car, but he has not been able to find a marriage partner, because the house was bought with a loan, and the other party hopes that he can buy a house in full. Rihanna didn't need anything, and I was much less stressed than my peers. My parents could also do their best to solve my brother's problem of starting a family.
Rihanna came to my hometown for the second time. She started trying to adapt to our local diet. Many things were tried for the first time, such as fried snails, which she felt were very similar to snails, and only ate two of them and stopped eating them. On the night of the license, I notified my classmates and friends in my hometown to celebrate my marriage with Rihanna. However, most people felt that I had been deceived by Rihanna, and the party that night seemed particularly deserted.
After receiving the license, we both returned to Shanghai together, continuing our lives in the rented "one room and one kitchen", and I got a job in a property company, where she worked as an English teacher at a training institution. In life, our communication is mainly in Chinese. Before we chatted on the Internet, we needed to use machine translation, but the translation was not accurate, which would cause some controversy, but now it is completely not. As she lives longer and longer in China, she often uses Chinese at work, and her Chinese level is much better than mine.
Every time she video chats with her family, Rihanna will tell her family what we eat and what interesting things are at work, so that her distant family can rest assured. Her parents are planning to travel to China this year, and our current plan is to wait for her parents to come, and we will first hold a wedding in China and then go to the UK for the wedding. After coming to Shanghai, we each had a pet, I liked cats, I had a cat called Eregg, she liked dogs, and her dog was named Hani. Because there are only two of us in the family, it will be more lively to have pets. My screen name became "Two Eggs and Hani".
On the evening of May 20th, Rihanna made me Chinese food – a shrimp tail stir-fried artemisia annua, and a potato mushroom. I gave her a bouquet of flowers. Usually, I leave work a little earlier than her, and most of it is up to me to cook dinner. The difference in Chinese and Western eating habits sometimes causes some small contradictions, such as cooking noodles, I am used to eating noodle soup, and she will pour out the soup and eat only noodles. For example, we Chinese cook, oil, salt, sauce and vinegar can not be less, she is how simple how to come, put a little peanut in the vegetables and add some vinegar is a cold dish. Therefore, we must accommodate each other and adapt to each other's eating habits.
When we were all resting, we would usually go for a walk on the Bund and a walk around East China Normal University— where she first came to China. Our lives are AA-based. If I borrow money from her, I will definitely return it to her, which will make us more clear about our responsibilities in the family. Our work is just getting started, the economy is not rich, and we have not yet reached a consensus on where our children will be born in the future. Our goal now is to live our two-person world first, and take advantage of the youth to establish a foothold in Shanghai. 【This group of photos provided by Wang Zhigang, today's headlines are exclusively released, reprinting is strictly prohibited!】 】
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