Meanwhile, reporters began visiting Ma Guodong's hometown. Rather than going to his parents' house, they sought out several of his older sisters for interviews.
As the eldest, his oldest sister had been the first to drop out of school and start working. When she brought a boyfriend home, her parents drove him away on the spot and told her to focus on earning money for her younger brother.
Once she was in her thirties, her parents worried that she would never marry and they would have to support her in her old age. Only then did they find a local bachelor with a disability, demand a bride price of two hundred thousand yuan, and marry her off.
Having tasted the benefits of that enormous bride price, the couple married off one daughter after another for hefty sums. But the husbands either had a lame leg or some other undisclosed ailment. They had already found a husband for their youngest daughter, Xiaowu, when she was only sixteen.
The sisters never said a word against their parents or spoke ill of their brother. They only talked about how hard their own lives were, and that made their stories all the more heartbreaking.
Their husbands had disabilities and had borrowed heavily to afford wives. The sisters began paying off those debts the moment they married, and their lives seemed utterly devoid of hope.
The eldest was only in her forties, yet her temples were already frosted with gray. The youngest had moved into her husband's home without even registering the marriage. When the reporter arrived, she was heavily pregnant, squatting beside a soot-blackened stove to tend the fire.
After using money to send away the relatives from her parents' family who were watching her so closely, the reporter asked her, "You're still so