ACTOR FENG YUANZHENG is a despised man. Some strangers curse him to his face, others slash his car's tyres. But the man who portrays China's most famous wife-beater, Dr An Jiahe, in the mainland television drama Don't Talk To Strangers, understands their anger and doesn't regret arousing their emotions. 'A lot of people, especially middle-aged women, hate me, thinking I'm actually an abuser,' he says. 'It's good because it shows people are fin-ally waking up to domestic violence.'
As the first Chinese drama to delve explicitly into the life of a family that is torn apart by domestic violence, Don't Talk To Strangers, set in Xiamen, Fuijian province, has been influential and controversial. Inspired by the Stephen King novel Rose Madder, the drama has disturbed millions of mainlanders not only because it evokes a ghoulish terror, but because its violence is so realistic.
'That book showed that some of the scariest monsters exist in real life,' says Zhang Jiandong, director of Don't Talk To Strangers, a professor at the Beijing Film Academy. 'Domestic violence is petrifying because the abused usually suffer at the hands of people who are most expected to show them love.'
As in Rose Madder, where an abused wife flees the beatings inflicted by her 'upright' police-officer husband, in Don't Talk To Strangers, teacher Mei Xiaonan (Mei Ting) is shocked to discover that her new husband, a respected doctor, could resort to physical violence when consumed by a festering jealousy.
True to many real-life situations, Xiaonan thinks it is her fault when her husband hits her for the first time. But when she realises his repeated promises not to beat her again are empty, she starts to look for outside help.
Initially reticent to seek a divorce, Xiaonan contacts a domestic-violence hotline, through which she meets friend and confidant Zheng Tong (Cao Weiyu). Later, as the beating injuries intensify from a bloody mouth to broken bones, she attempts to escape to Fuzhou, also in Fujian, where the series was filmed from February to October last year. Despite her growing determination to leave her husband and secure a divorce, other pressures such as her policeman brother-in-law's serious injury in the line of duty, her mother's pleading and later, a pregnancy, prompt her to keep returning to her husband.
