"CCTV emotional experts will personally help you save your love," the website sappily proclaims. It's advertising the services of a organization known for its 'xiaosan dispelling' services, xiaosan being the Chinese for side chick, mistress or if you’re feeling vindictive, home wrecker.
According to all-knowing Baidu, the term comes from the gender-neutral euphemism ‘third party,’ but in the popular imagination xiaosan are most often portrayed as women.
Professional ‘mistress dispellers’ solve marital woes by driving away unwanted third parties. Do a quick search online for ‘dispelling’ services, and plenty of options show up, all offering to redeem your relationship. For a price, of course.
Mistress dispellers at work
Last year, a movie even touched on the industry: Mistress Dispeller told the story of a man who’s hired by a wealthy CEO’s wife to lure away a troublesome xiaosan.
The phenomenon caught the imagination of Western media last summer, with a New York Times article leading the charge.
But although speculation is rife over how mistress dispelling works, there’s not much solid information about the field as a whole. Company tactics often come off as sketchy, and the relatively young industry lacks governmental oversight.
Recently, a reporter for Shenzhen newspaper Daily Sunshine talked to some local workers in the business for an inside perspective.
Here’s what they revealed.
A mistress dispeller talks about her work
1. Xiaosan aren’t always women
Huang Yue has been working in the ‘marriage-saving’ industry since 2014. According to her, in that time her clients haven’t only included wives: “…in reality, big data shows, women are only slightly more common than men.”
Her clients’ ages also ranged widely, from teenagers up to middle-aged folks. Most of those who seek her help do share a common trait, though. While they might excel in the workplace, when it comes to interpersonal relationships they are “just like a blank piece of paper, don’t understand anything.”
2. Clients aren’t always married
Huang’s company, which claims to have a 92 percent success rate, also accepts the cases of people who aren’t married. In 2015, for instance, they helped 20-year-old Zhang Qi win back a reluctant boyfriend.
Her boyfriend’s mother was a major obstacle to their relationship. The older woman strongly disliked Zhang and used various tactics to pressure her son into dropping his sweetheart, including bringing another girl into the family home and insisting that he marry her.
Zhang was advised to act more mature in order to gain her boyfriend’s respect and love again. Meanwhile, two ‘dispellers’ set out to convince the xiaosan that she could do better. After inserting themselves into her social circle, they were able to implant “the idea that there were better choices.”
According to the company, two and half months after Zhang first came to them, her boyfriend suggested getting back together. His mother was finally won over by Zhang’s newfound maturity, and the xiaosan left for greener pastures.
3. For some companies, mistress dispelling is only part of the job
An instructional pamphlet "teaching you how to hold onto love"
Huang’s company claims not only to get rid of xiaosan, but also mend broken homes. Their ‘therapy’ includes counseling their clients during and after cases.
Last year, 35-year-old Shen Nan, who lives in the Yangtze River Delta, discovered that her husband was cheating on her. What’s more, he showed no sign of remorse. When she reproached him, his response was blunt: “if you don’t accept [my affair], then divorce me.”
His behavior was a reflection of the relationship dynamic throughout their decade-long marriage: Shen had always been the yielding one, while her husband dominated the household.
According to Huang, her team’s first job was to strengthen Shen’s resolve, and to advise her on how to readjust the unequal relationship between her and her husband. Employees also managed to extract a promise from the xiaosan, a married woman, to not publicize the affair and humiliate Shen. The methods used to do so, Huang said, were “not convenient to reveal.”
4. ‘Marriage-saving’ companies operate in a legal (and moral) gray area
As the last anecdote hints, companies looking for a quick solution to their clients’ problems may not always take the most honorable route to get there.
That’s representative of the field at large, which a legal specialist described as generally lacking government oversight. While companies such as Huang’s claim to stick to a strict legal and moral code, in reality that’s hard to prove.
According to the specialist, possible legal issues in the industry include invasion of privacy, slander, scams and blackmail.
That’s not to mention the dubious moral value of meddling in others' affairs. Huang insists that the employees at her company are all trained professionals, but in terms of transparency, the field as a whole has a long way to go.
[Images via the New York Times, Vippua.com, Daily Sunshine]
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