Li Yang, the founder and potentate of Li Yang Crazy English, is China’s most famous English teacher, a man who has regularly delivered language lessons to stadium crowds for more than a decade. He is the eccentric icon at the top of China’s self-improvement craze, with an approach to learning that combines the physical confidence of shouting English the top of one’s lungs—better to unleash your “international muscles,” he says—with stridently nationalistic slogans such as “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!” His classroom megalomania has no shortage of critics. “It’s a kind of old witchcraft,” Wang Shuo, one of China’s best-known novelists, wrote.
When I profiled Li in 2008, I was struck, as people usually are, by his weirdness, and then surprised to discover that he was accompanied off-stage by an exceedingly normal wife: Kim Lee, a tall brunette from Florida who had met him on a business trip to China. They had three kids, and she once told me, “I’m just a mom who came into a bizarre life by happenstance.”
The picture has unravelled in a hurry. Last week, his wife publicly posted photos of her herself online with severe bruises on her head and knees and, in a series of Twitter-like messages, she vowed to seek a divorce. (She wrote, “You knocked me to the floor. You sat on my back. You choked my neck with both hands and slammed my head into the floor. When I pried your hands from my neck you grabbed my hair and slammed my head into the floor ten more times!”)
In China, it was a sensation, drawing headlines and thousands of online comments; people condemned the Crazy English founder and demanded that he respond. For days Li stayed silent, but over the weekend he admitted to “domestic violence” against his wife and kids that “caused them serious physical and mental damage.” In a strange interview with China Daily published today, he sounded less than contrite, saying the “problem involves character and cultural differences, which are difficult to solve through counseling.” According to the article, he also said, “I hit her sometimes but I never thought she would make it public since it’s not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders. But I still respect her for raising three girls on her own and for her passion for her students.”
If there is anything positive to be sifted from the sad affair, it is that the case has focussed attention to China’s under-discussed problems of domestic violence, especially in high-income urban families. When it is discussed, abuse is usually described as a problem left over in remote rural areas, but Li’s case has prompted Chinese counselors to report that “nearly half of domestic violence abusers are people who have higher education, senior jobs and social status.”
Photograph by Ian Teh.
