Olympic champion Xu Xin from an ordinary family married Yao Yan, a wealthy Shanghai girl. Their parents treated each other equally, and the couple run a happy marriage despite prior public doubts.
Shortly after Olympic champion Xu Xin’s wedding, his wife Yao Yan’s family background became a hot topic of discussion among netizens.
Xu Xin grew up in an ordinary working-class family in Xuzhou, Jiangsu. During his early years on the national team, seeing that his teammates came from families with varying degrees of privilege, he inevitably experienced moments of self-doubt in private.Yao Yan is from Shanghai; her grandfather was a senior engineer, and her parents had been in business for many years. Among her local circle of friends and relatives, she was known as “Princess Yao,” and her affluent background was common knowledge within the community. When the two made their relationship public, many people, due to the disparity in their families’ financial circumstances, were waiting to see how the relationship would turn out.
When the parents met for the first time, neither
side made a point of mentioning their family backgrounds. Yao Yan’s parents remained warm and friendly throughout the visit; holding Xu Xin’s hand, they simply said they hoped the two young people would build a happy life together.At subsequent family gatherings, no one compared incomes or social status. During the meals, the elders mostly served food to the young couple and remarked on how hard they worked training and competing away from home year-round.
Yao Yan’s parents never flaunted their family’s affluence in front of Xu Xin; they always treated their son-in-law with equality and kindness, and even Xu Xin himself never felt slighted in this father-in-law–son-in-law relationship.Xu Xin kept all these details in mind. After marriage, he took the initiative to handle all household matters, big and small. Whenever he had free time, he would join both sets of elders for meals or to play table tennis, and he never missed a single important milestone in their child’s upbringing. Whenever the elders in the family spoke of him, they would smile and call him “our Xinzi,” their tone even warmer than when referring to their own son.
In the
public’s mind, a good marriage is invariably linked to the idea of “matching social status.” Yet this couple—who were once viewed skeptically by others—has, through their actual relationship, shattered the stereotype that a marriage with a significant disparity in family background cannot last.A good marriage is never built solely on material conditions; the tolerance of their elders, the sense of responsibility shared by both spouses, and their genuine mutual respect have long since bridged the external gaps stemming from their different family backgrounds.
This marriage, widely praised within the Chinese table tennis community, embodies the simplest logic of family life: by staying grounded and working steadily to nurture their relationship, their lives will naturally become more and more stable over time.
