A Man in China Tried Suing A Woman to Allegedly Track Her Down

Back in September, a Chinese man named Sun saw a woman in a bookshop. She disappeared in the crowd before he got a chance to talk to her, but for Sun that didn't matter: a brief moment's eye contact between the two was allegedly enough for him to fall madly, deeply, creepily in love. So rather than file it away with the countless glances humans give each other everyday, he decided to take the next seven weeks off work to loiter around the store in the hope of seeing her again, Pear Beijing reports.

This ultimately proved fruitless—but Sun didn't stop there. On December 10, he appeared at the Dongcheng courthouse and filed a lawsuit against the woman, requesting that the court would "please issue a public notice to the defendant… to request her to appear in court to confront [him]". The charge? Giving him "emotional distress".

Sun listed the woman’s name, ethnic background, contact number, and place of birth as "unknown" on the court document, and stated that the only thing he knew for sure was that she was female.

"On the afternoon of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a girl appeared on the first floor of Wangfujing Bookstore wearing a tight yellow jacket, incarnadine stockings, medium-long blonde hair that had inward curls and wearing headphones," he said. A smiling, hand-drawn pencil sketch of the woman shopping in the bookstore was also put to the court.

Sun argued that, should he be unable to track down the woman in yellow, his life would lose all meaning—and implored the court to get the woman to talk to him so that he could be liberated from “great mental anguish.” What he apparently failed to consider was the "great mental anguish" that might be inflicted upon someone by tracking them down, completely unsolicited, and legally strong-arming them into a face-to-face meeting.

"The difficulty of finding the lady… may cause the plaintiff to accept the result of losing the meaning of his life," the court document said. "He has chosen to be a body without a soul, spend the rest of his life like a living dead, and bear the joke that life has brought to him.”

The court, meanwhile, saw Sun's proposed lawsuit for what it was: a disturbing attempt to stalk and harass someone who he'd literally never met. Thankfully, they threw out his attempted legal action and warned him to discontinue his search. He is reportedly considering other options.

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