I recently saw a long post by Ma Rong. She said that nearly nine years after her divorce, she ended up with nothing—both the people and the money were gone. She claimed that only a four-digit number remains in her bank account, and she even doesn’t dare to go to her children’s parent-teacher meetings. Judging from the transfer records she shared, it’s clear that she moved from a villa to a run-down old apartment in Xi’an; even when ordering takeout, she has to bundle deals just to meet the minimum spend for discounts. The contrast really is a bit heartbreaking.

She admitted that back then she was too young and picked the wrong person. After Song Zhe was released from prison, she only saw him once. He didn’t want to look back, and she couldn’t get back to Wang Baoqiang either. To be honest, Ma Rong’s biggest mistake wasn’t even the affair—it was that she overestimated herself and completely misjudged what was going on between her and Song Zhe.

Think about it: at the time, she was pretty ordinary in looks and had no fame at all. She only gained a bit of recognition because of Wang Baoqiang. Every day she dressed up in an extravagant, flashy, over-the-top way, looking down on her husband who came from the countryside, while spending his money and constantly left and right checking her surroundings. In the end, she ended up getting together with Wang Baoqiang’s assistant, Song Zhe. But Song Zhe wasn’t some romantic softie—he just wanted to handle the boss’s wife. In other words, he wanted nothing more than to use Ma Rong to hollow out Wang Baoqiang’s assets.

The key was that Ma Rong didn’t realize she was only the “boss’s wife,” naively believing it was love—thinking it was her beauty that attracted Song Zhe. So what happened? Without Wang Baoqiang’s halo, Ma Rong became just another random passerby—so much so that not even Song Zhe, who had been released from prison, wanted her.

By contrast, Wang Baoqiang was no longer the stupid fool he used to be. Now he has developed across film, movies, and variety shows. His self-directed film broke 2.2 billion in box office revenue, and his reputation has kept rebounding—he has truly become a top-tier A-list star. Standing by his side is a highly educated girlfriend who graduated from Stanford. No matter what, Ma Rong can’t go back to who she used to be.

Some people say the root cause is that Ma Rong’s family was too domineering. When the daughter makes a mistake and it gets discovered, instead of teaching her to admit her wrongdoing, they stubbornly fight back to the end, bullying the honest and simple-minded fool. The Wang family may have had some room to soften things because of their two children, but they still forced the marriage onto an absolute dead end. It’s really a terrible way to play a good hand. Ma Rong is at fault, but her mother-in-law isn’t a good person either—how many families have been ruined by a mother-in-law?

Now when you look back, Ma Rong’s life is like a high-stakes gamble—and in the end, she lost it all.