It was an ambush, said He Meili, a 51-year-old lesbian woman, describing how she met with her dead partner’s step-parents at a police station where they demanded she leave the apartment the couple had shared for 12 years. “It was that very moment at the police station when I truly felt the pain of not being protected by the law,” she told Reuters. When Li died from lupus in 2016, her step-parents, legally next-of-kin, inherited the apartment in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou and were quick to stick an eviction note on the door.
