A Chinese man ended up taking his daughter to court after she refused to neglect her duty as a university student in order to come home and take care of him following a car accident.

The man, surnamed Zhang, allegedly started calling and messaging his daughter after being involved in a car accident in his home city of Puyang, China’s Henan province. After repeatedly trying and failing to convince the young college student to come home and care for him, the man was shocked to find that his daughter had blocked his phone number. In a fit of rage, he filed a complaint with a local family court, asking her for 1,500 yuan ($215) in monthly alimony. Article 26 of the Chinese Civil Code stipulates that “adult children have the obligation to support and protect their parents”.

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Zhang told the court that he had indeed insisted that his daughter put her college on the back burner and come home to take care of him following a car accident. After a while, she stopped answering his phone calls, so he resorted to messaging her, but one day she just flat-out blocked his phone number, leaving him with no way of contacting her.

In her defense, the daughter claims to have repeatedly told Zhang that her college duties didn’t allow her to simply leave and come to take care of him. Plus, she made it clear that she also had two other brothers who could also be asked to take care of her father, but instead all the pressure was on her from the start.

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“I’m still in college, and I can’t afford my father’s alimony,” the young woman said. “I don’t have time to go back to take care of him and besides, I have two older brothers who could care for him, so I should have to come back. I blocked my father’s phone number, but only because all of his messages were complaints, which made me even more nervous and stressed than I usually was because of studying and exams. I felt even more exhausted, both mentally and physically.”

After hearing both sides, the court acknowledged that article 26 of the Chinese Civil Code states that adult children have an obligation to support their parents, but argued that in this particular case, the daughter was still in school and couldn’t afford to pay alimony. The judge did however ask the daughter to be more sensitive to her father’s plight and try to help him without neglecting her studies. Zhang has the option of filing an appeal.