How do you get level things out with a stone walling partner

Lol, his silence is not "abusive"

I ws in a similar marriage, she would want to talk "calmly" until she got what she wanted. I then got what I wanted, a divorce!

You clearly handle things differently. If he needs to be alone for a while, let him, but you should be able to discuss it once he's calmed down a bit. You're fixing nothing by acting like an immature child seeking "revenge", be the grown up instead and talk to him about this and if he refuses to compromise on this then you either get marriage counseling or a divorce because you can't go through life with someone you're this incompatible with and it's not gonna fix anything to act childish.

You're extremely aggressive. It's no wonder he wants to get away from you.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to give him the silent treatment in return. But if he is ready to talk, that needs to end immediately.

Have you thought that maybe y’all just aren’t right for one another?

STOP POKING THE MOTHER-FUCKING BEAR!

Bear bite, then yall run to the police acting the victim.
I think he is very mature to not play your little women games and get into it with you

This is not an easy situation, and you are wise to seek answers.

While some cultures do indeed emphasize restraint and avoidance of at least initial confrontation; it is also true that all cultures do have a successful way of dealing with conflicts in a non-violent way. This may be a lack of knowledge on his part on how to effectively resolve issues in a non-violent way.

I suggest that you seek out some older men and woman from his culture and talk to them about how that culture deals with festering problems and important conflicts between business associates and spouses. Be sure you talk to multiple different people as you may hear a range of approaches. Be sure to talk to woman and men both together and separately. In some cultures the woman will not speak to you about details and certain things in the presence of a man; and some men will not speak of certain relationship items in the presence of a woman. You may also find someone you trust to talk to your husband and assist him (and you may not).

There are usually at least one of 3 other fundamental issues a person shuts down like this:

1) They feel that they have the the abilities to be very violent and destructive - or perhaps have really been trained to kill. In this case the way they do protect others is to shut down unless they are in physical danger (if they feel in real physical danger they will likely leave dead, dying, or maimed on the ground unless or until the threat does that to them first). These people need to have above average knowledge and training in non-violent conflict resolution.

2) Lack of self confidence. This may be hidden and it may take a lot of effort to get them to talk about this. This is more likely in the realm of a professional counselor or perhaps a highly skilled life coach (which most aren't) to bring out and start to resolve. Getting your husband to start either of those processes in earnest may not be easy.

3) Lack of an ability to properly communicate love between the two of you.

This is in fact quite common and likely the biggest reason for divorce (although people blame other things). People rarely know how to talk about and resolve all kinds of things between them and their Significant Other (SO) or pending SO if they don't really feel loved by you (this does not mean that you don't love them and aren't trying to tell him that).

I highly suggest that you read "The 5 Love Languages" by Gary Chapman. Ideally he would read it too (and you should get 2 copies so you both have your own book); but, you can start with yourself and leaning about love languages, what's yours (and it can be a combination), figure out what his primary love language is, communicate yours - and you can really change a relationship for the "much better."

Once you are successful with this - you will likely find him more open to perhaps counseling or working with others from his culture on non-violent ways to resolve conflicts and issues.

I wish you the best with this,

Interesting how you admit that you were angry enough to say you wanted "revenge" in your original posting, but you came back to edit it and so make yourself come across as more reasonable. And yet you then say in a reply that you want to "give him a taste of his own medicine", which is nothing more than a folksy way of saying you want revenge.

I suspect that says something significant about your communication style.

With regard to the bag on the subway floor incident, you describe it in a way that makes it sound like you were calm and completely reasonable (even if your concern wasn't rational, given that bacteria and viruses aren't capable of boring through plastic and homing in on cooked chicken), but I have to wonder if you didn't express your fear/concern/annoyance/anger in far from calm terms.

I also find it interesting how you classify your partner's stonewalling as abuse. There's no shortage of fragile egos these days who will label even a single, isolated exasperated sigh or dismissive shrug as abuse, but that's just drama-queenery. If everything from premeditated murder to not wanting to talk about a problem is all "abuse", then the definition of the word becomes: "Anything a guy does that isn't exactly what his partner wants him to do."

What's actually going between the two of you is far from clear to me. You talk about him behaving in this way because of the culture he grew up in - which implies he's simply not equipped to communicate in the way you'd prefer. But then you say he uses silence to control you - which means it's a malicious, deliberate tactic on his part to make your life hell.

Stonewalling is exasperating, it isn't a positive way of dealing with the inevitable conflicts that occur in any relationship and it doesn't bode well for the future of the relationship.

But the fact is that you're not going to change how your partner behaves in this aspect of his life any more than you will be able to change any other aspect of how he perceives and deals with the world. Like all of us, he will change only when and if he feels a real need to do so and he's sufficiently motivated to put in the work that's necessary for him to make that shift of attitude. The same applies to how you respond to him when he does something you don't approve of.

This may indeed be all down to him as you claim, but I wouldn't be surprised if his perception of what's going on is drastically different to what you describe. I suspect that the two of you are so emotionally immature that you're incapable of expressing your needs and desires in positive terms and you don't have the skills to negotiate your way to the compromises necessary for both of you to be reasonably content. I also suspect that unless you both care enough about the relationship to seek some help with learning how to deal with disagreements in positive, loving ways, then your relationship is going nowhere positive.

If you're looking to get revenge on this person things probably won't turn out well in the end.

Stop nagging and stirring shit up with him. He'll have nothing to, uh, NOT talk to you about. If he starts crap with you, give him the silent treatment. An eye for an eye. If this goes on for much longer, call it quits. Who the hell wants to live like that?