Lonely seniors look for emotional support
Print Edition
STANDING on a busy street corner, Zhang Guifang attracted a lot of attention waving a placard that read “I’m a lonely senior looking for a partner, no matter whether a man or woman.”
The scene on July 15 in Changchun City, Jilin Province, was captured by a local journalist whose pictures of Zhang Guifang (an alias) were widely circulated online, propelling calls for elderly people to be given more emotional support.
Zhang, 69, is a retired worker from a car factory. According to Zhang, she used to have a loving family. Her husband was a senior engineer at the factory and they had a daughter who studied in the United States and became a teacher at Ohio State University after graduation.
However, Zhang’s daughter died 16 years ago at the age of 29 from cancer. Zhang’s husband went into a coma on hearing the news and died five years later with Parkinson’s disease.
Zhang sold her home and moved to a new residential community.
“I was wrapped up in the sorrow of their deaths and I thought a change of scene might help,” she said.
But the new environment was not as accommodating as she imagined.
“People my age like talking about their children and grandchildren, and I always felt embarrassed when such topics came up,” Zhang explained.
To increase social contact, she learned to play mahjong, and every morning would gather a group of women together to play, but the sense of loneliness still lingered.
“A mouse got into my house once, I didn’t know what to do and stayed up the whole night. Another time, I left my key in the house and couldn’t get back in. I cried for a long time wishing there was someone else inside!” Zhang said.
Her favorite food became dumplings, because the process of making them ate up a lot of time and took her mind off her loneliness. Short-sighted after surgery for cataracts, Zhang recently fell over while trying to clean her windows. She hurt her hands in the fall, and for a month the only food she could cook for herself was noodles.
“Since that fall, I haven’t been able to stop myself from wondering, what if I die at home one day? I wouldn’t be discovered for a long time. That’s when I plucked up the courage to look for a partner. I just want a helping hand, a person to talk to,” she sighed.
Zhang does not know how to use the Internet and has been unable to sign up with a match-making agency.
“I went to one agency and they asked me to hand in 3,000 yuan (US$450) for a membership fee. That’s too expensive,” she said.
In the past few days, Zhang has received many phone calls from strangers, most of them calling to offer encouragement and comfort. “Some of them were elderly, and in a similar situation like mine. They expressed their admiration for me and said they would have never dared do the same.”
There are over 220 million people aged 60 or above in China, about 16 percent of the total population. In a culture that places a lot of emphasis on filial piety and family, a great majority of older people prefer home-based care to nursing institutions.
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