Across China: Senior's companionship call highlights plight of lonely elderly

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 uterine cancer. Zhang's husband fell into a coma upon hearing the bad news, then caught Parkinson's disease and died five years later.

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 to a match-making agency. "I went to one agency and they asked me to hand in 3,000 yuan (450 U.S. dollars) 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, in a similar situation to me. 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.

The longing for family love is a pain felt by many seniors who live alone.

Zhong Xiao, who mans an emotional support hotline in Jilin, said that a large proportion of his regular callers are lonely elderly people. Many of them call to solicit his advice on emotional problems.

"Some who want to find partners are afraid of being laughed at or facing objections from their children; some worry that it would be hard for them to adapt to others' living habits when remarrying at their age," Zhong said.

Many seniors' emotions are unknown to younger people, and they are in great need of more attention and understanding, he added.

Zhang Min is the Party secretary of the residential community where Zhang Guifang lives. She said volunteers visit Zhang once in a while, helping her buy medicine, clean the house and cook.

Zhang Guifang said she was grateful for the help, but she still needed more care emotionally.

Now living standards have improved for China's senior citizens, authorities and society must focus more on looking after them psychologically, said Zhang Chaolin, a volunteer in a hospice care program.

He suggested that China should train more professional social workers, a group that will be increasingly in demand given the aging population.

Governments should also encourage the establishment of more non-profit platforms offering social opportunities for seniors, Zhang Chaolin added. Endi