Zhang Yingmei, a 24-year-old student from Anyang Normal College of Henan Province recently called for designing November 1 as International Single Parent Day, and appealed to people to take care of children raised by single parents. Zhang herself is from a single-parent family.

 

According to Henan Business News, Zhang was a fashionable lady, wearing red boots and a yellow jacket. She told our reporter that she had launched activities aiming to commemorate single parents in the past two years.

 

"I had a happy family in the past, but my life became miserable after my parents divorced," she said. Zhang revealed that she was born in Baimasi County in Luoyang, Henan Province. She was forced to live with her grandparents in the countryside because her parents quarreled everyday. In Zhang's memory, her father only had come to see her only two or three times, which made her often think he was her "uncle." After her father remarried, she never met him again. Nobody mentioned him ever since.

 

Because she was from a single-parent family, Zhang was often laughed at by her classmates, and was insulted by a man from the same county.

 

Zhang also finds that children from single-parent families are stubborn and lonely, and she believes that, if a special commemorative day is devoted to them and their families, things may turn better.

 

(Chinanews.cn March 29, 2007)