The single-parent story
"The troubles of Mother are not for you to see / The recipe for warmth is kept in her heart / Spend more time holding her hand when you get the chance / Going on a fantasy trip hand in hand / Do what your mother tells you, and don't let her get hurt / Grow up fast, that's the only way to protect her."
The song "Do What Your Mother Tells You" by pop-music icon Jay Chou has great lyrics and music, and has been selected by many primary-school teachers for use in their music classes. But if you listen to the words carefully, they are really expressing Chou's cry from the heart of a single-parent child.
Hong Kong star Tony Leung once told a reporter in an interview that the reason he has remained unmarried is that he still feels the effects of his parents' divorce. His trademark melancholy look is in fact a product of the wounds he suffered as a child.
Single-parent children of divorce can no longer be considered a "minority group" in today's society. But just because they are common does not mean that the wounds they have suffered are not deep. Even after many years, such children often cautiously protect their secret vulnerabilities, do not readily show their pain to others, and even have selective memory failure, pretending that the wounds are not there.
"I feel very lucky, very happy now." Hsiao Wen, a first-year student at a top high school, is a happy-go-lucky, healthy sunshine girl. Few people know that she had a turbulent, transient childhood that forced to her to grow up fast.
When she was five her parents divorced, and Hsiao Wen was abruptly taken by her father away from her mother, on whom she had mainly relied for those five years. First she moved to the countryside to live with her dad and paternal grandmother. Then in second grade she was sent to live with an aunt. When she was in third grade her dad remarried. Hsiao Wen became part of a new family with her father, stepmother, stepbrother and stepsister, spending two very lonely years living in America. By fifth grade, it had become clear that Hsiao Wen was not fitting in with her new family, and was very unhappy. So her stepmother arranged for her to go back to Taiwan to live with her birth mother. Thus in her six years of elementary school, she attended four different schools and lived in four different family structures, residing in two different cultural environments with completely unrelated languages. She grew up with anxiety and uncertainty as her constant companions.
"When I was small I felt really unlucky having no mother." In her life Hsiao Wen could not hear her mother's voice, or see her mother's form or even her picture. After being apart for only five years, she had forgotten virtually every impression of her mother that she had.
Those two-and-a-half years in the States were the worst time for Hsiao Wen. Her father was busy learning English and training himself in new job skills, and had no time to look after anyone else. Her stepmother had to earn money to support the family. Her step-siblings, who were after all not blood relatives, were unkind to her, and Hsiao Wen had virtually no one she could talk to at all. How lonely was it? In those two-plus years, there was not one single phone call asking for her. "Every day I borrowed a pile of books from the library and brought them home to read; I took out more books than anyone else in my class." As a result Hsiao Wen learned to read English very well, a silver lining in her otherwise cloudy existence of the time.
"As soon as we saw each other we just hugged and started crying and crying, I don't even know exactly what we were crying for...." When Hsiao Wen talks about the scene in a park the first time her stepmother brought her to meet her mother, she is, as usual, smiling happily and speaking with detachment, as if she were telling someone else's story. It is only when the reporter interviewing her can't hold back her own tears that Hsiao Wen begins herself to get red around the eyes.
The wounds of divorce need to be soothed, but children do not easily reveal their deepest feelings, and schools don't take the initiative to inquire too much into family business, so the support network needs to be bulked up.