Holidays a stressful time for single offspring

A Chinese woman bought a full front-page ad in a popular Chinese-language newspaper in Melbourne on Tuesday to publish a letter asking her missing son studying in Australia to get in touch with the family.

In it, she asked the young man, Peng, to come home for Chinese New Year celebrations and promised to stop trying to force him into marriage.

Peng had ignored phone calls from his parents because they were pressuring him to marry, according to media reports.