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Seventy-year-old Siu Yu Chan has all she needs at her home, in sheltered accommodation in the heart of Newcastle.

The place is clean and bright, the neighbours cheerful, and there's the ubiquitous red alarm cord should she need urgent attention.

The problem is, when Siu does pull the cord, she has plenty to say to the warden but not the ability to do so. For, like several thousands of her community, Siu never learned English.

For years the Chinese community clustered together and supported each other. Many of them, especially the older generation of women, rarely got exposed to the non-Chinese world.

Young families to this day are expected to look after their aged parents. Sending them to sheltered homes or residential homes is taboo, an insult to the dignity of the family. Thus, in some cases, even those suffering from acute dementia are kept at home.

But now several of the youngsters are too busy to stay at home and look after their parents. So they leave them and move on to new homes and families.

The plight of the elders gets even worse if one of them dies, leaving the spouse to fend for himself or herself. Loneliness and sheer boredom take over when there aren't any Chinese in the immediate neighbourhood.

Desperate

Siu wakes up every morning and heads to the casino, a good walk away, to share talk and play mah-jong with her friends.

Siu stays busy to ignore her loneliness

But when her arthritis kicks in she stays indoors, virtually cut off from people for days, ironically in the midst of a very busy city. 

"I'm too old to return to Hong Kong, too old to learn English. I wish there's a place just for us, where we can speak Chinese and look after each other." Siu is thus desperate to be housed in sheltered accommodation purpose-built for the Chinese.

So she makes a trek almost every other day to check for vacancies at Mascot House, the only Chinese sheltered home in the area.

Lan Chan, the manager, has told her not to bother though; they stopped taking new applications some 10 years ago because nobody wants to leave.

To make matters worse, the recent credit crunch has unhinged a proposal the Chinese community had made to Newcastle City Council for another sheltered home.

So Siu and hundreds of other isolated elderly are waiting for these hard times to change, for a miracle to come and save them. Because giving up is not an option.