A friend, Loretta, has put the pager to a use probably never intended or imagined by her paging company - as a tool for self-preservation.
While studying at a local university a few years ago, Loretta lived with her boyfriend and his family for two years, unbeknownst to her own parents.
Too terrified to face the consequences if her parents discovered the situation, she told them she was living at the university's dormitory. Curiously enough, the parents never asked to visit. They did ask her for her phone number, though, and she gave them her pager number.
That was more than three years ago. Now she and another boyfriend are flat-hunting. This pattern will probably continue until the day she marries. She, presumably, will then give her home phone number to her parents. Until then, the pager remains.
A Jewish-American male and a Chinese-American female found themselves in a similar situation: her parents would have considered co-habitation before marriage scandalous. So the couple resorted to elaborate measures to conceal their living arrangements, moving him out during parental visits and rearranging the apartment furniture to underline her single status.
In another case, Joanna - a locally born but overseas-educated returnee - has been dating a European for more than a year, again keeping parents and family in the dark. They want her to marry someone Chinese. Joanna and her companion will not consider living together: unlike the others, they consider it too risky.
But they, too, have played their part in a charade so their relationship is never discovered. When the couple went to Europe for a month-long holiday, Joanna asked female Chinese tourists to pose as her friends so she could have a set of photos to show her parents.