WHEN SIMON Tam's parents told him they were getting divorced, he was angry. Very angry.
'I hated my dad for having an affair. And I was mad at my mum too, but I didn't know why and I didn't know what to say,' he said.
Uncertain of what to say, Simon said nothing. For a year. But all that bottled up anger was bubbling close to the surface and it was his classmates who felt the brunt of it. Simon was a big 14-year-old and children were scared when he began picking fights in the playground. He soon became a regular outside the headmaster's office.
'I didn't want anyone to know that dad had left us. My little sister cried a lot and I felt bad about that, but I didn't want to talk to her either,' he said.
Simon is not alone. He is among thousands of Hong Kong youngsters who have struggled through their parents' divorces. And the number is on the increase. In 1980, there were 2,087 divorces, and the divorce rate stood at 0.56 per 1,000 of the population. In 2000, there were 13,247 divorces and the rate had risen to 2.39.
Simon was not proud of his growing reputation as a bully, or of his falling grades, but there seemed little he could do about it. And his teachers' patience was wearing thin. It was his best friend who came to the rescue.
'Michael is a bit bigger than me, so he wasn't scared of me. And we had been friends since primary school. I thought it would be really embarrassing to talk about my dad going, but when I started I realised it wasn't so hard.'
