Screen grab of the full-page ad in the Chinese Melbourne Daily.
A desperate Chinese mother has published a letter on the front page of a Melbourne newspaper asking her son to come home for the Lunar New Year after her attempts to force him into marriage had scared him away.
"I've called you many times, but you don't answer. Maybe you will see this," she wrote to her son Peng in a front-page letter published in the Chinese Melbourne Daily.
"Your mother and father won't force you to marry again. Come home for Chinese New Year (which falls on January 31)!" the letter was quoted as saying by South China Morning Post.
The mother lived in Guangzhou and Peng was working in Australia, where he graduated, Ta Kung Pao reported.
Peng's family had repeatedly tried to get him to return to China to marry, so he stopped answering their calls.
Not knowing what else to do, they bought a full-page advertisement in the most widely read Chinese newspaper in the city where he lives.
The Chinese Melbourne Daily has a circulation of 18,000, according to the newspaper's rate card, a black and white full-page advertisement on the front page would cost 19,300 Hong Kong dollars (nearly USD 2,500) on a weekday.