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一年前
姑父还经常陪Brenda去墓地.
http://northern-district-times.w ... renda-lin-moves-on/
Brave Brenda Lin moves on
BRENDA Lin is a bright, friendly and fiercely strong 16-year-old.
She remains stoic, greeting people with a smile, somehow managing to be brave despite living with tragedy and sorrow throughout the past year.
SHOW YOUR SUPPORT: Leave a message for Brenda
READ THE CHINESE TRANSLATION: Full interview.
She has just finished her mid-year exams and was recently elected as a prefect at Cheltenham Girls’ High School, where she is now in year 11.
The police openly admire her courage, which Brenda says she draws from her school, classmates and the community.
She is grateful for the overwhelming support that has helped her to get through dark times.
“I am finding things much easier now,” Brenda said. “When it first happened I thought I would take a lot of time off school, because at home I was crying all the time. Like, anything would make me cry.
“There are still times when I find what happened hard to accept.
BRENDA LIN: “I am not afraid”
FINAL FAREWELL: Community’s final goodbye to Lin family
“But I got letters and messages from school friends and teachers who encouraged me and gave me strength, and I felt that maybe if I went back to school it would keep my mind off things.
“It has helped me because it gave me people to talk to, and some of my friends have also lost family members and could relate.”
On top of school work Brenda has had to adjust from living with her mum, dad, and two younger brothers to living with her aunt and uncle, Kathy Lin and Robert Xie and her 10-year-old cousin William.
She moved in with Kathy, just around the corner from where she lived with her parents and not far from her grandparents.
Kathy has promised Brenda that she will look after her forever, and the close-knit family took Brenda in with open arms.
“We (aunty, uncle and cousin) were always really close, but nothing is as close as living with your family,” Brenda said.
“At first I wondered if I belonged because my cousin and aunty and uncle are so tight. But now it’s fine, and they treat me as one of their own, exactly the same as they treat William.
“Kathy is so caring and she does so much for me. She makes sure I have everything I need and makes sure she gives me all the things my mum would give me.
“Most of the time I’m OK, but sometimes I think back, ‘this is what my mum used to do for me’.
“Even in bed at night when I can’t sleep, I think about my parents and brothers, and sometimes get really upset.
“But I’m off sleeping pills now, I’ve learned not to rely on them.”
Initially, Brenda was too devastated to return to the house in Boundary Rd.
She said she still had not decided what to do with the property, but said she had found the strength in recent months to go back inside the home.
“I’ve been there a few times,” she said. “It was OK at first, but now if I go back it’s really scary, it seems so empty and cold and it’s all dusty.
“We were wanting to sell it, but then we’d have to clean it out, and we won’t be ready to do that any time soon.”
She said she finds comfort from visiting the Macquarie Park Cemetery where her family was laid to rest on August 8 last year.
“I generally go with my aunt and uncle and William,” Brenda said.
“It’s a really nice place. It doesn’t seem like a cemetery. It’s really bright and there’s lots of sun and grass.
“William and I will go down there and play handball together and run around a bit.”
The past 12 months have been difficult for Brenda, not just because she has had to deal with incredible loss, but also because she and her family have been the subject of continuing media reports and speculation.
She said that photographers often take pictures of her while she is walking home from school.
Every now and then she is confronted by rumours about her family or claims that police have made a breakthrough.
Last year, pictures from inside the family home were published, seemingly with family consent.
They had not given permission to enter the home or snap the photo hanging on the wall of the entrance foyer.
“A lot of the time what you hear and read is not true, but you have to deal with it,” Brenda said.
“All you can do is ignore it. I try not to read things. I come home or get off the bus and I can hear people taking photos of me and I wonder, ‘why?’
“The police tell us to just ignore the media but it’s really hard to do that because everywhere people are talking about it.
“When it’s untrue I get a bit angry.”
Most recently her uncle Robert was thrown into the spotlight amid reports that he was a key suspect.
Brenda said any reports that her uncle could be involved were hurtful and simply not true.
“He was really stressed and really upset (by the reports) because we know it’s not true,” she said.
“And he doesn’t like to think that people around him might think that way about him.
“He has helped me so much and he really supports Kathy and has done so much for us. It’s not fair that people and the media are making out like he might have something to do with it.”
Brenda said she feels safe, because it seemed that whoever did it was targeting her parents.
“Nothing has happened to me. I still don’t know why it happened.
“If it gets solved then at least we will know why and that will give us closure. I don’t know if that day will come soon, because it has been a year already, but I’m sure the police will come to some sort of conclusion.”
POLICE INVESTIGATIONS CONTINUE: What we already know
Brenda denied there was tension between her aunt and uncle and her grandparents, Lin Yangfei and Zhu Fengqing, over legal issues, such as the dividing up of family assets and who should have custody of her.
“We’re all going to Shanghai together for 1 1/2 weeks during the school holidays,” Brenda said.
“We’re close. It’s hurtful because the media don’t see both sides of the story and a lot of the time it’s not the truth.
“It’s untrue that there is tension because we just need to have time to sort out how we handle the family assets.
“Of course, everyone has different opinions about how that should be done, but it doesn’t mean we are angry at each other.”
Despite everything, Brenda is trying to focus on getting through school, passing her exams and perhaps getting into university, though she is not sure what she wants to study yet.
“I enjoy a lot of things, doing things on the computer and playing with graphics and computer programming,” she said.
“But I’m not really sure about after school. In a way it’s a bit scary because at the moment I have lots of friends supporting me and I worry that I might lose touch with some of them once we leave school.
“It’s good to know that people care, even though you’ve lost your family you have close friends who will be there for you, and you just hope that you won’t lose them any time soon.”
[ 本帖最后由 老猫 于 2011-5-5 23:57 编辑 ] |
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