Office workers retrieve childhood joy on Children's Day

     Retrieving their magic cubes from the dusty drawers and chanting the nursery rhymes they were taught in kindergarten decades ago, China's office workers joined the country's hundreds of millions of children in their celebration of the International Children's Day on Monday.

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    Xiao Wenye, 24, a programmer with a Beijing-based computer company, found her mobile phone flooded with "Happy Children's Day"text messages from her colleagues.

    "Although I am not a child any more, I want to make the special day my holiday," she said.

    "When I was a little girl, I could not wait to grow up," she recalled. "But now, I really miss the joy in my childhood."

    Xiao's passion was shared by her nostalgic peers. One of them is Li Hong, a 30-year-old executive in an accounting company in the eastern Nanjing City.

    The young father bought a Teddy bear and a car model online as his Children's Day presents -- one for his 4-year-old daughter and one for himself.

    "When I was a kid, my needy parents were too poor to buy me any decent toys," he said. "Now I can make up for my lost childhood joy with my own salary."

    The ever-increasing work pressure that office workers face also makes them cherish the good old childhood days.

    A popular text message that has been circulating among Beijing's white-collar workers reads "Lay down your masks and be a child. Those over-aged children who rise as early as a rooster, sleep as late as a dog and work as hard as a mule -- Happy Children's Day."

    "I will turn off my mobile phone and spoil myself by sprawling on the couch, watching Transformers with a bag of king-size potato chips in my hands," said Liu Chang, who is a bank clerk in the southwestern Sichuan Province.

    "I just want to pretend to be a child for one day to escape from the work pressure," he said.

    In cyberspace, words such as "Let's be childlike and play hide-and-seek today!" and "Anyone want to go to the entertainment park today?" could be easily spotted on twitters and MSN.

    According to an online survey conducted by www.zdiao.com, a Chinese survey Web site, more than 80 percent of the nearly 750 voters said they believed that the Children's Day is a good outlet to alleviate their work pressures.

    "Most adults who love to observe the day are urbanities born in the 1970s or 1980s, who lived a relatively affluent life when they were children. But they experienced great pressure when they began to work," said Meng Tianyun, a sociologist with Qingdao University in the eastern Shandong Province.

    "These changes make them cherish their childhood even more and celebrate the festival could be interpreted as a way of easing their pressure," he said.