PHOTO: STACEY SQUIRES/HOMEDVicki Van is taking a proactive stance to find her first home – she is dropping flyers into letterboxes in her preferred suburbs in Christchurch.
Vicki Van of Christchurch was born in China in the 1980s, when the one-child-family policy was firmly in place. And that was her misfortune.
“Most couples were keen to have a boy,” Van says. “My parents were so disappointed to have a girl that they discarded me into a rubbish bin outside a fruit shop.”
But Van’s fortune changed – the fruit shop owners heard her crying and rescued her, and they kept her and raised her as their own daughter.
Fast forward more than 20 years when Van heard about New Zealand while working as a guide in the Australian Pavilion at World Expo 2010 Shanghai. “One day I visited the New Zealand Pavilion next door and I was so amazed at your country, I applied for a one-year working holiday visa. I have been here ever since, because I am deeply in love with this country, and now I want to buy a house here.”
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