Brothers and Sisters

by Wood, Charlotte

  In this photograph, Bi Kaiwei looks thin to the point of gauntness, his eyes closed and his mouth tight. He lives in Wufu, works in a chemical plant there, had a little girl, Bi Yuexing, who was thirteen years old. His daughter, his only child; she was killed in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.

  If it’s impossible to write about only children without invoking the single-person ghost of Granville Stanley Hall, it’s also impossible to write about only children without invoking the billion-person population of China and its famous—or infamous—one-child policy. ‘Have fewer children; live better lives,’ the government slogan declares. And in 2008, the world was paying particular attention to some real lives behind that phrase. On the one hand, the stories were about those only children killed in Sichuan’s rubble—more than seven thousand, some said. On the other, with the Beijing Olympics imminent, they were about the pianistic prodigy Lang Lang. As the young Chinese superstar who would be centre stage when the Games began, he embodied not only the happy-endings of international opportunity and success but also the worst kind of pressures and expectations that Chinese parents—and often, people suspected, any parents—were suspected of harbouring for their lone offspring. Here were Lang’s parents paying half a year’s salary to buy their two-year-old son a piano. Here was Lang’s father moving thousands of miles with the young boy to pursue his musical education while Lang’s mother stayed behind and kept up her job. Here was Lang’s father, furious that his son had missed two hours’ piano practice, thrusting pills into his son’s hand and insisting he take them or throw himself from their tiny balcony. Because missing practice meant certain failure. Because failure meant death—there was no going home and admitting that your little boy was not going to be an international megastar.

  A father advocating his son’s suicide: the suspected story of China’s suspect little emperors and empresses—as their millions of only children were tagged—writ large.

  The problem seemed to be one of many eggs and just one basket. In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, some bereaved parents expressed their grief in terms of having had to pin their every hope on just one child. ‘And this is the return we get,’ said one mother.

  Children mourned in the language of profit and loss, of capital and investment. This is the return.

  In the photograph of Bi Kaiwei, he is holding a photograph of Yuexing; you can see how tightly his fingers clutch its glossy edges. His body looks rigid with grief, as if his entire being was focused on the little girl in the picture, the mess behind him where she died. When the Chinese government announced it would lift its one-child policy for parents whose children had died in the quake— provided they weren’t too old to try again, or hadn’t already been sterilised—I wondered whether he and his wife could or would try to have another child. Because in in the first stories that reported the children’s deaths, and the later policy reversal, the implication was that the parents’ grief would have been less, or could be lessened, if they were no longer restricted to having just one son or daughter.

  The implication rubbed and jarred: if I died, these stories suggested, my parents would feel better if they had someone else to fall back on. If something happened to my child, I would feel it less if I had another one. They were strange ideas for an only child to think about—strange ideas, too, for the mother of one. As Bi Kaiwei’s wife would know: pregnant with another child by early 2009, ‘I feel this is the return of our daughter,’ she said. Yet, she continued, ‘even though I’m comforting myself, telling myself this is her, I still don’t feel very cheerful. I’m very depressed.’ She and her husband visited Bi Yuexing’s grave every day.

  I am four years old and standing in a cupboard in the laundry. This cupboard can be, variously, a shop, a lift, a bank, a travel agency, depending on my mood, but today it is what it is, a broom cupboard, and I am pretending to be Alice.

  Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard is the imaginary friend of a character in Russell Hoban’s book A Birthday for Frances. Frances, in the book, is a badger.

  Outside the cupboard, my mother is doing the ironing. If the cupboard was a lift, she’d say, ‘fourth floor’ or ‘haberdashery’ from time to time. If the cupboard was a bank, she’d say, ‘Five dollars in change, please.’ But when the cupboard was home to Alice, she simply let it be home to Alice.

  She does not, fortunately, subscribe to Dr Spock’s theory that children invent imaginary friends to make up for some deficit in their lives. Perhaps it was a shortfall of ‘hugging and piggyback rides’, he suggested, recommending that any child still nattering to an imaginary being by the age of four should be shipped off to a ‘child psychiatrist, child psychologist, or other mental health counsellor [who would] be able to find out what they’re lacking’. At the age of four, I am not and never have been deprived of either hugs or piggybacks. At the age of four, my own gallery of imaginary friends is not only intact, I also like to pretend that I am the imaginary friend of a badger out of a book. And no one tells me I shouldn’t.

  If imaginary friends were symptomatic of a problem, then the problem was thought to be more pronounced and more common among only children. Of course it was the lack of siblings, the lack of conversation between peers, the lack of interaction in long days. We were lonely little souls, deprived of real conversation with real playmates and desperately trying to make some up for ourselves. Best not to talk about it; best to hope we grew out of it as quickly as we could—with or without the assistance of Dr Spock’s retinue of experts.

  I can’t remember what being Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard required me to do, other than stand in the broom cupboard. I can remember the sound of my mother’s voice as we chatted through the door, the sound of steam as her iron went on gliding and surging, gliding and surging. And Alice-in-the-Broom-Cupboard is still part of our family, referred to and remembered in the way of Percy the Parrot (whose adventures my father channelled for me), the Six Fairies (channelled by my mother), and Mrs SeeWee, my imaginary neighbour in the garden who lived beyond a doormat that sat— inexplicably—in the middle of a bed of sasanquas for years.

  One of the first things I did when we thought about becoming parents ourselves, more than thirty years later, was track down a copy of A Birthday for Frances, so that Alice could come into being for that next, then-theoretical generation.

  Here is a selection from the world’s gallery of only children—proffered for their various levels of inspiration, consolation or remonstration. Here is Lance Armstrong, Lauren Bacall, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Indira Gandhi, Isaac Newton and Frank Sinatra—plus one US president (FDR), two US first ladies (Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush) and one almost-one (Tipper Gore). Take solace, too, one-off progeny, from the fact that you are more likely to appear on the cover of Time magazine than your siblinged friends.

  And here is an alternative phrase that could ameliorate the downsides of that English ‘only’. Step into French, and an only child becomes une enfant unique instead—redolent with drum rolls and acclamation.

  I am eighteen years old, a few days out of home, starting university, starting the next part of my life. On this late summer morning, my mother’s phone rings, and it’s someone suggesting that my parents might like to host an exchange student now that I’ve gone. The silence in the house without its one available young person—they must want someone else around to fill that gap.

  My mother declines: they’re not really looking to replace me. They’re not really wishing they had someone else around. They’re happy I’m off doing what I want to do; they’ll look forward to the holidays when I come home. They stand firm in the face of more than one of these suggestions. My mother, as the years pass, gets busier and busier—there’s no way she’d have had time for an exchange student.

  Later, when I move overseas, it happens that they sell my bed, change the locks on their front door, buy a car that only seats two. We make jokes about this—not only did they not need to replace me with an exchange student, now they’re excising me from the
ir space completely. Some people, when I tell this story, take it seriously, which makes me wonder if this is the sort of sneaky behaviour parents-of-several do get up to when their houses finally empty.

  And later again, when I’m pregnant, I ask my mother for the first time about being an only child, about whether they ever thought I might not be—or should not be. It’s never occurred to me to ask before.

  ‘I always wondered,’ she says, playful, ‘what I’d do if I had another small person and didn’t like the second one as much as I liked the first . . .’

  Here are some statistics; here are some correlations. The work finally done on only children that offered alternatives to G. Stanley Hall showed that they tended to speak earlier and gain their vocabulary faster, gain higher marks in aptitude tests and in school, and not only progress to tertiary education but follow through and graduate. They tended to have better self-esteem, to be more patient, to be more sharing. In terms of happiness, politics and career choices, they were indistinguishable from any member of a larger family.

  As countries prosper, families tend towards fewer children. Similarly as women’s education levels rise. And as levels of personal faith decline, people tend towards fewer children too. By late 2008, single-child families outnumbered two-child families in America for the first time—although the number of Americans who thought one child was the ideal number was still a miniscule three per cent.

  Here are some theories about the benefits of being or having a single child. Fewer children in a family mean the resources that family has available have to be divided fewer ways—whether that’s time for reading together, money for tertiary education, or the availability of frog and mouse suits. There’s no way even a master French-knitter could whip up Charlotte’s webs for five offspring on short notice.

  Imaginary friends are now seen not as a dangerous tendency that should be curbed as quickly as possible, but as a hallmark of creativity—if your child doesn’t have a Mrs SeeWee, some say, you’d do well to invent one to impress their teachers. And fewer children mean women are freer sooner to do other things, whether that’s returning to work or heading in a whole new direction. Only children as emancipation.

  But research can show you whatever you’d like to see: of the first sixteen studies of China’s burgeoning population of only children, two found they displayed more ‘socially desirable’ behaviour, one found they were more spoiled and selfish, and less independent and emotionally healthy, and the vast majority—the remaining thirteen—found there was no appreciable difference between the onlies and the severals at all. A connection was drawn between an increase in the Chinese crime rate and an increase in single children. The preponderance of males compared to females that was the perhaps unintended result of the policy could be responsible, it was suggested, for almost two-fifths of the surge in crime the country was experiencing. But then another connection was drawn between the one-child policy and any positive contribution China was making to address climate change: 300 million fewer births meant 300 million fewer people making their demands on the world’s resources.

  More than a decade ago, American environmental writer Bill McKibben approached parenthood from an ecological angle. The world and its resources had played a large part in the decision he and his wife made to have Sophie, a single child, and he wanted that world, those resources, to at least figure in the thinking some other people gave to the important question of their family’s size. ‘I’m not saying that my friends, or anyone else, are wrong to have several children,’ he wrote, ‘or that they should feel guilty or defensive . . . all I’m saying is that we live at a watershed moment in our ecological history when we need at least to consider this question, a question we almost never talk about.’

  But alongside his concerns about the world’s food, the world’s energy, the world’s space, the world’s future, he grappled with the authority he had—and as someone with his own sibling—to decide that his daughter would be siblingless. Beside all the familiar concerns—would she be shy, selfish, spoiled, unpopular?—he asked whether she would have to endure an especial loneliness after he and his wife had died.

  I understood how much he worried about Sophie and the state of the world and its future. But the idea of especial loneliness, especial orphan-ness, had never occurred to me. Everyone is orphaned when their parents die, irrespective of how many brothers or sisters they have, just as every first-born child gets to be an only one . . . for a while. And only children—at least in my experience—tend to be good at accumulating people, at creating their own quasi-families, at bulking up their numbers with a profusion of friends with whom they often have closer relationships than the ones they see over in sibling-world.

  I asked my one-of-five husband if it would matter to him that this one-of-one child of ours had no siblings.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all.’ As simple and definitive as that.

  I am thirty-seven years old and lying on an operating table at Brisbane’s Mater Hospital, unexpectedly caesareaned, unexpectedly delivered. My head is turned to my left, and my nose is centimetres away from the nose of our tiny baby, looking to his right, looking at me while my husband leans in from the other side. This person we’ve spent nine months wondering about, imagining. For most of that time, chatting away to him, telling him stories, it felt like he was the latest in my long line of imaginary friends.

  ‘The look on your faces,’ says the anaesthetist, clicking our camera, ‘the look on your faces: look what we made.’ The three of us, framed in our hospital blues, together in the world for the first time.

  Later, in one dead-of-night feed, I look at this little being lying in my lap, his father lying next to me. In the half-funk of darkness, I wonder about the genetics of this, and whether I see my son not as the amalgam of two people, two families, two clear and distinct lines of descent, but as some kind of sibling—a sibling through vertical generations, rather than the more usual horizontal ones.

  He shifts a little, grabs at my finger without looking at it, and I cannot describe the size or shape of the warmth and the excitement and the anxiety and the responsibility that settle around me. This can’t be how you feel about a sibling; this is how you feel about a child. This is, as a friend had said it would be, a whole other way of loving.

  When I glimpse myself now in a mirror or a window, I see somebody’s mother—just one somebody. And I see myself more clearly, more distinctly than I ever have before, as if I’m recognising myself properly for the first time.

  This little life, lying across my lap, his head as soft as velvet, his skin as smooth as silk. It’s four in the morning and while my son lies here with his cheek resting on one hand, his father is next to me, asleep, his own cheek resting on his own hand. Outside, the light is coming up through silver, through mauve, and the first kookaburras are beginning to sing. Inside, the three of us are breathing together, safe and warm.

  There’s no correct maths for families—they’re the embodiment of infinite variety, irreducible to models or theories, right or wrong sizes or shapes or numbers. This is my family: these are the numbers and the people that feel right, from the generation above to the generation below.

  That’s all.

  THE YARRA

  Nam Le

  Hours before sunrise my body’s already soaked with sweat, as though in anticipation of the real heat. Melbourne’s in drought. The city a plain of dust and fire. I wake amidst dreams of Saturday sports as a schoolboy, shin guards and box chafing where the sheets have twisted; noise, collision down the pitch as faraway as a deeper dream. There are tupperware containers at half-time, frozen wedges of orange. Then a sudden switch and charge, players all around me, the rising breathing in my ears—I am sprinting, dread-filled, from here to there, and here the ball is kicked to there, and there it’s booted—at the very moment I’ve chased it down—somewhere else. The sun is on my face and then it is dark. My brother, my blood and bones, confessor and protector, came in last night, he mus
t be sleeping downstairs, and—as always when he comes—I find my hand on my heart and my mind wide open and wheeling.

  I get up and wash my face. The water from the cold faucet is warm, and smells of dirt. Downstairs, a reflexive propriety forestalls me looking at the sleeping form on the couch, and then I look. My brother, Thuan, comes bringing no clues where he’s been. As always, he lies on his back. His mouth is open, his eyelids violent with their shuddered thoughts, and under the thin sheet I can see the heavy limbs, flat and parallel as though lying in state. He has a powerful body.

  I make some coffee in a plunger—not bothering to keep the noise down—and take it outside to the back deck. Surrounded by cicada song I sit down, stare out. Something is wrong. Why else would he have come? I wonder where he’s been but then why does it matter? Away’s where he’s been. I think of his last visit three years ago, then Baby’s visit a few months later—how quiet and uncertain she was, how unlike his girlfriend from those rowdier times. Before leaving she hesitated, then asked for thirty dollars; I gave it to her and never saw her again.

  Against the darkness, other faces from that shared past occur to my mind with stunning vividness. Even closer, thicker, than the dark is the heat. Another scorcher on the way. Somewhere out there a forest is burning, and a family crouching under wet towels in a bathtub, waiting as their green lungs fill with steam and soot muck. I test the coffee’s temperature. As often happens at this time of morning I find myself in a strange sleep-bleared funk that’s not quite sadness. It’s not quite anything. Through the trees below, the river sucks in the lambency of city, creeps it back up the bank, and slowly, in this way, as I have seen and cherished it for years, the darkness reacquaints itself into new morning.

  He’s there now, I sense him, but I say nothing. Minutes pass. A line of second lightness rises into view beside the river: the bike trail.