One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

by Mei Fong

  The mascots were collectively dubbed fuwa—“good-luck dolls”—but online wags took to calling them wuwa instead—“witch dolls.”

  Censors, of course, quickly shut this down.

  Fourteen days. Ten days.

  I was in the hospital for my official first-trimester checkup. My doctor was reassuring. “You’re past the hump,” he exclaimed cheerily. He passed a transducer lightly over my belly, frowned, did another pass.

  “Never mind, you’ll see it all better when you do the scan,” he said, and smilingly sent me down to Radiology.

  After gazing at the monitor, the man in Radiology bit back an exclamation.

  “Who’s your doctor?” he demanded. He left abruptly.

  I clutched Andrew’s hand.

  They told me the heartbeat—the same one that I had seen pulsing so strongly a few weeks earlier—had stopped. I hadn’t felt it, hadn’t known.

  Game over.

  Later, in my bedroom, I heard the same sort of choking cries I’d heard from Tang. How odd, I thought, before realizing it was me.

  Eight days.

  I was in the hospital for a D&C. The next day, I was back at work. I was going to act like it had never happened. What happened to me was just a small taste of what happened to the parents in Sichuan. The dream had ended, that was all. Morning had come.

  Despite my best efforts, the guilt bubbled up. Did I hurt the pregnancy by traveling to a seismic zone? Carrying heavy bags? Looking at dead bodies? Or maybe it was breathing the polluted Beijing air, or riding a bicycle . . . I told myself sternly not to be irrational. Miscarriages are common in the first trimester. Still, the little voice remained. Your fault, your fault. See what you did to your wawa.

  Zero days.

  The opening ceremony was held at the Bird’s Nest Stadium, the world’s largest steel structure and very likely its largest folly too, for after the Games the costly building would serve almost no practical purpose. To cut costs, they scrapped plans to build a retractable roof. With no cover, the stadium would be too hot or too cold most of the year.

  On this day, the air smelled of rain, and we nervously fingered the rain ponchos placed inside our Olympic grab bags. The Weather Modification Bureau had deployed twenty-six control stations to fend off rain clouds before they got to the Bird’s Nest.

  With temperatures in the nineties, the Bird’s Nest was more like a wok. Everyone—China’s Politburo, George W. Bush, and David Beckham—was cooking. Raising my binoculars, I zoomed in on athletes on the field, picking out seven-footer Yao Ming. Sweat stains bloomed all over his scarlet blazer. The basketballer had walked in to thunderous applause with an adorable nine-year-old. Lin Hao, a quake survivor, had pulled two classmates from the rubble. Two-thirds of his classmates had been killed.

  Of the two, it was really Yao whose existence said more about the one-child policy and what might have been. Born in 1980, Yao belonged to the first generation affected by the policy. He was the eleven-pound child of towering basketball players. Spotting his potential early on, sports officials fruitlessly lobbied for Yao’s parents to be given an exemption to the policy. They’d wanted more Yao champions.

  Increasingly sports recruiters complain that Chinese parents are reluctant to subject their precious one-and-only to this system, where young athletes are plucked away from their families and relentlessly drilled. Looking at the parade of athletes, I thought it was funny that the one-child policy could eventually spell the end to this sports system.

  One Olympic gymnast told my colleague her meal portions were so tiny, “it was like cat food.” She said, “I never realized until I traveled overseas that other athletes did this for fun.” Guo Jingjing, known as the “Goddess of Diving,” suffered from extremely poor eyesight, a common condition among China’s elite divers, who start high-impact diving before their eyes are fully developed.

  Yao himself believes the one-child policy fostered selfishness, a lack of trust, and “may be one reason why we struggle in team sports.” Certainly the Chinese have a sporting inferiority complex because, although they periodically win medals in Ping-Pong, diving, and gymnastics, they don’t fare as well in commercial sports like soccer and basketball.

  Sports insiders call this the “Big Ball, Small Ball,” theory, arguing that China can do well only in sports that emphasize precision and mechanization—“Small Ball”—but not in sports that need creativity and teamwork—“Big Ball.” Beyond sports, it’s become a metaphor for everything from China’s education system to its economic prowess.

  On this night, it was clear China was gunning for Big Ball status.

  I was live-blogging the opening ceremony and trying not to think about miscarriage, or children, or the earthquake, which had all linked in my mind to become one giant lump of misery. I thought the Olympics, with its relentless push to celebrate China’s glory and bury the history of its excesses, would be a good venue.

  But even here, it was impossible to escape reminders.

  Take the venue itself. Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous dissident artist, likened to Warhol, had been a consultant on the Bird’s Nest design. He ended up disavowing his role in its creation, saying the Chinese government had turned the Olympics into a sham.

  Ai had gone to Sichuan ten days after the quake to film the disaster and was a vocal critic of the school collapse cover-up. Later on, he tried to create a database of the names of all the children killed in the quake. For his efforts, he was beaten, detained, and slapped with a $2 million fine for unpaid taxes.

  At 8:08 p.m., the show began in a deafening burst of fireworks, floating fairies, spacemen, and synchronized tai chi performers. There were 2,008 cherubic children, representing China’s different tribes. It was all a lavish spectacle choreographed by Zhang Yimou, who had once been persona non grata for making films with themes critical of the regime. In recent years the director had toned down and was now considered safely rehabilitated. Detractors now called him China’s Leni Riefenstahl.

  Zhang had certainly pulled out all the stops, with set pieces giving spectators a quick romp through five thousand years of Chinese culture, touching on the Silk Road and Great Wall. In one set piece, the word harmony blazed brightly.

  An angelic little girl sang the popular “Ode to the Motherland”: “Our future is as bright as ten thousand radiating light beams.”

  A giant globe rose from the floor of the stadium. Was this China’s Big Ball moment? Balanced on top, a Medusa-locked Sarah Brightman kicked off with syrupy sweetness, singing the Olympic theme song “You and Me”: “. . . from one world . . . we are one family . . .” The lyrics are overwhelmingly banal.

  I dashed away a tear. How absurd! To be moved to tears by Sarah Brightman!

  And then, my heart broke.

  IV

  Nothing was what it seemed.

  Those 2,008 children representing China’s tribes? They were all Han Chinese.

  That little singer? She was lip-syncing, a last-minute replacement because the actual singer wasn’t considered pretty enough.

  The fireworks viewers saw on their TV screens? Computer-generated imagery.

  Zhang, the ringmaster, would fall from grace for violating the one-child policy after online rumors floated that he had sired several children. Family-planning officials ended up slapping a $1.2 million fine on him. The man who orchestrated China’s biggest show would end up the man with the biggest fine in the history of the one-child policy.

  China’s coming-out party did mark the country’s ascendance as a global superpower, especially after the Lehman Brothers collapse on Wall Street a few months later, which set in motion a chain of events that underscored America’s shaky economic status. But far from displaying a can-do, fearless spirit, China would become increasingly paranoid about maintaining control, clamping down on media and displaying increasingly territorial behavior with its neighbors.

  A few months after the Olympics, activists unveiled Charter 08, a manifesto advocating reform alo
ng democratic lines. China responded by jailing one of its authors, Liu Xiaobo. In 2010, Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but was unable to collect it since he remains incarcerated.

  Influential Tsinghua University academic Sun Liping wrote, “The Olympics marked a beginning, it can be said, of the stability preservation regime in China. Looking back now, it might be said that the Olympics were something we did that we ought not to have done.”

  V

  Six years later, I arrived in Anren, a little town southwest of Chengdu. Anren is a fairly prosperous-looking little place, with an expensive prep school and lots of new buildings imitating the old Chinese style, with curved sloping roofs, just like in kung fu movies. Signs indicated a Four Points Sheraton was imminent.

  Anren is the pet project of Fan Jianchuan, a real estate tycoon and history buff. In a country that has institutionalized the art of collective forgetting, Anren is a chimera. Fan has built a Xanadu of museums documenting modern Chinese history. All in all, there are fifteen museums, spanning the period from the Japanese Occupation to the Cultural Revolution—the touchy bits that have been mostly excised from other, more orthodox collections in the country. (Beijing’s National Museum, the world’s largest museum, has room for only three lines of text alluding to the ten-year Cultural Revolution.)

  I went to Anren because it boasts two museums on the Sichuan earthquake. I was curious to see how they have memorialized the event. It is always a source of frustration to me that Chinese museums, stuffed with so many exciting artifacts from five thousand years of civilization, are mostly curated by a clutch of didactic, prosy bores with no sense of drama or storytelling. Would this be the same?

  At first, it seemed that propaganda was going to win the day. One building was stuffed with dioramas, diagrams, and pictures praising the government’s swift response to the quake. Beijing’s swift response was admittedly praiseworthy—especially contrasted with the Bush administration’s Katrina response—but it all made for dull viewing.

  Statistics were offered up, as numbing as Sichuan peppercorns:

  Confirmed deaths: 69,226.

  Injured: 374,643.

  Missing: 17,923.

  Roads damaged: 53,295 km.

  The quantities of water conduits and power lines damaged in the quake were recounted to the exact kilometer, but nothing was said about the number of children killed in the quake, or school buildings destroyed.

  I was strolling around the museum compound, flagging, when I saw a sign: TOUGH PIG. It was next to a pigpen, purportedly the home of the quake’s most famous porcine survivor. Zhu Jianqiang, or “Tough Pig,” was a hardy hog that survived under the earthquake rubble for thirty-six days without food and water. I was just wondering if this was the actual pigpen, transported to the museum, when a perfect chorus of shrill grunts burst out behind me.

  There was Tough Pig himself, a huge creature strolling the grounds majestically. He was a massive dirty gray animal, easily dwarfing his keeper. Judging by the alacrity with which people whipped out their cameras, it was definitely a case of four legs good, two legs bad. Hands down, Tough Pig was easily the most popular exhibit I had seen so far.

  Tough Pig had been castrated before the quake, but in 2009 scientists used his DNA to clone six piglets, hoping to study whatever genetic markers he might have that made him so hardy. Even the swine hero of Sichuan could not escape the long arm of family planning. Of course, unlike humans, he was encouraged to multiply. Four legs good, two legs bad.

  Behind Tough Pig’s pen was an annex.

  Here, at last, were the real reminders of the quake, as poignant as Pompeii. There were clocks permanently stuck at 2:28 p.m. There was half a shoe and the ripped remains of a bridal veil, from newlyweds who perished when disaster struck.

  There was a red motorcycle, used by a man to take his dead wife home. He’d lashed her two-day-old corpse to him for their last ride.

  There were murals from Shejiantai, a village famous for producing painted New Year pictures—called nianhua—since the Song dynasty. These nianhua are hand-painted pictures of chubby, rosy babies frolicking around carps, peaches, and peonies, all symbols of plenty. It was a sort of rural, more durable version of Hallmark. People put nianhua up at the start of the New Year as a way of bidding goodbye to the past and welcoming the future. Shejiantai had been completely destroyed in the quake, though was later rebuilt.

  The saddest exhibits were artifacts from the collapsed schools, all conveying an unspoken message of time stopped, life quenched in medias res. Among battered school desks, badminton rackets, backpacks, and Ping-Pong paddles, there was a copy of a seventeen-year-old’s diary. The last entry was dated a week before the quake: “Today the midterm report came out. It’s bad, it’s bad . . . I am so sad. How come I am so useless? How come I didn’t really study hard, spend time reviewing? I’m sorry Father. Really, truly, sorry.”

  From Xuankou Middle School, there are handwritten menus laying out meals for the week. On Monday, the students lunched on pig head in spicy oil, shredded potatoes, and cauliflower with ham. On Tuesday, they had stir-fried pork and lettuce. Many were having a post-lunch siesta when the quake struck. A third were killed.

  I was strongly reminded of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, where a haunting display of thousands of old shoes from victims brings home the tragedy in a way no statistic could. There is very little narration in Anren’s quake museum—I suspect to avoid censorship—but the voices are nonetheless strong.

  The pièce de résistance is an air shaft entirely covered with black-and-white pictures of parents, who are in turn holding pictures of their dead children. This picture-within-picture is blown up, replicated, and pasted onto all four sides of the narrow shaft, which stretches upward.

  Standing there, I was surrounded on all sides by mourners. My eye was drawn upward, a portrait of loss stretching into infinity, pressing down on me. It was hard to breathe.

  I had not thought to see this remembrance in China. So many horrors have happened in modern Chinese history, people have become polar opposites of the citizens of Gabriel García Márquez’s fictional Macondo, who are chained to nostalgia. In China, they are chained to forgetting. Radio journalist Louisa Lim called her book on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre The People’s Republic of Amnesia. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings, Internet censors busily excised even the word nostalgia.

  At the Anren museum, there were reminders everywhere of the importance of the family—witness all those nianhua pictures. You could see how children represented so much in rural China. Not just love, but economic security, societal acceptance, affirmation that life holds meaning.

  When the earthquake happened, there was no real way to describe parents who lost their only child. The term shidu had not yet come into popular usage, but it surfaced in later years. Shidu comes from the words shi—“lose”—and du, or “only.” Sichuan’s parents became one of the earliest examples of the shidu phenomenon, a byproduct of the one-child policy.

  By 2014, there were an estimated 1 million shidu parents, and an additional 76,000 set to join their ranks yearly. They had become a loose-knit organization, commiserating among themselves and petitioning Beijing for higher compensation, priority in adoptions, as well as plans that cater to their specialized pension, medical, and burial needs.

  Shidu parents say the death of a child—if it is your only one—is, in the Chinese context, by far a greater and deeper injury than the loss of one of several children. This truth is unpalatable to Western ears—as though a child’s death could be anything but ruinous and painful for any parent!—but with no progeny, shidu parents have trouble getting accepted into nursing homes and buying burial plots. They are also more financially vulnerable than ordinary retirees, and more prone to depression, studies show. Everything in Chinese society is geared toward marriage and family. Even if the government limited you to one child, you are still a parent, like almost everyone else you know. The unm
arried and the childless are very low on the societal totem pole.

  That was why Zhu Jianming had gone out just three weeks after New Moon’s death for a reverse vasectomy. That was why his voice had trembled when he thought of the lonely years ahead. There are no Florida retirement homes, no colonies where you can lose yourself in craftwork or good works or composing poetry, for a man of his background and income.

  I read an Internet post once by a retiree who’d lost his only child. He didn’t want to move into a retirement home. He couldn’t face weekends, when the halls would fill with visiting family.

  The Sichuan earthquake was not just a tragedy caused by a natural disaster. Like the shadowy outlines of the kraken beneath the sea, it showed the tragic proportions of that great unnatural disaster, the one-child policy.

  Cassandra and the Rocketmen

  It is a very good thing that China has a big population. Even if China’s population multiplies many times, she is fully capable of finding a solution; the solution is production.

  —Mao Zedong

  I

  After fifteen hours on a very slow, very old train, followed by a bone-jolting bus ride, I stumbled bleary-eyed into Yicheng.

  It didn’t look worth the trip. Yicheng is a dirty little place in landlocked Shanxi, coal country with smog levels that are appalling even by China’s standards. It’s the kind of place even KFC and Starbucks wannabes don’t bother with. Yicheng has pretty parts, but they were all blanketed by the fug of pollution. When I drove to the hills flanking the city, I found cave dwellers living in quaint, Hobbit-like splendor, and fields of sunflowers, their great golden heads drooping, exhausted, in the dust.

  Yicheng’s locals joke that it is so named—“City of Wings”—because everybody wants to fly away to bigger, cleaner places. But Yicheng’s name also has another meaning for those interested in population studies. It provides a vision of a China that never took flight.