by Mei Fong
I was reminded yet again that despite the Internet and an increasingly globalized world, many Chinese people’s perceptions of recent historical events can be sketchy.
While writing her book on the 1989 student protests at Tiananmen, National Public Radio correspondent Louisa Lim visited four top Chinese universities and showed students a picture of “Tank Man,” the iconic picture of a single person stopping an oncoming line of tanks. To the Western world, it is one of the most recognizable images of the event. Lim found that only fifteen out of a hundred students recognized the photo.
It struck me as ironic that people of my former student’s generation would know so little about a policy that birthed them and will continue to shape their reality. Yet to my student, such a story was a tale from another country.
Little Emperors, Grown Up
People born in the 1980s are now, at most, 28 years old, and they exercise no real power to speak of, so the damage caused by abuses of power cannot be their fault. If you haven’t wiped your ass properly, don’t try to use the younger generation’s baby hair as toilet paper.
—Han Han, This Generation
If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.
—P. D. James, The Children of Men
I
One of the most common sights in any Chinese public space is a staggering infant surrounded by a gaggle of hovering adults. This is, of course, the Little Emperor, a Chinese phenomenon more precious than pandas, though reproductively not as rare.
I was curious: What happens when this scenario reverses itself? What happens when the Little Emperor grows up and has to return this attention sixfold, no longer the pyramid’s apex but the base?
Over 90 percent of China’s urban households were subject to the one-child policy at the time it was revised, which makes for over 100 million only children who will eventually have to shoulder the burden of aging parents, grandparents, and all the accompanying financial and emotional baggage—dementia, cancer, brittle bones, broken hips—with limited help from China’s still-nascent social safety net.
In 2007, I began searching for a way to report this. It wasn’t easy because the oldest children of the one-child policy were just thirty, with parents in their fifties, most still enjoying good health. I was trying to write about something that hadn’t happened yet.
I started looking around for someone in the unusual position of having an ailing parent while still in his or her twenties. That’s how I met Liu Ting, who became a minor national celebrity for a strange reason: he took his mother to college.
Now, when I say “took his mother to college,” I don’t mean that he physically brought her along to classes. Liu Ting’s mother had kidney disease and required careful nursing. His father, a gambler, had decamped, worn out by years of marital acrimony. Liu Ting was off to college in a different town, and there was no one to care for his mother, Yong Min. In an engaging bit of role reversal that happened to catch a nation’s fancy, he brought his mother to live with him on campus.
In another country, this might have been no big deal. But China has a long history of revering parents. The words xiao shun are translated into English as “filial piety,” or respect for one’s elders, but that’s a dry facsimile of what it really means. 24 Paragons of Filial Piety, a medieval set of stories still told to today’s children, demonstrates filial piety in a variety of self-sacrificial ways. One “paragon” eats vegetables while the parents eat meat. Another, little Wu Ming, exposes himself to mosquitoes so they bite him, not his parents. One tastes his father’s fecal matter, to judge how sick he is. Such solicitude even extends to in-laws; one notable paragon, Lady Tang, breast-feeds her toothless mother-in-law. At its most elevated, filial piety means putting parents ahead of children; as the thinking goes, you can always have another child, not another mother.
During the Cultural Revolution, filial piety and other cornerstones of family life took a hit. Mao’s government encouraged children to rise up against their parents and other figures of authority in the name of smashing the four “olds”—customs, culture, habits, and ideas. In one instance, sixteen-year-old Zhang Hongbing turned in his mother for defacing Mao’s portrait. She was shot two months later. Decades later, a guilt-ridden Zhang published a lengthy public confession, calling himself a son “who could not even be compared to animals.”
In 2007, the Communist leadership, alarmed by the changes brought about by rapid economic growth as well as the family structure breakdown the party itself had engineered, sought to revive such traditional values. One of the ways it did so was by launching a series of National Moral Hero awards, a sort of Nobel for noble values: honesty, patriotism, and, of course, respect for elders. Liu Ting was honored in the first batch, one of the youngest winners.
It brought the lonely twenty-something a kind of fame he hadn’t bargained for. Books, newspaper articles, and comics were written about him. National broadcaster CCTV aired a song, “Mother,” composed especially for him. Someone else wrote a play. A local developer let Liu Ting live in a luxury apartment, rent free. His mother got a free kidney out of his National Moral Hero status; money for her operation was raised through donations. There’s even a statue of him in Guangzhou’s Cultural Square for Filial Piety, though he’s never seen it.
Who is this modern-day paragon, and how does he speak for his generation of only children? Were his trials and tribulations somehow a foreshadowing of tensions to come?
I went to meet him in Lin’an, a small town four hours west of Shanghai. Slight, with a pointed chin and smooth skin as pale as rice, Liu Ting was quiet and deferential. He immediately linked hands with me and started calling me “Sister Fong.” I noticed he kept his nails short except for his thumbnail, which jutted out. This was a common affectation among older men in China but rare in people of his age. Much like a Rolex or a fancy cell phone, the lone long fingernail signals affluence and gentility, for no peasant farmer can afford to maintain this kind of manicure. When I asked Liu Ting about it, he blushed and hid his hands behind his back.
Liu Ting was genuinely taken aback by the attention showered on him.
His days were a juggle of classes and nursing. Everything he did was constrained by the need to care for his mother, who had uremia, a disease that manifests itself in constant fatigue and nausea. He rose at six to prepare the family’s breakfast of hot green bean congee. He headed to the wet market every day after class to buy fresh produce and ensure that his mother ate well. I went with him once, observing as he expertly threaded his way through the crowds to buy spring onions and tofu, which the vendor skillfully sliced from a trembling white slab the size of a small table. At the time supermarkets like Walmart and its local imitator, Wumart, were already making inroads even into small towns like Lin’an, but Liu, ever mindful of bills, rarely visited those air-conditioned bastions of comfort.
“It’s not always pleasant,” he said, delicately picking his way past a tubful of croaking frogs. “But you get the freshest and cheapest this way.” He averted his glance from a corner where a dog shivered, paws and muzzle bound, destined for the pot.
A wet market in China is not at all like a genteel farmers’ market in the West, with cheese tastings and organic olive oil. Instances of casual brutality are everywhere: Pick an eel slithery from a bucket, and the vendor will smash its head in for you with a large stick. Blood and entrails from newly slaughtered chickens slop onto the floor. Vendors stomp around in rubber boots, as sprightly as folk dancers, wearing colorful sleeve protectors—elasticized cloth tubes reaching from wrist to elbow. You can get almost anything in a wet market: meat off the hoof, fresh flowers, hand-rolled noodles, sticks of incense, Hello Kitty underwear, whippy little bamboo canes for disciplining children or pets.
All through the market, I saw people shoot Liu the sidelong glance, the lot of a small-town celebrity. Lin’an has a population of only fifty thousand, small by China’s standards. (Even by 2013, the tow
n was still so non-noteworthy it couldn’t be found on Beidou, China’s GPS system.) In such a small place, Liu’s celebrity resulted in heightened focus. He couldn’t put a foot wrong. Throughout his shopping he bobbed and ducked, courteously replying to queries about his mother’s health, the state of his studies, and whether or not he was dating anyone. Shoving onto a crowded bus, Liu said, “Of course at times I want to be rude, but I can’t. Everyone’s watching.” Back home, Liu scrambled to cook dinner: steamed fish, soup, and rice. Then the dishes, his mother’s nightly back and foot rubs, and, finally, homework.
Liu’s happiest memories were his first six months on campus, when he was unencumbered by family cares. He lived in a dorm, went to parties, indulged his interests in photography, art, and drama. Then came news his mother would die without a kidney transplant, an operation they couldn’t afford. Liu Ting moved out of the dorm to a rundown apartment. He used his student loans to pay for his mother’s medication. He also took a part-time job as a janitor on campus.
A local reporter learned about Liu’s predicament and wrote the article that changed Liu’s life. The next day, readers jammed university phone lines offering donations. A hero was born.
II
When China launched the one-child program in 1980, one of the big questions was whether a generation of only children—dubbed xiao huangdi, or “Little Emperors”—would mean a nation of overindulged, spoiled children. If so, what implications for China?
The nation’s worst fears appeared to be realized in a famous, though controversial, 1992 study of a group of Chinese and Japanese children on a camping trip to Inner Mongolia. Conducted by Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of the China Youth and Children Research Center, the study described Chinese children as whiners and complainers. Unlike the Japanese group, Chinese kids did not know how to ration or prepare food, and they wanted adults to cook for them. The parents, Sun said, were no better—the Chinese rushed to help whenever their kids needed assistance, while Japanese parents held back to let their children learn independence.
The study was criticized as being unscientific, but it cast a long shadow. When I taught at the University of Southern California—the college with the largest proportion of Chinese nationals in America—virtually all my China students knew this experiment, which they disputed vigorously. They did not feel themselves to be more selfish or narcissistic than normal, but they did acknowledge one important benefit of not having siblings: most of their parents couldn’t have afforded USC’s hefty tuition otherwise.
In the years since then, a score of more rigorous studies have been conducted looking at China’s only-child phenomenon, with mixed results.
While some supported the Little Emperor hypothesis—China’s singletons tended to be more self-centered, with weaker life skills and less self-control—there are many others that indicate no significant differences between only children and children with siblings. Some showed that these antisocial differences disappeared over time, as singleton children are socialized through school and other institutions. Other studies showed that only children in China have an edge over children with siblings when it comes to academic achievements and sociability. In a massive 2007 study covering over eighty-five thousand children, run by the National Science Institute, a survey of only children compared with children with siblings concluded only that singletons were on average heavier, taller, and had poorer eyesight.
Measured against children with siblings, China’s Little Emperors didn’t look that different at first glance. Measured against other age cohorts, however, China’s only-child generation displayed marked differences.
In 2012, a group of economists headed by Lisa Cameron recruited over four hundred people from two groups, one consisting of those born between 1975 and 1978, before the start of the policy, and the rest born after 1980. Over half of the pre-one-child group had at least one sibling. Only 15 percent from the so-called Little Emperor group had siblings.
Subjects took tests and played games designed to measure traits such as extroversion, agreeableness, and negativity. The contrasts between the two groups were striking. In a game where players decided how to split a pot of money, the Little Emperor generation were less generous. In another game that tested players’ willingness to rely on others, Little Emperors exhibited less trust and trustworthiness. In games that measured risk taking, they favored safe bets over high-risk, high-reward propositions.
They were also more pessimistic. When asked to rate the probability of sunshine the next day, the Little Emperor group tended to expect gloomy weather. In a game that tested players’ willingness to engage in competition, the Little Emperor group were also more likely to back away from competition.
While the sample size of 421 people was relatively small, the study stood out from other Little Emperor studies because it wasn’t primarily based on behavioral surveys, nor did it compare single children with kids with siblings. Instead, it employed relatively new concepts from game theory to observe differences in behavioral patterns. Since Cameron et al. compared test groups that were only a few years apart in age—thus keeping large socioeconomic conditions fairly constant—the results suggest that the Little Emperor cohort’s differences are a result of family structure.
Lisa Cameron admits when presenting the study results, “I did feel uncomfortable painting a cohort with such a negative brush as being less trusting and more neurotic.”
The news that China’s Little Emperors view themselves as unlucky and pressured may come as a surprise to others, if not themselves. This generation is the most affluent in recent Chinese history. Unlike their grandparents and parents, they didn’t have to deal with the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution or the 1950s Great Famine. In the thirty years since the launch of the one-child policy, aspirations have morphed from the humble “three rounds and a sound”—bicycle, sewing machine, watch, and radio—to private home ownership, cars, and college degrees. Unlike their parents, the Little Emperor generation have never known anything but soaring economic growth.
I spent two days with Liu and his mother, Yong Min, in their apartment. Liu’s Moral Hero award has scored him this two-bedroom rent-free apartment for the duration of his college years. It has security guards and landscaping, a beautiful little man-made creek, blossoming plum trees. We flipped through old photos: his mother in her youth, with soft parted lips and an ingénue look; his now-absent father in a loud checked sport coat and modified Afro; Liu’s school pictures. Year after year, it was always a large crowd of boys and not very many girls. Everyone’s gender is nearly neutralized with baggy tracksuit uniforms.
We paused before a studio shot of Liu Ting dressed up in yellow emperor robes. “I was never a Little Emperor,” he said emphatically.
Yong Min’s frail health made him protective. When he was ten, he remembered, he had a rare argument with his mother over a long-forgotten issue. Yong Min said, “Well, I’ve raised you for ten years, you dare stand up to me?” Liu Ting retorted, “It’s normal for parents to take care of kids for a decade. When I’m grown up, I’ll take care of you.”
III
In 2005, academic Mei Zhong studied a series of letters from only children. They had been sent to radio talk show host Danyan Chen and published in a book called The Only-Child Declaration. Zhong analyzed the letters and broke them into categories that revealed these children were mostly preoccupied with a sense of living under pressure, excessive parental love, and loneliness. “In general, the writings have a common blue tone in them. Stress and pressure are a main theme,” wrote Zhong.
Children expressed embarrassment and guilt for the huge sacrifices their parents made. One father offered to sell his blood for college fees. Another set of parents cooked magnificent feasts every weekend when their daughter returned home from school, only to live on leftovers the rest of the week. One teenager recounted how his mother, before heading to work, would travel across town every day to his dorm room to bring him breakfast and make his bed. “Before l
ong, my roommates became upset because they’re not used to having a woman in the room as they get up. What’s more, my roommates, and later on, all my classmates gave me a nickname, ‘Baby,’ and called me as my mother does with a long inflection at the end.”
With these sacrifices came great parental expectations. Many parents from this only-child generation had been deprived of an education or had theirs interrupted because of the Cultural Revolution, said Zhong. “They felt their dreams were crashed and the only hope to realize those dreams was through their only-child. There was a sense of urgency for them to push their child toward success, and in every possible aspect.”
One child wrote, “Our generation of only-children is very self conscious. For historical reasons, we must shoulder all of our parents’ goals and their ever-bigger dreams. Compared to previous generations, we don’t have our independent future, but rather, re-walk the path our parents didn’t finish; we live for it and struggle for it.” The Little Emperor generation label themselves the “sandwich generation” and kubi.
Kubi (rhymes with “ruby”), combining the words for “bitter” and “pressure,” is Internet slang, a term of self-mockery. Kids use it the way Americans say “It sucks”: “I’ve got term papers due; my life’s too kubi.”
A former student of mine said the Little Emperor generation feel kubi because, compared with cohorts born in the 1970s and 1990s, they are unable to fully reap the benefits of China’s economic growth but bear the brunt of its development.
Too young to take advantage of private-sector expansion or the privatization of the real estate market, they deal with skyrocketing property prices in China’s major markets.
