One Child (15 page)

With success in examinations, a well-established form of social mobility, the
gaokao
became a be-all and end-all examination for every Chinese school-going person, starting in their early teens.

When I lived in China, I always knew when
gaokao
season arrived. Colleagues would take a couple of weeks, sometimes even a month, off work in order to help their kids through this crucial time. Traffic would be lighter. Heavy construction around test areas halted. Beijing’s smoggy skies would magically turn blue. I’d heard of parents who put their daughters on the Pill during
gaokao
so their focus wouldn’t be diminished by menstrual cramps.
Parents would put toothpaste on their child’s toothbrush, just to save them those precious seconds to study.

In the year or two leading up to the
gaokao
, my Chinese students had twelve-hour school days and cram school on weekends, and they slept on average only four to six hours each night. The only children of China may not have had to compete with siblings, but they faced even fiercer competition with their peers.

While suicide rates in China among the young and college-going lag behind those of Japan, the United States, and Russia, test-taking pressure does take its toll.
A 2014 Chinese government report looking at seventy-nine cases of suicide among students concluded that over 90
percent were caused by the pressures of China’s test-oriented educational system. Sixty-three percent of the suicides occurred between February and July, when the
gaokao
and other important exams are held.

My students who said they wanted to work in in-house PR weren’t necessarily lazy or unambitious. But the window for experimentation for a young person in China is much smaller than it is for Americans of a comparable age.

Dating, for example. With
gaokao
being a huge burden during the teenage years, they are all discouraged from distractions like the opposite sex—which isn’t to say, of course, that there’s no flirting or heartbreak. In 2007, a school in southern China even went so far as to ban hand-holding between male and female students. The top high school in Yizhou, a small town in southern China, issued rules stating boys and girls “should only talk together in well-lit places such as the classroom or hallway,” and “exclusive talk between one boy and one girl is prohibited.”

In China, the legal age for marriage for women is twenty (twenty-two for men). Women then have a window of about five to seven years before being considered officially too old for marriage, according to actual guidelines put out by the All-China Women’s Federation, the organization established by the Communist Party to protect women’s rights.
After that, they’re on the shelf, a condition charmingly termed
shengnu
, or “leftovers.” With such a narrow window to make a life-changing decision, it’s no wonder one in five Chinese marriages ends in divorce now, double the rate a decade ago.

Popular blogger Han Han, the Holden Caulfield of his generation, describes it thus: “Most parents won’t allow their school-age children to date, and many are even opposed to their children dating when in college, but as soon as the kid graduates, the parents pray that all of a sudden, someone perfect in every respect—and if possible with an apartment of their own to boot—will drop out of
heaven, and their child must marry them right away. Now, that’s well thought out, isn’t it?”

V

In 2012, Chen Hanbin sold the Beijing apartment his parents gave him, used the proceeds to buy two RVs, and embarked on a road trip around the world. Three years later he was still on the road, a modern-day Jack Kerouac chronicling his journey through short films and blogs.

Among his adventures: kickboxing in Thailand, scuba diving in Australia, picking watermelons in Iraq, and cuddling cobras in India. His group, called No Turning Back, have lost their passports in Cuba and narrowly escaped an avalanche in Norway and an earthquake in Chile. Original members have drifted away and been gradually replaced by new dreamers.

When Hanbin announced his intentions on Chinese social media, China’s online community reacted predictably with encouragement, longing, and envy. But many commenters also voiced disapproval for his “unfilial” conduct and his abdication of parental responsibilities. One online user said, “If you have money to take care of your parents and use the leftover money to pursue your dream, then that’s fine and I’m all for it.
But if you selfishly sell the family home and hurt your parents’ feelings, then that’s another matter.” I couldn’t imagine this kind of reaction if an American thirty-something had decided to do something similar.

I met Hanbin in Los Angeles just after he had completed a cross-country leg that started in Miami. He’d managed to persuade his parents—who’d been lukewarm about his journey from the start—to spend a month on the road, a decision that had ended with his father breaking down in the parking lot at Universal Studios. His father
started crying, begging him to come home, said Hanbin. “He said, ‘Your life is too dangerous. Can you please not go on?’”

Hanbin couldn’t do it. Referencing Tennessee Williams’s “A Prayer for the Wild at Heart Kept in Cages,” he said, “Everyone has cages but China in particular is a cage. Everyone follows one path, everyone measuring how expensive your apartment is, what school you went to, living up to your parental expectations. . . . I want to define my own life.”

Was Hanbin selfish, or were his parents overly invested in their only child?

In 2012 Renmin University academic Du Benfeng coined the term
one-child family risk.
Wrote Du, “The one-child family has serious structural defects: injury and accident suffered by anyone in a family means disaster and even breakdown of this family, and the family is extraordinarily fragile.” (Du’s definition of fragile family structure contrasts with Western studies, where family fragility is mainly viewed through the lens of single-parent or unmarried households. These familial variations are relatively rare in China, in part because of the one-child policy’s effects.)

Family fragility in China, says Du, is also exacerbated by the tendency of one single child to marry another. Only children also come under great pressure to sacrifice job mobility, career choices, and migration in order to please their parents, he said. To ameliorate this, Du suggested measures such as improving government compensation for the death of only children as well as the establishment of insurance for accidental deaths of only children. (So far, no commercial offerings of this nature appear to be available.)

These all seemed reasonable ideas. But in addition to advising tougher traffic laws and heightened safety standards in schools to protect only children, Du also suggested banning violent online games as “harmful to children’s physical and mental health” and counseled that all government organizations take steps to “carry out activities being
favorable to only children’s safety.” It was startling that Du seemed to advocate a coddled existence for only children.

VI

In 2013, I caught up with Liu again. He was still living at home, in the same small town. Among my circle of China acquaintances, this level of permanence was unusual. There were small changes, of course: He was no longer living in the glare of celebrity. There were no more rent-free apartments; he and his mother had moved to cheaper accommodation, a small five-hundred-square-foot apartment they had expanded through a series of built-in partitions. It looked like an elaborate system of bunk beds.

Liu had graduated in 2009. He’d managed to find a low-paying job in the university library. A few years later he found a graphic design job in Hangzhou but quit after less than a year. The high cost of living in a major city stretched his slender salary, he said, and long weekend trips home to see his mother also ate into his time. He was living on savings and writing his autobiography.

I found Liu unchanged, like a Chinese Dorian Gray. He was still thin, still dressed in shapeless large T-shirts and jeans, that long thumbnail, that sweet mien. Yong Min, on the other hand, looked younger than she had five years back. The lines of her face were smoother; her hair seemed glossier and had been cut into a fashionable bob. She was full of plans to make trendy air filter masks, modeled on Korean designs. Such things were becoming more popular in China’s smog-filled cities, she said.

Liu, on the other hand, was drifting. In many ways, his situation seemed to confirm my assumptions: given the stifling demands of his parental obligations, he was not free to pursue his dreams, and indeed the cramped horizons had created a learned response of helplessness.

Liu reinforced my suspicions when he told me he’d auditioned for a reality TV show on Zhejiang TV. The show, called
Chinese Dream
, was modeled on BBC’s
Tonight’s the Night
, where ordinary people were assigned mentors to help them realize their dreams: starting their own business, or starring in a West End production, for example. Liu got an audition on the strength of his previous celebrity.

For his audition, he played the guitar and sang “Mother,” the song that had been specially composed for him. But he didn’t make the cut. “I told them my dream was to live happily and in peace with my mother, maybe write a book,” he said. “They said my dream wasn’t big enough.”

When he saw me off at the bus station, I noticed he was wearing Converse-style rubber shoes with the label
Bu Xiang
, written in Romanized script. It’s a cheap brand, very popular among youth from rural areas and factory workers. I’m not sure what the brand’s name means—likely something positive—but the Pinyin script
Bu Xiang
could also be read to mean “Not thought of” or “Not dreamed”: 不 想. I watched him walk away, his shoes rising and falling.
Bu Xiang. Bu Xiang. Bu Xiang.

I felt sad.

I was wrong. In 2014, Liu finished his book,
We Will Be All Right.
Then he came out with a bombshell: he’s transgender.

Liu had struggled with this secret the entire time he was being showered with accolades and called a national role model. Liu outed himself in a photo spread in
Southern Weekend
, a major newsmagazine, with startlingly intimate photos: putting on makeup, trying on a bra, debating whether to use the men’s or women’s toilets.

“Folks kept telling me not to be a sissy, to stand up, be worthy of my Moral Hero title,” he said, “but deep inside I was torn because I knew I was in the wrong body.”

All this time I had worried his horizons were too narrow, he had been nursing a dream of transformation.

Liu’s mother had been devastated at first. The likelihood of grandchildren receded further into the distance. “People hope I can give birth to a child, which is the biggest sign of filial piety. I was conflicted,” said Liu.

Eventually, he came to believe “when you can live well, you can have filial piety to your parents.
I think it’s time to give filial piety a new definition.”

Soon, one of China’s most famous Little Emperors will become an Empress.

—Book of Songs

You’re going to have a gigantic mass of horny young men in China.

—
Paul Ehrlich

I

In 2009 I was flipping through news items in search of a story when a headline caught my eye: “Runaway Brides Strike in Central China.”

The story, a minor item, talked about how a small village called New Peace in Shaanxi Province had a rash of runaway brides. These women had decamped soon after their weddings, leaving bankrupt
bridegrooms who’d paid substantial bride prices. It reminded me of the bride-buying story Liu had told me on our train journey the year before.

Despite my years in China, it was pretty much the first time I’d heard of
caili
, a kind of reverse dowry given by the groom’s family to the bride’s. In rural China, there is usually an exchange of money and gifts on both sides: dowries from the groom’s family, and bride price from the bride’s side. Usually, the balance tips in favor of
caili
, reflecting the economic value rural women brought as cooks, bedmates, and baby makers.

During the Mao era, such exchanges were modest—a set of clothes, or enamel washbasins. Wealthier families might, perhaps, rise to the heights of a Flying Pigeon bicycle or a suite of rosewood furniture. But starting from about 2001,
caili
values rose sharply when China’s first one-child-policy generation started to reach marriageable age.

China’s historical preference for sons predates the one-child policy, of course, but there’s no question that the imposition of the one-child policy on this culture created the biggest gender imbalance in the world. By 2020, China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men.
The country’s population of single men will equal or surpass the number of Canadians or Saudi Arabians in the world. Ten years later, one in four men in China will be a low-skilled bachelor.

Son preference also exists in other cultures, but nowhere else is it as extreme as in China. Forced to limit their choices, many Chinese couples turned to infanticide, daughter abandonment, and, with technological advances, sex-selective abortion to ensure they had at least one son to carry on the family name. In India, where there is also son preference but never a one-child policy, there are 108 boys born for every 100 girls. In China at the time the policy shifted to a two-child rule, a staggering 119 boys were born for every 100 girls.
(The global average is 105 boys to every 100 girls, seen as Nature’s way of
compensating for risky male behavior, which makes boys more likely to die earlier.)