One Child (7 page)

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 unmarried 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
un
natural disaster, the one-child policy.

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.

For over a quarter of a century, Yicheng and several other rural counties were part of a secret experiment. They were zones where, with remarkably few conditions, residents could have two children. For example, while many rural parts of China allowed couples a second child if their first was a girl, only in Yicheng and a few other places could residents have two children regardless of gender.

Overall, these secret two-child zones affected roughly 8 million people in the time since their creation in 1985—a drop in the bucket for China. Nonetheless, they offer a tantalizing glimpse of the road not taken by family planners. With fewer restrictions, people in these counties were not driven to resort as much to infanticide or sex-selective abortions for unwanted daughters. Today, Yicheng and its sister counties have gender ratios that are closer to global norms. Birthrates are also below the national average. The two-child allowance also made enforcement of birth quotas—always an unpopular task—easier for Yicheng’s officials. “We didn’t have to use force.
We could hold our heads high and live in peace with our neighbors,” said village chief Huang Denggao.

Years later in their fight to overturn the one-child policy, a group of demographers would hold up Yicheng as an example of a future China. In doing so, they would also throw into prominence the man behind the Yicheng experiment, Liang Zhongtang. Liang, a little-known economics instructor, holds the distinction of being publicly the only vocal critic of the one-child policy at its inception over three decades ago.

In a seminal population conference in Chengdu, held just a few months before the one-child policy’s 1980 nationwide launch, Liang warned that the policy would be a “terrible tragedy,” leading to a “breathless, lifeless society without a future.”

He foresaw an aging population with little familial support and
coined the phrase “4:2:1”—now commonly used—to refer to the situation where two adults would have to support four elderly parents and one child.
“Simple though it was, this numerical figure served as a powerful rhetorical device,” wrote scholar Susan Greenhalgh.

I met the Cassandra of China’s one-child policy one blustery autumn day at his apartment in Shanghai’s Hongkou university district. The wind was whistling mournfully around his top-floor, book-lined eyrie, an appropriate setting for the unsung hero of China’s population movement. Liang was now a retiree, an erect, silver-haired figure with a distinctly tart edge to his tongue.

Some of China’s current crop of demographers eventually came around to Liang’s way of thinking, calling him “hero” and “national treasure” for his prescience. Liang, however, sees his role as small, his resistance nothing compared to the force of the one-child policy. “I don’t think I meant anything,” said Liang, who, in all our conversations, would frequently describe his efforts as “useless” and “a waste of time.”

Year after year, Liang was unable to persuade Beijing to adopt his two-child proposal nationwide. Nonetheless, he was able to interest reform-minded party elders like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Zhiyang to allow the series of experimental two-child zones. As a result, thousands born in these places owe their existence in some part to Liang.

Liang said wryly, “It’s much more helpful than just sitting here doing nothing,” adding, “It’s better doing it as a demographer than a peasant.” He was both.

One of six children born to peasant farmers, Liang finished high school in 1966, intent on studying philosophy at Beida, or Peking University, China’s premier higher-education institute. The year 1966 was a bad time to hold such ambitions, for that was of course the year Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. The Great Helmsman closed all schools and launched his Red Guards on a decade-long war against intellectuals.

Liang lost his chance for higher education and never regained it—a factor that would count against him when he tried to get China’s family planners to take his proposals seriously. He became a soldier, whiling away his years in the People’s Liberation Army, teaching himself political theory and devouring Marx and Engels. Eventually, he ended up as an instructor at a local party cadre school in Taiyuan, Shanxi’s provincial capital. In the late 1970s, he was asked to teach demography, a subject he initially knew little about and initially had no interest in.

The study of demography—and, indeed, of all social sciences—had been viewed with suspicion and removed from university curriculums after the Cultural Revolution.
Demography as a subject was revived only after China was restored as a permanent member of the United Nations General Committee, and the Chinese Association for Population Studies was founded only in 1981—a year after the launch of the one-child policy.

In the early days, said Liang, China employed a system learned from the Soviet Union, which focused on productivity and economic statistics, without (as Western countries did) incorporating social and economic elements. China’s demographers did not even know how to construct life tables—projections of life expectancy, considered essential to the field—until the early 1980s.

In 1980, when Beijing decided to impose drastic population curbs, leaders still weren’t sure how many people there were in China.
The country’s last population count had been fifteen years before and had provided “only rather crude numbers,” according to population scholar Thomas Scharping. It seemed incredible to me that China launched the world’s most ambitious demographic experiment on such a shaky foundation.
In retrospect, I asked Liang, was this not a little like a definition I’d once read of a critic: “a legless man teaching running”?

True, Liang said. “But you have to remember, at that time there was a sense we were drowning in people, and we would never stop being poor unless we did something.
Ren tai duo.
” Too many people.