The following is not a verbatim account of a conversation with a single person; it never occurred as such. It is a fabrication of several conversations with several people, and some inventiveness to boot. It is nonetheless true.
“So how is it that you have a younger brother, given the one-child policy in China?”
“Well, as you can see, I am a woman. And everyone really wants to have a son, to continue the family name, or because they are much cheaper – they don’t cost you a huge dowry when they get married – and they can help support you financially in your old age, better than daughters can.”
“But I read that there are certain officials, nurse abortionists, who go around looking for women who are pregnant with a second child, and they ensure that, however late in the pregnancy, an abortion takes place. I have even read that there are some pretty ghastly situations with late-term abortions, the babies surviving, and then being drowned in a bucket. That sounds pretty incredible to the outsider, absolutely horrific, whether or not one supports the right to have early termination of pregnancy under certain conditions.”
“Well, it is particularly scary if you are a mother and you want to have a second child. You never know when a knock may come on the door, and someone will force you to go to a clinic to terminate your pregnancy – perhaps even do it right there in your own home.”
“Yes, it must get worse and worse during the pregnancy as you get closer to the delivery date, as you can feel the baby growing in you and you begin to identify with it more. I suppose it must be like the feeling of a miscarriage late in a pregnancy, and yet this is a case of anticipation as well. No one, or few at least, anticipate a miscarriage; here one is imagining the worst all the time, from the outside intervention of the authorities.”
“Yes, I imagine that it must have been very hard for my mother.”
“But how did she and your father manage it – didn’t everybody in your village know that you were there, and that she was pregnant with a second child?”
“Yes, indeed, that would have been a problem. I am about five years older than my brother, so I remember when I was four-and-a-half my mother and father left the house, and moved away to another village to live with my grandmother. My aunt, my father’s sister, came to live with me, and so for several years I had another mother.”
“That must have been very strange indeed. Did you not feel abandoned by your parents, and didn’t you resent your brother as a result? I mean, resentment is usual in older siblings towards their brother or sister, but this must have been significantly greater.”
“Yes, I did feel abandoned at first. But it didn’t seem unusual. They said they had to leave for a while, and I missed them, but I didn’t really see it as my brother’s fault early on. I now find him a little insufferable – all he does is play computer games, and he has no interest in the things that I think are important, like politics and society; but then he’s just a boy.”
“So once he was born and he survived delivery, and the health officials didn’t catch your mother, what happened then? Obviously they couldn’t swoop in after the fact and kill your brother, as that would have been murder. So didn’t your parents and brother just come back and live with you, so that you were all together after the nine months?”
“Well, it isn’t that easy. And if it were, then more people would do it; perhaps the elite women would go and stay in the United States and have their babies and then return. They could also get U.S. citizenship for the child as well. But it doesn’t happen like that because if it was ever determined that my father or my mother had had a second child, they would both lose their jobs. As it was, my mother had to give up her job when she got pregnant and she just became a stay-at-home mother; it was imperative that my father never lose his job, as we would all then have been destitute. So we had to carry on the fiction for a long time. Indeed, I wouldn’t have told you if my father were still alive, but he died recently from cancer, and it now makes no difference.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. It must be difficult helping to support your mother and your brother; I am not sure how you manage to survive.”
“It is difficult. It is very difficult. But hopefully I will get a better job soon and we will all be ok. And then my brother will grow up and get a job too, which isn’t too many years away, and we should then be alright. Men can get jobs that women can’t, in today’s China.”
“Well, do you agree with the one-child policy?”
“Almost everyone does. It is necessary to keep the Chinese population within limits. Our population is now 1.3 billion; without the policy, it would now be more like 1.7. It has been a success.”
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