China’s One-Child Daughters
By Melissa Ludtke
My daughter’s birth family in rural China abandoned her when she was a few days old. Three days old, to be exact, according to her abandonment papers I was given when I adopted her. It’s likely that her family wanted — or felt it needed — a son, not a daughter. Someone in her family, perhaps her paternal grandfather, decided that she’d be left in a place where it was likely she’d be found. Not hidden out of sight, but an abandoned baby left to be discovered. Then, somebody else would see to her care and upbringing.
For her parents to raise a son meant relinquishing this daughter. This is because her family lived in Jiangsu, a province where every family — rural or urban — was permitted by family planning regulations to raise just one child. Local cadres had the job of keeping their watchful eyes on pregnancies and births in the town and were authorized to enforce provincial punishments when families exceeded one-child regulations. If she’d been born to a rural family in less densely populated and more rural province, her parents could have kept her as a daughter while trying to have a son.
Strangers found my daughter on September 13, 1996 in Xiaxi Town, a collection of villages where farmers harvest flowers, grass and trees. Police were called and they drove her, as they did other babies abandoned in this town, to the orphanage in the nearby prefecture city of Changzhou. She lived on her back in a crib for nine months until I adopted her in June 1997. The orphanage staff called her Chang Yulu; I named her Maya Xia Ludtke.
Chang Yulu in her wooden crib in the Changzhou Social Welfare Institute.
Maya’s Journey Home
Sixteen years later, in August 2013, Maya returned to Xiaxi Town. She went back so she could get to know girls her age whose families raised them as an only child. These Chinese girls might have been Maya’s childhood friends if their lives hadn’t diverged soon after they were born. Their companionship offered ground-level glimpses to Maya of what a rural Chinese daughter’s life was like. Taking this rare journey “home” gave Maya a perspective she needed to unravel strands of her dual identity as a baby born in China and as a daughter growing up in a Caucasian family in America.
Maya wrote about returning to Xiaxi Town:
“There, I met the girls I could have grown up with, and with them visited the places where I would have spent each day. I was overwhelmed by simultaneous feelings of deep connection and unbridgeable distance. As we struggled to narrow the chasms created by language and culture, I found familiarity in their faces and the trees enveloping us.
“’So, what are you?’ the girls asked me. ‘You look Chinese on the outside but you are American on the inside.’ At first, I detested this description. If the substance of my being is not Chinese, I might as well be white. Once content with describing myself as ‘Chinese American,’ now I was hit with its vagueness. Where do I belong between being Chinese and becoming American? In some ways my new friends were right; our many fragmented conversations during the three weeks we were together affirmed the differences in how our minds had developed to perceive the world.”
Yuan Mengping was one of Maya’s “hometown” guides. She was home for the summer after her junior year at a university in Changzhou. Mengping met Maya when her grandmother rushed home to let her know that she’d seen an American girl who had arrived in town. Maya turned out to be the first foreigner anyone in Xiaxi Town had met.
Mengping’s many years of studying English, and Maya’s limited ability to understand Mandarin (plus a translator when they needed help), helped conversation flow. Soon a friendship bloomed and the two girls shared stories about their lives. Mengping’s own life gave Maya a bridge to understanding how the one-child policy that likely led to her being abandoned also enabled only-child daughters like Mengping to do what almost no female of previous generations of women in Xiaxi Town had done. Already in her young life, Mengping had achieved what few elders in her family believed was possible for a girl in rural China when she was born.
She Can’t Be Our Baby
In “Abandoned Baby,” the first of our six iBooks in the series Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods, we tell the story of Mengping’s life since it illuminates so well what has been the surprising life of many girls in China who grew up when she did.
We titled her story “She Can’t Be Our Baby: A girl among many boys.” Here it is:
On November 11, 1992, Yuan Mengping was born in rural Xiaxi Town’s main hospital in China’s Jiangsu province at the same time as eight other babies, all boys. Ultrasound machines had recently come into use there, as they had in other clinics and hospitals in China, enabling doctors to determine the gender of a fetus.
Two years later, in 1994, lawmakers in Beijing would prohibit the use of “techniques to identify the fetal sex for nonmedical purposes.” But that law didn’t stop couples from convincing poorly paid rural doctors to help them avoid having a daughter when they wanted a son.
Mengping’s mom had not pressed her doctor to find out the gender of the baby she was carrying, though she remembers feeling that her baby was a girl. When she shared this feeling with her husband he said he preferred a daughter who would not be “as naughty” as a son.
When they brought Mengping home, her paternal grandfather expressed his disappointment. With all of the baby boys at the hospital, he could not believe his son was bringing the one girl into their family. Still, her parents raised Mengping as their only child.
In June 2014, Mengping received her degree in business Japanese from Changzhou University. Her grandfather did not live to see her earn her university degree, something no one in his family — male or female — had done before. He died when Mengping was five months old.
Girls Without Brothers
Girls born and raised before China’s one-child policy went into effect in 1979 usually had brothers, who were usually favored in the family. Now, families without a son invest in a daughter’s education. She is the person upon whom they will depend in their elder years.
Girls with brothers in China have been found to attend school for fewer years on average than when a girl is an only child or has a sister. Investing in girls’ primary and secondary education results in more females enrolling in universities and junior colleges. China has fewer females in its population due to its extreme gender imbalance. The girls they have are required to score higher than boys on the Gaokao exam to be admitted to the same universities. Still, the Ministry of Education in China revealed in 2012 that 51.35 percent of students at its universities and junior colleges were women, outnumbering men by 647,800. Among Masters’ degree students at Chinese universities, about 40,000 more women were enrolled than their male peers, out of 1.43 million students in all.
Mengping’s experiences — beginning from when she was born in Xiaxi Town’s hospital until now — chart a familiar life path that many only-child daughters of her generation in China have navigated. As children, they’ve been valued more by their families than daughters in the past generations and they’ve achieved more than women who came before them in their towns.
Mengping’s story speaks also to the rapid shifts continuing to take place in young women’s lives in China. While occurring at a quicker pace and with greater visibility in urban areas, change is evident in lives of well-educated rural girls like Mengping who’ve been raised as only-child daughters. Maya met another only-child daughter who went to primary school in Xiaxi Town. Xue Piao is a year older than Maya, and she just finished her sophomore year at Syracuse University. Known to her American friends as Tiara, she dreams of returning to China to work in international relations.
Yet as single women in China reach their mid-to-late twenties, societal and familial signals change. At this age, women who are too well educated or too ambitious and successful in their early careers are admonished by family members who push them toward marriage. Families are amply aided in this mission by the pronouncements of authorities and slogans in the media that speak to the dangers in becoming a “leftover woman,” the unflattering term that adheres to those women who remain unmarried after the age of 27. In tandem, their nation and family urge these daughters to assume traditional characteristics associated with being dutiful wives and responsible mothers. Essentially, women are pressured to cast off personal ambition they might have imagined for themselves in younger years when they were taught to think of their lives as being equal to those of their male peers.
Just after International Women’s Day in 2011, the All-Women’s China Federation, a national organization authorized by the Party to speak and act on behalf of women’s interests, cast into the public arena cautionary words aimed at overly ambitious, primarily urban young women in China.
“Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.”
This vigorous campaign to convince women of their duty to marry by the age of 27 continues full-throttle to this day.
Mengping is 22 years old. She left Xiaxi Town after graduation to live and work on her own in Shanghai. There, she found a job selling equipment at a golf course; many of her customers are foreigners so her fluency in Japanese and English is a plus. Her grandmother who helped raise her in Xiaxi Town wants Mengping to be married soon, in part so that she will be alive to see her wedding. Her mom and dad are not as adamant as grandma about when this happens, but Mengping knows her parents are thinking more about all of this as she heads into her mid-20s.
At Lunar New Year, Mengping returned home to celebrate the holiday with her family. Her aunt and grandmother wanted to know when she is bringing a boyfriend to meet them. Mengping doesn’t have one to introduce. Besides she’s happiest when talking about the possibility of traveling to faraway places she’s never been — perhaps Japan. Right now, marriage isn’t among the destinations she plans on reaching any time soon.
Melissa Ludtke is an award-winning journalist and author of “On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America,” (Random House). She began her career reporting for Sports Illustrated, and then was a correspondent for Time and editor of Nieman Reports, an international magazine about journalism published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. She is co-producing the digital iBooks series “Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods” with Boston-based documentary filmmaker Julie Mallozzi. The first in this six-iBooks series is called “Abandoned Baby” and it was published in May; the other five iBooks will be published within the next year. More digital elements of this project are available on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram and on our Website.
