
To whom it may concern,
I don’t know who you are, whether it was your own or a group decision, but yeah it was you, you made the decision to implement the one-child policy.
Who am I, you may ask? I am one of the millions born under your policy. I am a 31-year-old woman living outside of China, a single child of my parents who are entering their 60s.
Why am I writing to you? I want to have a conversation with you, I want to know what your thinking process was like when you made the decision, I want to know how you feel about the policy that impacted more than two generations.
First, tell me more about you. Who are you? Are you that aerospace engineer/demographer who decided that 700 million is the ideal number of population for China? Or are you one of the party leaders? How old were you I 1979? How many children do you have at that time? How many siblings do you have? Have you ever tried to put yourself in the shoes of those who were impacted by your policy?
Well, I really want to tell you that I am quite angry with you and your policy, thus I want to know more about how you made it. I want to show you that this is a really reckless decision. Do you know that the birth rate has already started to drop in the 1970s? Have you considered what this policy would ramify decades later? Maybe you think that was not your problem to think about? If you are still alive now, are you surprised to find out that the pace that the population is shrinking? How would that make you feel?
OK, I’ll calm down, instead of pointing out all the things people already talked about countless times, I think I’ll just share my personal stories with you. In that way, at least you can get a concrete example of how it affected me and my family.
I am a girl. My mom told me that when I was born and when they found out about my gender, my grandfather was very angry and slapped his own face. My mom cried when she first saw me because I am a girl. If I were in a rural area, I would probably have been abandoned by my family, like 2 million other girls. So, I am a lucky one.
When I was around six, my grandmother came to my house, holding a pillow and told me that this was my brother. She then dropped the pillow to the floor, telling me that the brother is dead. That’s my family’s way of telling me that my mom had an abortion.
I don’t have siblings growing up, of course, no one has. When my parents were busy at work, I would just go home by myself after school, finish homework and wait for adults to come back. It was very very lonely. Happiest moments were friends come to a sleepover or I spend time at their houses. It doesn’t happen often though.
Every time when my cousins came to visit, I was so happy. And I would cry every time we parted away. Intense feelings.
I never learned how to share a living space with someone until college dorm. I wish I could have learned it earlier.
I wonder what I would be like if I had siblings, would I be a better and more loving person?
I recently started to think more about how this policy impacted me and my whole generation, especially now that I live abroad and my parents are in China. They are in their 60s and can take care of themselves now. But what about in 10 years, 20 years? What kind of actions or decisions would we make to work it out? How about my peers who are in a similar situation?
I heard from a friend whose parents moved to the US, the grandmother lived in China with the uncle and committed suicide after knowing that she had dementia and was worried to become a burden for her kids. I felt extremely scared, I worry about my parents. There are things I need to deal with, and my situation may just be a single case. But think about the aging population at a scale of a whole generation, how many disasters would there be? Is the generation, and the social welfare system ready for such a challenge? I really don’t know.
I was a journalist for a few years. Oftentimes I would interview people in very helpless situations, immigrant workers without hukou, laid-off workers without pensions, people’s houses got torn down without money to purchase new apartments. I feel really sympathetic and sometimes I would get the chance to ask the policymakers the rationale behind certain policies. Common rationality is that the underprivileged people are just a small percentage of the population, sometimes you have to make sacrifices of small group’s interests to achieve something bigger. I wonder if this is actually how you approach social problems and implement policies. Then how about the one-child policy? Which group’s interest you are sacrificing to achieve what? I would really want to understand you more to be less angry.
I don’t know if I can hear back from you. I wish I could.
Best,
Angry Citizen
