I wish I could tell you that reading all my grad students' essays is a joy. The struggle to wade through highly imperfect English is sometimes rewarded with hilarious gems. Witness: "In October 2003, the chinese successfully sent a man-made flying saucer into the space. china became the third country, after the US and Rassia, can direct spacious ship by itself." Occasionally, I'm just befuddled: "As another saying goes, 'No err is humanity.' From then on, I conceived the solid of basement, the good of performance." Fortunately, for every essay I struggle to get through, there are at least five others that fascinate me.
To practice some of the verb tenses we studied, I recently assigned the topic "What Was Happening When I Was Born." Predictably, families of newborn sons were overjoyed. But one mother's reaction stopped me in my tracks. Her rather forlorn son wrote: "Before I was born, my mother wanted a girl. However, when I was born, my mother looked at me, a fat boy. She got worried. Coincidentally, our neighbor had just given birth to a little girl. My mother wanted to exchange babies because my neighbor wanted a boy. They agreed to my mother's idea. Just then, my grandmother came and she firmly disagreed, so eventually my mother gave up her idea. As I was growing up. my mother liked me more and more." How can it feel, I wonder, to grow up knowing your mother really would have preferred the child next door?
As you might expect, there were plenty of stories of grandparents and fathers who were bitterly disappointed by the birth of a daughter. It seems as if paternal grandmothers especially heckled daughter-in-laws who failed to produce a son. One father sadly abandoned his wife after the birth of a second daughter.
However, there were an equal number of tales of devoted fathers. One planted a flower garden to honor his daughter's birth and maintained it for the years that followed so that his sole heir would have beautiful things to look at. Another new father spent hours pouring over the dictionary choosing the ideal name for the baby girl who would be his only offspring. He ended up naming her "Jing," meaning perfection. These fathers confirmed for me that China's one-child policy, in the long run, is going to improve the way family members regard girls.
The one-child policy has sometimes confused me because most of my students do, in fact, have siblings. Some even have three siblings! It seems that policy was most strictly enforced in cities, and if I think about which students are only children, they are my urban students. In the countryside, if the first child was a girl, a couple could try one more time for a boy. But only once! One student wrote, "I was born in 1982, just meeting the early stage of the Family Planning Policy , which was the strictest stage. Because I already had two older sisters, and I'm the third child of my family, my parents were fined for my birth." Other third children echoed the fees their births cost their families. While the exact costs varied, for peasant families at the time, all were exorbitant.
With few exceptions, most of my grad students where born in the late 1970s or early 80s, a time of dramatic changes in China. Yet students from the countryside describe a time that seems more like an earlier century. "My father was working on the farm that morning when I was born. Although it was really raining cats and dogs, he was still planting rice. It was the right time to plant rice; otherwise it was too late. At that time, my family had not other people who could help my father. My sister was only three years old and my grandmother had died for 15 years. What's more, my grandfather was old and in bad health. My grandfather was was only lying on the bed every day and night. He was feeling very sad. My father was the only one who could plant rice. When he heard that news, he was excited for a long time. Immediately, he came home and took care of my mother and me. I'm the first son in my family, so my parents were excited....My father was smiling for at least ten minutes when he carefully held me."
I have no trouble imagining a rain-drenched farmer pausing to dip his muddy hands in an enamel wash basin before gingerly picking up his newborn son. But what really captures my imagination is the fact that this sounds like a mother who gave birth in a small, possibly one-room, farmhouse with a bedridden father-in-law and a three-year child.
Another student from a mountain village in Yunnan Province wrote: "There was a very exciting thing happening in my hometown when I was born. At that time, my hometown was very poor and backward, so even a bicycle and a radio were scarce, let alone a TV. It was said that when I was born, someone in our village bought a TV which was the first one at that time, so it indeed caused a great sensation for a long time. On that day, almost everyone that heard of it rushed to his house, stared at it with extreme surprise, and some couldn't help touching it. Later that day, watching TV was the most important thing for people after dinner. Undoubtedly, everyone envied the owner very much and everyone gossiped about it everywhere."
The late 70s and 80s brought positive changes for most of China. "I was born in 1978 and that year my family received the reputation reconversion. Everyone in my family had been ruthlessly treated in the previous ten years because my great-grandfather had been the first secretary of a famous Guomindang general. Before then, Guomindang members, landlords, and rightists did not have the same rights as other people. After the note with the good news came, Grandpa was preparing to go back to his hospital to work as a doctor again. Grandma was going to teach students again. My uncles got their first chance to continue to study since they came to that poor village from the county seat in 1969. Moreover, my father got his opportunity to work for the railroad system. My family took on a new look in those days and they all hoped everything would be better. When I was born, they named me Hong which means Rainbow."
On the other hand, my older students, born in the late 60s and early 70s arrived in the midst of turmoil. "I was born in 1974. The Cultural Revolution was happening through China in 1974. The people were mad for revolution and didn't produce. Industry, agriculture, and commerce were destroyed. The people were very poor. Politics were in turmoil. A lot of innocent people were jailed and lost their work. My family lived in the suburbs and were farmers....My family was poor and strived to make a living. That decade was the tragic decade, the destructive decade, the mad decade, and the disordered decade." Other students born then wrote of families who fled to the countryside to escape the "bloodthirstiness" of the Red Guards, leaving behind homes they fervently hoped they would be able to return to one day.
Admittedly, these are very narrow and subjective views of modern Chinese history, but I find them more gripping than anything I have read in a history book.
Back to the index