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Little Emperors: Being an Only Child in China
I was born in 1980, the year China implemented the one-child policy: I don’t have siblings, and neither do my peers. Whenever a Westerner learns that I’m an only child, the facial expression is a give-away: ‘You must have been terribly spoiled’ or ‘You must have been terribly lonely.’ Stanley Hall, the pioneering child psychologist, referred to the condition as ‘a disease in itself’. Our generation were known as ‘little emperors’ here in China. We are the chubby (pampered) babies surrounded by parents and grandparents in posters and cartoons. Being spoiled was the least of it. The attention a couple pay to their only hope can be overwhelming. Often they were very strict. At school, where we were all ‘little emperors’, we were subjected to shock therapy. A boy at my primary school had every meal fed to him by his mother until he was ten. Our teacher’s approach was to get us all to mock him, and man him up a bit.
Growing up wasn’t a lot of fun, but we didn’t have much to complain about either. I was never beaten, and unlike the older generation, I never went a single day without food. The worst punishment was a thorough scolding, probably for bullying boys at school – girls usually did better than boys in primary and middle school and there were many haughty little tigresses – or for speaking out of turn. My mother never allowed me to do chores or housework even when I was eager to help: ‘Your only task is to study, nothing else.’ My parents didn’t go to university – they didn’t have a chance to – and it was my job, apparently, to ensure that I did. This command was issued endlessly throughout my childhood until I finally fulfilled their dream. Part one of mission accomplished.
...
Only children who move away from home are often lured back by guilt. One of my friends had to give up a good job at the South Bank in London and return to Shanghai. Whenever she spoke to her mother and father on the phone there were tears and threats of an imminent heart attack (‘What if you are not around when we die?’). Parents of single children are also extremely picky about potential spouses; nobody is good enough. All the same, I know very few people roughly my age who haven’t already married and had babies, or who don’t plan to do both, just to satisfy their parents. Things are much harder if the only child is gay. W., for instance, after dozens of failed matchmaking attempts by his mother, came up with an ingenious solution and persuaded a lesbian, under pressure from her own family, to marry him. The moment his mother laid eyes on her the plan collapsed. ‘She isn’t pretty enough to bear my grandson!’ W. was forced to do the rounds again. Last spring festival, he wrote his mother a long letter (ten thousand words), baring his soul – and his sexual preference. But he hasn’t sent it. He told me he was afraid she’d kill him, and then commit suicide.
...
In 2015 the one-child policy was phased out. Mei Fong calls it ‘China’s most radical experiment’, and clearly thinks of it as on a par with the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. Kay Ann Johnson calls it ‘brutal’, even an ‘atrocity’. Most reviewers have backed these claims, but we only children are a lot luckier than our parents and their many siblings (an average of between three and five). They were the rusticated youth or zhiqing, also known as the ‘lost generation’, who were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to be ‘re-educated’ among the peasants. My mother was 16 when she was sent away: she had barely finished middle school when she was told she would be leaving Shanghai for an unknown world and an uncertain future. But she set off in high spirits, eager to show initiative and prove she had the strength to break with her family of bourgeois intellectuals. The Down to the Countryside movement was deemed necessary because the population had grown too quickly. Marauding bands of Red Guards were getting out of hand in the cities, and bands of jobless youngsters were roaming the streets. Many later poems and novels describe the tears shed by zhiqing as they boarded trains to the rural areas, but it’s not clear that all of them were sad. My mother wasn’t. But it was a radical experiment that robbed a whole generation of their right to education.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-emperors
Growing up wasn’t a lot of fun, but we didn’t have much to complain about either. I was never beaten, and unlike the older generation, I never went a single day without food. The worst punishment was a thorough scolding, probably for bullying boys at school – girls usually did better than boys in primary and middle school and there were many haughty little tigresses – or for speaking out of turn. My mother never allowed me to do chores or housework even when I was eager to help: ‘Your only task is to study, nothing else.’ My parents didn’t go to university – they didn’t have a chance to – and it was my job, apparently, to ensure that I did. This command was issued endlessly throughout my childhood until I finally fulfilled their dream. Part one of mission accomplished.
...
Only children who move away from home are often lured back by guilt. One of my friends had to give up a good job at the South Bank in London and return to Shanghai. Whenever she spoke to her mother and father on the phone there were tears and threats of an imminent heart attack (‘What if you are not around when we die?’). Parents of single children are also extremely picky about potential spouses; nobody is good enough. All the same, I know very few people roughly my age who haven’t already married and had babies, or who don’t plan to do both, just to satisfy their parents. Things are much harder if the only child is gay. W., for instance, after dozens of failed matchmaking attempts by his mother, came up with an ingenious solution and persuaded a lesbian, under pressure from her own family, to marry him. The moment his mother laid eyes on her the plan collapsed. ‘She isn’t pretty enough to bear my grandson!’ W. was forced to do the rounds again. Last spring festival, he wrote his mother a long letter (ten thousand words), baring his soul – and his sexual preference. But he hasn’t sent it. He told me he was afraid she’d kill him, and then commit suicide.
...
In 2015 the one-child policy was phased out. Mei Fong calls it ‘China’s most radical experiment’, and clearly thinks of it as on a par with the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. Kay Ann Johnson calls it ‘brutal’, even an ‘atrocity’. Most reviewers have backed these claims, but we only children are a lot luckier than our parents and their many siblings (an average of between three and five). They were the rusticated youth or zhiqing, also known as the ‘lost generation’, who were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to be ‘re-educated’ among the peasants. My mother was 16 when she was sent away: she had barely finished middle school when she was told she would be leaving Shanghai for an unknown world and an uncertain future. But she set off in high spirits, eager to show initiative and prove she had the strength to break with her family of bourgeois intellectuals. The Down to the Countryside movement was deemed necessary because the population had grown too quickly. Marauding bands of Red Guards were getting out of hand in the cities, and bands of jobless youngsters were roaming the streets. Many later poems and novels describe the tears shed by zhiqing as they boarded trains to the rural areas, but it’s not clear that all of them were sad. My mother wasn’t. But it was a radical experiment that robbed a whole generation of their right to education.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n10/sheng-yun/little-emperors
