by Karoline Kan
My family, the Kans, worked together on more than ten mu—over 1.6 acres—of farmland. In those days, the climate was wet enough to encourage the villagers to plant rice. Ninghe was famous for its rice, reeds, and fish. In the beginning of the twentieth century, when my grandparents were young, everyone in Ninghe depended on those resources to make a living. Before the first bridge in Ninghe was built, villagers would cross the river using wooden dinghies. A screen of tall reeds on the riverbank stretched like waves in a green sea. But when I was a child in the mid-1990s, Ninghe started to suffer from drought, and the fish died from water pollution. Soon, corn and cotton—which required less irrigation—replaced the lush rice.
It took a lot of work from the entire family to run the farm. They’d set out to work in the early morning, when the water in the paddy field was still cold. In their farmers’ clothes—wide-legged pants and loose gray shirts—they were like uniformed ants.
Mom was a pretty woman by Chinese standards, with big, smoky eyes and a small nose. She would tie up her long mane in a scarf and let it hang to hide her neck from the sun. She was lighter skinned than most women in the village, and had a few freckles. Women with freckles were said to have a wild spirit. She was also a strong farmer. Mom would walk barefoot in the field for hours, row by row. She was small but sturdy, focused, and fast. While other women rested at the field ridge to drink water, Mom would continue treading the fields.
But to the dismay of her in-laws, she worked in the field on the weekends only. During the week, she went to a job she loved, a place where she could wear her floral printed shirts and dresses made from soft polyester fabric. She was a teacher at the primary school in her parents’ village, Caiyuan. She did this even in early summer—a crucial farming time—and so she was labeled as stubborn.
The family had to work fast and hard if they wished to bring in a good harvest, and it was difficult to satisfy my paternal grandfather, Wengui. At the time, farmers did not have access to many machines, and there were only a few horses, so labor was mostly by hand.
In 1982, China embarked on significant land reform. Whereas in the past a village would have worked the land together—communally—this new system rented land to individual family units. So, the more time a farmer spent on his land, the better the harvest would likely be in the autumn and the more income his family might accumulate. This notion made Grandfather Wengui the family’s drill sergeant—he needed everyone to be swift and available—and he had a big problem with my mom’s choice to divert her time elsewhere.
* * *
The land reform led to the collapse of the People’s Commune, an agricultural cooperative initiated in 1960 during the Great Leap Forward, a campaign led by Chairman Mao that set unattainable production goals with the sheer objective of overtaking Western countries within a few years. The government decreed that the production of steel in 1959 should be four times the volume of 1957, and the production of grain should double within two years. Their mission was clear.
Mom was a little girl then, and told me that one day the village chief had gone to her house and announced that, henceforth, they would be able to eat beef and potatoes every day. Everyone was amazed; it was the best food the villagers could imagine having access to. They didn’t care that they’d have to share it. Her mother made the best meat dishes. She and her brothers were ecstatic, but one day she came home to find her mother quietly weeping. Local officials had arrived to take away the family’s dining table and their only iron wok—a prized possession in most Chinese households. “You don’t need these anymore,” the village chief had said sternly. “Everyone will eat together in the public canteen.” He removed a notebook from the chest pocket of his blue Mao uniform—a dark two-piece suit with baggy pants and a four-pocket collarless blazer. He made note of the items he had confiscated. “It’s time to say goodbye to the old way of living, in which you care only for yourself and your own family. In the People’s Commune, we will support each other.”
But the meals at the canteen were short lived. The first month, there was beef and potatoes, the second month only rice and boiled vegetables. In the last month, the cooks didn’t have enough grain to supply three meals a day. Within three years, although the villagers had continued to work communally on the farmland, the canteens were closed. The government later announced that the public canteens were a “great proletarian revolutionary experiment” and the villagers were allowed to return to their own kitchens. They had been reduced to rats in a lab.
Though productivity was low, village officials around China would report grain production several times more than what they obtained in order to impress the higher-ups. When the exaggerated figures were registered, the central government had collected a disproportionate amount of grain, leaving tiny amounts for the localities. This contributed to the Great Famine, which lasted from 1959 to 1961, when tens of millions of people died from starvation. My mom vividly remembers walking with her father to the graves of our family’s ancestors, where bitter wild grass tended to grow and which they would pick for dinner. She was four years old, and it was all they had to eat.
The Communists hoped the land reform of the 1980s, which allowed farmers to work on land owned by their families, would rekindle people’s belief in socialism. However, villagers like Grandfather Wengui were doubtful. If there was anything he had learned from the war with Japan, the civil war, and the Cultural Revolution, it was to grab whatever fortune you could scrounge during peacetime, before chaos returned and things like food started to disappear again. Like the other villagers, Grandfather Wengui stopped complaining and started to invest all his time into the land he had.
* * *
Mom knew my grandparents would try to force her to have an abortion. They needed her to work, and a second child was illegal. If she had the baby, she would face a hefty government fine. But she wanted another child, and she vowed to Buddha that she’d walk to the Dule Temple one hundred miles away to thank him if he helped her. She and my father hoped they would be able to borrow money for the fine, and that she’d keep working throughout the pregnancy to save up.
Wengui didn’t understand why Mom cared so much about teaching other people’s children and not staying at home with her own. “How could you be so selfish? You leave your son for the whole day. What kind of mother are you?” Wengui said one afternoon when he and Mom were sitting on the floor of their front room, weaving a reed mat.
“I don’t make much, but it helps that I can feed myself,” she answered without raising her eyes from the mat.
Wengui roughly threw aside the hammer he had been using to tamp down the mat edge. “Feed yourself? The Kan family will feed you as long as you are still our daughter-in-law. Why do you need to go around like a woman who pāotóulòumiàn?” Wengui stressed pāotóulòumiàn, which means “go out to be seen in public” and is usually used to refer to women in a negative light.
Women were traditionally required to stay home and avoid contact with men other than close family members. Pāotóulòumiàn was common after Mao’s revolution, when women were widely encouraged to work outside the home. But still, the traditional concept remained.
Wengui believed in those old values, that a wife was the property of her husband and his family. And Baba was not helpful. He was an obedient first son. A thin, hairy man, Baba had eyes that always looked at the ground when he spoke to his father—a sign of respect and meek, filial piety. He was afraid of Grandfather Wengui, but also cared too much about what people thought of him. Speaking up for his wife—or showing affection toward his wife or child—could damage a man’s reputation, and he did not want to be a laughingstock.
Baba had a very good memory and did well in school. He had been accepted by a prestigious medical university to major in surgical science in 1977, but Wengui refused to let his son go, saying he could do better than being a doctor, who was no better than a patient’s servant in Wengui’s eyes. So he turned down the offer and took the exam again the follo
wing year. But even though he passed a second time, the local education bureau disqualified him from applying to university, scolding him for “wasting the education resources the previous year.” In desperation and pain, Baba returned to the farm and followed in his father’s footsteps.
But in private, Baba listened to my mother more than his family knew. It was Mom’s idea for him to buy a tractor so that he could haul bricks from a factory in a neighboring province at a lower price, then sell them to nearby villages. It brought in additional income for the family.
Born in the village, Baba had automatically received a rural hukou, not an urban one. Hukou was a household registration system that dictated where a person could go to school, get married, and work. Baba’s hukou prevented him from getting a job in the steel or textile factories in the nearby town. He never did make it to college, but after his high school graduation, the family became financially dependent on him.
On the last day of each month, Baba would dutifully hand the money he earned to his mother. She would give pocket money to each family member before locking the rest in a black wooden cabinet.
As the fourth child, and the first girl, Mom was prohibited from going to high school to help her family. But she continued to teach herself, and was very proud of her position as a full-time substitute teacher. Substitute teachers were not registered with the government, but were directly hired by the local schools. They had no insurance or contract. In 1977, 56 percent of China’s school system was made up of substitute teachers due to the country’s lack of qualified educators. Teachers were paid very little, hardly enough to survive on. Only a small group of teachers were promoted to permanent staff because the government’s limited budget could not support so many registered teachers all at once. But Mom was eager for a promotion, especially with a new baby coming. At the same time, she could be fired for disobeying the One-Child Policy.
Surprisingly, and even though Mom knew all this, her pregnancy was not an accident.
Five years prior, just a few months after China implemented the One-Child Policy, my parents had my brother, Yunxiang. As the first son of the family, he was expected to continue the bloodline. The news of a grandson lit up Wengui’s wrinkled eyes. Yunxiang had the Kan family’s round face and steely black hair. I heard that on the day Yunxiang was born, the day of the Dragon Boat Festival, Grandpa lit a long ring of fireworks in celebration. Wengui was so pleased that he took my father to our ancestors’ graves, where father and son knelt to give thanks for the blessing of a baby boy. Mom was not allowed to join them; women supposedly brought bad luck if they attended such ceremonies.
Though she loved her son dearly, she wanted a girl for herself, and knew she’d have one. It would be her and Buddha’s decision—not China’s.
* * *
The sudden One-Child Policy of the 1980s bothered the unlucky old men in the village without grandsons. For some time, there had been discussion about how to control China’s fast-growing population, which exploded after 1962, after the Great Famine. After eight years of war against Japan and another four years of civil war, in which tens of millions of people died, Chairman Mao called on people to have more children—dubbing women with many children “Heroine Mothers.” In response to Chairman Mao’s encouragement, my grandparents on both sides had seven children apiece.
Then, in 1983, China’s census showed its population had grown to more than one billion, a two-thirds increase from the census in 1953. In hopes of curbing the population boom, China enacted the standardized, national One-Child Policy. It was the first time Chinese people had ever heard that birth should be controlled.
The policy began to take hold widely and quickly, with officials in all levels of government in charge of family planning. Chaoyang had the infamous Sister Lin, a short, strong woman in her early forties. She had three children but proudly defended the new policy. Mom said Lin had a cheerful appearance, but behind her back people called her a “smiley tigress” who “hid knives in her teeth.” Every week, Sister Lin went door to door with brochures about the One-Child Policy. She was in charge of official paperwork for newborns, and though she never enforced abortions, everyone believed she was the person who reported married women’s illegal pregnancies to the county’s Birth Control Office. Otherwise, how would they have had the information so quickly?
Sister Lin was unapologetic, and even the most well liked and admired, like Teacher Huang, were reported. Huang, a polite and gentle man who always wore neat blue trousers and a pen tucked into the breast pocket of his white shirt, was fired from the central middle school for having a second child. Despite being such a beloved teacher whose students regularly excelled academically.
There was also Farmer Lian, a short man with tanned skin who lived in the neighboring village and sometimes came to Chaoyang to sell his home-grown cabbage and radish.
“Lian will not be showing up this week; he has his own awful mess to deal with,” Sister Lin said sternly to the group of women shopping for vegetables at the small morning market. “He delayed paying the fine for his second child again and again, and refused to open the gate when officials came by. They took a piece of wood from his yard and broke down the door. He had to hand over his tractor.” Upon hearing such news, the villagers would grow more afraid, which seemed to excite Sister Lin. She’d raise her chin higher. “You know, it’s not robbery. It’s called ‘confiscation.’” A word they did not know.
A month after Yunxiang was born, Sister Lin knocked on Mom’s door. “Congratulations!” she said before stepping inside. “A boy!”
Mom struggled to sit up in bed to greet her. It is customary for women to stay in bed the first month after giving birth to both recover and receive guests. But it was clear that Sister Lin had come for more reasons than a congratulatory visit.
“When you think you’ve had enough rest, come see me. I’ll write a letter to the hospital to get the birth-control ring put in,” said Sister Lin. She stretched her neck closer to my sleeping brother. “It’s wonderful that you have a boy,” she whispered, “not like Xiu Feng’s wife. She just had another girl. I am almost sure she’ll sneak off and try for another one.”
Mom nodded and promised not to have another child.
Six months later, Mom received a letter from the village committee instructing her to go to the local hospital to have an intrauterine ring put in her body. It was a new order from the Ninghe County Birth Control Office.
Every few months, the Birth Control Office would ask mothers with one child to come in for a B-scan ultrasound or an X-ray to ensure their intrauterine rings were still in the right place. Some women ran off to relatives’ homes in other villages to hide and avoid the ring, the check, or the abortion, but this was only a temporary solution.
There was no escape.
Mom had heard that in a neighboring village, to punish two women who refused the ring, the Birth Control Office performed forced surgical sterilization. Mom was afraid but had also heard that the ring could be easily removed. That was safer than running.
She knew of women who tried to run but got caught, and she witnessed government officials forcing them into cars, sometimes even trucks with wooden benches in the back—used otherwise to take pigs to the slaughterhouses.
The women didn’t know much about the intrauterine ring. They only knew from Sister Lin that once it was inserted into the uterus, it would prevent pregnancy. Sister Lin explained, using the diagrams set out in the government leaflets.
She also explained the difference between the ultrasound and X-ray. “You have to take off your clothes and bare your belly with the B-scan,” she’d warn. “The X-ray is quicker and best, unless you want a male doctor touching you all over with a machine.”
Many of the women were still too conservative to let a male doctor touch them and didn’t like the idea of a miscellaneous object in their bodies, so, again, panic and rumors ensued.
“I heard they smear a kind of poison on the ring; that’s how it sto
ps women from getting pregnant,” one woman reported at the market.
“My cousin said she bled for months after that goddamned thing was put in her body!” said another woman.
Five years after my brother was born there was still no sign of the law being overturned, as the old folks had predicted. Furthermore, the penalty for breaking it grew more severe. There were stories about unborn babies aborted at late-stage pregnancies. In my aunt’s village, a woman was reported to the authorities when she was seven months pregnant. To ward off the officials, her family put diapers on the clothesline, where they could be easily seen. They said she’d had a premature delivery. When the birth-control officials came around to ask for the second-child fine, the pregnant woman sat in bed with quilts covering her body, and held a baby borrowed from relatives on her lap. The baby was clearly bigger than a newborn and the officers caught on. The woman and her family begged, cried, and pleaded with the officers, but they still took her in for a forced abortion.
To my mom’s relief, her age gave her some respite: the Birth Control Office no longer scrutinized older mothers. She had to do a B-scan photo only a few times a year.
In the meantime, she had secretly consulted a doctor in her parents’ village, and had the ring removed.
Three months later, at her next physical, she asked to have an X-ray rather than a B-scan. So many women were checked daily that the grumpy doctor would often rush them along, so my mom got by with a little trick. She put an iron ring into the pocket of her long coat and adjusted the pocket to the exact position where the intrauterine ring should show. When the photo was taken, all the doctor could see was that there was a ring in the right place.