by Karoline Kan
Though they were just following the rules, the women who did undergo sterilization were mocked, and were becoming known as “the third gender.” Many suffered from infections, their recovery often long and painful. When people ask me today why I advocate for a strong feminist movement in China, I think of the third gender. Those women did not have a voice, a way of putting a stop to what was happening to them. Today, more of us do.
Sister Lin kept a notebook in which she jotted down names of women who had been sterilized voluntarily. Months passed, the names in the book didn’t increase, and the officials were champing at the bit to get more women to agree to the operation.
One day, when my mother was shopping, she was startled by a strident male voice coming through the speakers on every street corner. “Attention! Just received an order from the government: Women who already have two children must register with Sister Lin and get your tubal ligation operation done now! All mothers with two children. No exceptions…” The broadcaster also stressed that refusal to go to the hospital would mean that officials would take you there forcefully.
But Mom was ready to play cat and mouse again. She asked the doctor who had helped her give birth to Yunxiang for a letter with the hospital’s stamp saying that she had almost died from serious anemia and hypertension during labor, which was true. When she knew the officials were coming to Chaoyang, she would go out to work with my father in other villages to sell bricks; however, the officials caught her twice and took her to the county clinic. Both times, she had been able to sneak away, in the shadows of the chaos.
But when they caught her a third time—two males and one female official—they had come specifically for her.
That day, my dad was not at home, and my grandparents were at a neighbor’s playing mahjong, a popular table game that uses tiles instead of cards. My mother stood at the gate, refusing to get into the car. I was holding her legs, crying. Yunxiang rushed to the neighbor’s house and called for my grandparents.
“She’s a stubborn woman!” one officer yelled, pacing and smoking. He threw his cigarette butt to the ground. “Don’t cry to us; this is just our job! I’m not going to lose my job because of you. Get in the car! Now!”
By the time my grandparents ran over, the officials had already pushed Mom into the back seat.
“Bring my coat, Yunxiang,” she screamed.
The doctor’s note was in there, along with a legal-sounding letter her brother—a lawyer—had written for her, in case of just this kind of emergency. She refused to give up. It was her body and she would protect it. She didn’t know if the letter would help, but she’d try.
“My daughter,” she wailed, reaching for me. “I’m taking her with me.”
“She’s too young!” yelled the officer.
But Mom pulled me in the car and held on for dear life. Neighbors, standing on their tiptoes with stretched necks, watched as it sped off, my mother restrained in the back seat, dragged away like a wild animal.
When the car arrived at the county’s central clinic, a large crowd of women like my mom were waiting outside. The clinic didn’t have enough rooms, so they had set up twenty or so tents for the operations. The smell of blood and sweat brewed in the air and, together with the cries and screaming, made my mom feel as if she were going to throw up. She looked around, left and right, trying to find an exit route, but the nurses were watching her closely. I was squirming desperately on her lap, my eyes closed and my hands over my ears. I didn’t know what was going on, but I sensed that she was going to get hurt—either she or I—and so I held on to her as tightly as possible. She clutched the letter, her sweat soaking through the paper. I tugged on her sleeve, recalling what she had taught me to do when we were in the market: “If we’re in a crowd, pull Mommy’s sleeve and you won’t lose your way.” So I pulled and pulled.
A doctor who seemed to be in charge drew his finger down a list of names. Then, three, two, one, it was her turn.
It was so stuffy inside, the doctor removed his white lab coat and draped it over the back of a chair in the corner. He had been working without a break since early morning. His hair was unkempt, and his wrinkled shirt had come partially untucked. Through his large glasses, his eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles underneath.
“It says here that you’ve twice run away from the clinic?” he said, looking up from his notes.
“Yes, but, Doctor, I insist that you see this.” Mom handed him the letter and waited.
The doctor took it and read it out loud: “‘I agree to be responsible for Shumin’s safety. If she has any problem after the surgery, I, together with the clinic, will take care of her two children until they grow up. Signed…’” He looked at her. “What’s this?” he said, pushing up his glasses. “Why should I sign this?”
“I have serious high blood pressure and almost died the first time I gave birth. The doctor in the county’s central hospital told me I couldn’t have major surgery. If you insist on doing the surgery, then sign this letter first. My brother—he’s a lawyer in the people’s court—told me this.” It was an exaggerated version of the truth, but she used the moment to give him the official note from the hospital.
He read this, paused for a moment to think, then turned to the nurse standing beside his desk. “Can you leave us for a few minutes? And take the kid!” he yelled, pointing at me.
When she came over to get me, I threw a tantrum. Like my mom, I was also refusing to do as I was told, and used all my strength to cry and kick the nurse away.
“Okay, never mind!” The doctor waved the nurse away. He studied the letter for a few more minutes and then glowered again at my mom. “I can’t sign this, of course.”
“Well, then, I can’t lie on your table,” she said, pointing to the gurney.
“You have to.”
“Doctor, I really can’t,” she said, sounding composed. “Otherwise, I would have, long ago.” She stared at him intensely. “Unless you sign the letter…”
The nurse returned. “It’s hot outside; people are getting impatient. We have to go faster.”
The doctor shouted at her to wait. He sat silently for a while as Mom held me.
Finally, he said very quietly: “Leave.”
Mom didn’t say a word; she just picked me up and left. Behind her, she heard him tell the nurse to bring in the next woman.
* * *
Some villagers found it suspicious. Shumin looked healthy as before, did not have to spend any time recovering in bed, and returned to the fields the same week after the “surgery.”
“Shumin must have some powerful relatives,” the villagers whispered.
Mom was probably one of very few women in the county with two children who did not have the operation. According to the Ministry of Health, each year—from 1983 to 2015—more than a million Chinese women were sterilized. In 1983 alone, the year China first implemented the One-Child Policy, more than 16 million women were forced to undergo surgery. The operation rooms—mostly temporary tents like the one my mom and I were taken to—were filthy, underequipped, and understaffed. The “surgeons” were often masked village doctors ordered to fulfill the urgent mission but who lacked the formal training to do so. Chronic pain and mental trauma haunted these women. Many of them were farmers who were subsequently no longer able to do strenuous manual work, and became dependent on a lifelong supply of painkillers they could barely afford. In many other ways, too, the surgeries had devastating consequences, especially for rural families. According to Chinese scholars who conducted field research in villages of ten provinces in 1995, 10 percent of China’s rural women suffered from health problems caused by forced abortions and sterilization surgeries.
Mom felt lucky, or more in control of her own fate, so she made another bold decision: to return to teaching. Her “victory” in giving birth to me and protecting her body from the government had increased her confidence: If she tried, nobody, not even her father-in-law or the government authorities, could stop her fro
m what she understood to be her human rights. Going forward, she would be the one to decide how she would live her life.
She knew there were opportunities since Communist paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had launched “Reform and Opening Up” in 1978 to stimulate the economy, which made the prospect of owning a private business very attractive. Every month, Mom would hear of a teacher resigning in the hope of trying his or her luck at starting a new venture. Before Reform and Opening Up, all businesses were owned by the state. The government had banned private trading and labeled the independent entrepreneurs as trouble, alleging that their capitalist mind-sets and behaviors would pollute the purity of our country. If caught, they faced prison terms or even the death penalty. But the spring breeze of Reform and Opening Up melted the suppression of entrepreneurship. In the closest town, Lutai, although the state-owned businesses were still there, a new market was built to welcome privately run businesses, which quickly replaced those run by the state. The business owners, mostly in their twenties and thirties, were hip, ambitious risk-takers. They played pop songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan at their stalls, where they sold things like clothes, fruit, electronics, and CDs, which helped create a cool atmosphere.
The state-owned business operators resented the upstarts’ newfound riches and sense of freedom. But this didn’t stop people from wanting in, including those with government jobs or teachers, who quit to try their hands at making their own way alongside others from all walks of life. My parents were not used to taking such risks, but Mom was attracted to the idea of taking fate into your own hands, and now there would be more full-time teaching opportunities.
As they were finding their way, I had to stay with Nainai, which I hated. She smoked and would spend hours in the afternoon playing mahjong with other old people, who also smoked. I had difficulty breathing in such rooms, but Nainai was too distracted to pay any attention to me. At the mahjong table, Nainai fixed her eyes on her opponents’ tiles, as if she could see through the cream glaze and know what was on the other side. She kept her ears just as sharp. The only good times I remember having with Nainai were when she was with another old lady, Grandma Liu, whose granddaughter, Mengmeng, was my good friend and lived in the house opposite ours. Mengmeng was also a second child but, unlike me, she had an elder sister. According to the One-Child Policy, rural families with firstborn girls were allowed to have a second child. The authorities understood a farmer’s need for a son. No one had a retirement plan beyond relying on the younger generation’s continuation of the work, and whose traditional duty was to look after their elders.
Though Mengmeng’s birth was legal, her parents had made no announcement, aiming to try again for a son. They had a son when Mengmeng was two, and registered him in the hukou system instead of her.
The Chinese preference for boys dates back over two thousand years. The Chinese philosopher, Mencius (described as the “Second Sage” or second to Confucius himself), said that failure to produce an heir is the worst thing a dutiful (or filial) child could do. But the term he used referred to male children. In addition, people—like the villagers in Chaoyang—could cite dozens of reasons why boys were better:
Boys carry your family name.
Boys support you financially when you get old.
Boys sweep your tomb after you’ve passed away.
(Yes, this last one was relayed to me as a valid reason—as if girls cannot sweep!)
A more pragmatic reason was always that boys could get better jobs and could therefore earn more money. If the firstborn were a girl, there was still a chance for a boy to follow. But a second girl? Folks were not tolerant. They would either give away the second girl, or throw her away, literally. Mothers would spend hours praying to the Buddha and Taoist priests to bless them with a baby boy. If they had money or a good relationship with the hospital, some would pay the doctor or nurses extra money to check the gender of the fetus and abort females. Scholars believe that 30 to 60 million girls “disappeared” because of the One-Child Policy.
Mengmeng was a cheerful girl who always wore her hair in two braids, with red bows at the ends. She was five years old, one year older than me. She behaved like an older sister, wiping my tears and kissing my chubby face when I cried. When our grandmothers sat under the tree, chatting, sewing quilts, and hand-washing clothes in a wooden basin, Mengmeng and I were free to indulge ourselves in our own kingdom. We caught grasshoppers and kept them in a cage made from cornstalks; we dragged bamboo poles from the warehouse and used these to pick reddish dates from the tree we’d often sit under; we tied my mother’s scarves around our waists like long dresses and mimicked the women in soap operas. The backyard was our secret garden. From here we could see the farmers under their straw hats; mothers stringing red peppers and corncobs, hanging them out to dry; grandparents chaperoning grandchildren home after school; and the neighborhood yellow dog chasing cats and chickens up the road.
One day, when we were picking flowers in the yard and stirring them in dishes, pretending to “cook,” Mengmeng looked lost in thought. When I tugged her arms to play, I noticed her eyes were red. I asked what was wrong.
“My parents are going to give me away,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. They are going to give me away and pretend they never had me.” Mengmeng started to sob. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Her parents were not certain they could guarantee their son a hukou if the authorities knew about Mengmeng’s existence. My heart pounded hard in my chest again. What if she is sent away? What if this happened to me?
One afternoon, Nainai led me to Mengmeng’s house as usual. Grandma Liu opened the door, her little grandson standing beside her. When she saw me, the old woman casually told me that Mengmeng wouldn’t be home for a while but would come back soon. I knew she was lying. “You can play with Huanhuan today.” She pulled my hand to her grandson’s.
“No, I don’t want to play with him,” I declared. “I’ll play by myself.” It hurt to know that Mengmeng might never come back. I wanted to scream at her to return my friend.
That day, I quietly walked around alone, picking grass and flowers. I held the small basket of little pans and bowls in my hand that Mengmeng and I used to cook in. I sat down far from the little boy. Nainai sat under a willow tree with Grandma Liu, shelling peas.
“We heard that the birth-control officials will come again tomorrow,” said Grandma Liu. “It’s better to send her to her maternal grandparents’ home for now, and see what happens.” She used one sleeve to wipe the sweat dripping from her forehead. She was in her fifties, but her face looked as if it belonged to a woman who had had enough. Like Nainai, she was always plainly dressed. Their clothes consisted of four drab colors: black, gray, blue, and sometimes white in the summer. Women of her generation were used to wearing such simple clothes, a habit from Mao’s era. On the rare occasions when she wore a colorful dress, her neighbors would gossip about her. For a long time, whenever I thought of a grandmother, I pictured a woman in plain cotton clothes.
Grandma Liu added, “Mengmeng’s a bright girl. It’s a pity. But a boy is what our family needs.”
Mengmeng came back that winter. She did get a hukou, but only after her younger brother had been registered. Before that, whenever someone from the Birth Control Office came for the regular checkups, her parents would hide her somewhere and make her invisible.
* * *
I, too, was always aware that I was the different one. Growing up in the years when the One-Child Policy was most strictly enforced, I found it difficult to ignore that I was a second child. Although it took years for me to understand, I was sensitive to how people addressed me as “the second.” Whenever I heard people calling me “the second,” I would turn my head, pretending I didn’t know what they were talking about. No matter how friendly they were, I disliked them after that.
Government officials referred to the One-Child Policy as “birth planning.” I didn’t understand what
the officials came for, but I knew that whenever they did come to the village, it was not good. All we knew was that they would take away pregnant women and leave their child crying at the gate. The officials—who would rush in with wooden sticks—invaded and looted the homes of families who didn’t pay the fine for their second child. No one would speak out against them. Some people were in agreement with the law, others were not.
It scared me, not only because of what was happening to my neighbors and those I knew, but also because I had come to believe that I could be taken away at any time. I’d slip into the haystack in my backyard, where I could hide but still see outside to the gate. I remember hiding there one day, watching a gray spider hunt winged insects on the web it had spun on the elm tree beside me. I closed my eyes and drifted asleep, but it didn’t take long before Nainai found me and dragged me out for dinner. “Get out of there,” she shouted. “Why did you put yourself in that rabbit hole? Look at your dirty clothes.” Nainai used her apron to clean my face. “Policemen will come and take you away if you don’t behave.”
I cried a lot as a child, and was most afraid of the police. Whenever Yunxiang and I fought or if I cried about my dolls being taken from me, Nainai would put a stop to it by suggesting that the police would come and get me. I knew the police had all the power and we had none, so I should stay away from them.
Powerful people made Nainai nervous too.
Like everybody from their generation, Wengui and Nainai worried a lot and easily. During their formative years, even private conversations could cause serious trouble. After Mao’s death, when Reform and Opening Up brought more freedom to the country, my grandparents and their peers had to learn to forget the old dogmatic culture and they tried to relax. However, in 1983, three years of what is known as “Strike Hard” began. Once again a powerful police state returned.
The Strike-Hard Campaign began when a group of party leaders decided there was a need to restore public order. In the 1950s, according to propaganda, it was so peaceful that it was unnecessary to lock one’s door at night. Leaders began to believe the justice departments had been too soft on crime. So, in summer 1983, Deng Xiaoping—the “paramount leader” of China from 1978 to 1989 who led the country through far-reaching economic reforms—launched a crime-fighting campaign. Within a year of the start of this campaign, 861,000 people were tried in the criminal courts nationwide and 24,000 were sentenced to death. Petty thieves were sentenced to life imprisonment, or even death. Young men were sentenced to death for dating and having sex with different women.