One Child (19 page)

In 2014, Feng helped design a lower-end line of sex dolls purely for China’s domestic market, costing a more pocket-friendly $3,000. Features are scaled down: lashes and brows are painted, instead of made of real hair, and the dolls feel stiffer and less pliable. In dim light, they do look eerily like real women, in part because they have been designed to resemble specific East Asian soft-porn stars. Certain popular features from the higher-end model have been retained.

“The nipples—they are very tough,” said He, tugging vigorously to demonstrate. “Normal ones,” he said, “could never withstand such treatment.”

Of course, Hitdoll represents an extremely niche market. But I believe it is part of a bigger trend in China resulting from the scarcity of women, which is manifesting itself in increasingly hostile attitudes toward women and feminism.

That’s not likely to go away even as the pressures generated by the gender imbalance act to slowly decrease the bias against daughters. China’s gender imbalance, while still high, has been slowly ebbing since its peak in 2004 of 121 boys to every 100 girls. Some social scientists believe it will move toward normal proportions, as has happened in other patriarchal societies like South Korea. Certainly, fewer people in China appear to be expressing a preference just for sons now. In
2013, a Zhejiang University survey showed that most people wanted both a son and a daughter.
In cases where only one child was allowed, 21 percent preferred a daughter to 13 percent who wanted a son. Some of this is due to public campaigns such as the 2003 Care for Girls campaign initiated by the family-planning commission, which is designed to improve perceptions of the value of girls. Still, much more needs to be done.

It’s worth remembering that the one-child policy accentuated a long-standing pernicious bias against females in China. The removal of the policy, on its own, isn’t going to solve the country’s gender inequalities. I was reminded of this when I visited my ancestral village after leaving Hitdoll’s premises.

For many years, despite working in China, I’d resisted traveling to the Fong family village, Zili Village, just a two-hour drive from Dongguan.

My antipathy stemmed from my gender. My grandfather, Fang Wenxian, had come to what was then prewar Malaya and made his fortune. He also sired eighteen sons, of which my father was the sixteenth. Even though the family wealth vanished with grandfather’s death and the Japanese invasion, the Fong/Fang family are proud of their lineage. When my mother married into this family and produced five daughters, no sons, it was a truth universally acknowledged among the Fongs that my father was in want of a better wife.

For a long time, I was too young to understand the great stress this placed on my parents’ marriage, or the burdens this placed on my mother, particularly at great clan gatherings, like Lunar New Year. I simply rejoiced, in those times, at the chance to run wild with my male cousins. We pretended we were bandits, brandishing weapons and executing what we fondly imagined to be magnificent leaps and acrobatic kicks. In these games I was as loud and unmannerly as any boy and thought of myself as such. But at times my grandmother, Ah
Ma, would interrupt our play, cooing for her favorite grandchild of the moment—always one of my male cousins—so she could feed him a sweet, or wipe his sweat.

My sisters and I were never thus honored and took care to stay out of reach, for Ah Ma, a tiny woman with corpse-white skin, would occasionally reach out to viciously tweak our tummies, a pleasure she reserved exclusively for us girls.

My father never got over his sonless state and took it out on his children in beatings and apoplectic rages. The latter probably did him in, for he was felled by a stroke, at age fifty-seven, and never recovered.

I was not, therefore, particularly eager to explore my Fong roots. In the ways of the clan, the female Fongs are just temporary members, to be married out to other families and thereafter lost to the family.

Still, over time I learned more about Zili Village from cousins who’d visited, and it piqued my interest. It turned out Zili was an enchanting landscape made up of thousands of towers that dotted southern China’s flat green fields. It had even been made a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

These towers,
dialou
, are amazingly fanciful creations, inspired by what Chinese had seen working in far-flung places: a hodgepodge of Moorish arches, Corinithian columns, Byzantine domes, and crenellated walls. These McMansions of yesteryear ought to have looked garish and arriviste. In actuality, they are a startlingly romantic sight, reminiscent of something from Tolkien or Grimm.

As it turned out, Grandfather had built a tower, named Yunhoun Lou, or “The Tower of the Illusory Cloud.” That last fact gave me the push I needed. I was a little unnerved after visiting a workshop of sex dolls. What could be a better antidote than a pilgrimage to the Tower of the Illusory Cloud?

The tower turned out to be a slim, boxy mass, opening up at the top to a broad terrace with sweeping views and Corinthian columns.
It looked very beautiful and peaceful, but tiny box-shaped slits on the balustrade—designed for rifles to fire through—reminded me that this tower had been built for defense. For returning Chinese who’d made their fortunes abroad, the towers were a sign of wealth and sophistication, as well as acknowledgment of the insecure times in which they lived. They were defense fortifications against the many bandits who roamed the area, the restive
guanggun
of their time. They were vertical panic rooms. Saddened by the turmoil, Grandfather had composed a poem carved on the tower:

Flying dragon, dashing tiger: harboring great ambitions but unfulfilled;

Only a life adrift overseas, years of void like an empty mountain.

After leaving the tower, I spoke to some Zili villagers and discovered I still had some relatives in the village, including a first cousin. We sat in his house, and he showed me family pictures. Idly, I asked him, “How many daughters did Grandfather have?”

The Fongs counted the sons, so my father was the sixteenth son, not sixteenth in birth order. I had never been too clear how many aunts I had.

“One,” he said, instantly.

“Really? I remember at least two or three aunts.”

He conferred with other relatives. They knew one daughter had been born to Grandfather’s first wife, who’d remained in the village as the grand chatelaine. She had bound feet and refused to travel overseas. Grandfather’s second wife had lived with him in Malaya and done the bulk of the childbearing. After she died, my grandfather took as his third wife my grandmother, who had been younger than some of his daughters. She had borne him four sons in his old age.

After a while, my cousin returned. “We only know of one. The others, they weren’t counted. They were born overseas.”

It was as I suspected. Zili’s little family museum detailed the far-flung births of the Fong men, even those like my father in Malaya, but the women didn’t count. It was a salutary reminder that gender discrimination was a poison in China long before the one-child policy.

But the Fongs, I discovered, could be selective. The museum traces the Fong lineage back to northern China in the 1300s. The first Fong ancestor, according to family historians, was a general who had married an emperor’s daughter and moved down south to fight the Mongols.
That
female, they counted.

The study of dying is like gazing into a reflecting pool. The waters there reflect back to us the kinds of people we have become. More than ever before then, it is timely to ask the question: what kinds of people have we become?

—
Allan Kellehear
, A Social History of Dying

Two wasn’t enough, that was the trouble. He’s always thought that two was a good number, and that he’d hate to live in a family of three or four or five. But he could see the point of it now: if someone dropped off the edge, you weren’t left on your own.

—
Nick Hornby
, About a Boy

I

In Kunming, the City of Eternal Spring, after breakfasting on his usual eggs and honey water one day in July, Ma Ke began hospital rounds punctually at 8:25 a.m.

Barely had he started, wrote Ma in his diary, when “a stir occurred. A nurse informed us that three patients were extremely unwell.”

Thirty minutes later, all three were pronounced dead.

At the end of his first hour, the death toll rose to four.

Ma found himself comforting a patient crying “so hard, tears were flowing into her ears.”

Lest you think Ma is an exceptionally bad or unlucky physician, allow me to explain that he heads China’s most famous hospice, Kunming’s No. 3 People’s Hospital’s Section on Palliative Care. Ma does not cure anyone. His job is to ease his patients’ pain and make their last days tolerable, which can be difficult for a physician primed to heal and cure.

Partly, I suspect, as therapy, and partly because he finds the topic of how we face our last days deeply fascinating, Ma has made copious observations over the years, a Pepys of palliative care. His entries are whimsical, ironical, and sometimes tortured.

Over the years, he has evolved pet theories on the particular nature of China’s aging and dying. One: China’s recent wave of materialism has made dying especially hard. Two: those without children have it worst. Not so much for financial reasons—“People of my generation, we will have savings, pensions. But a country with so few young loses creativity,” he said. “Loses hope.”

It is this last point—unsurprising but most evident in the land of the one-child policy—that led me to him.

It is perhaps no surprise that China, as the world’s most populous nation, also has a gargantuan share of the elderly. However, the peculiar element that singles China out from the global herd is not so much the
size
of its aging population, but the
speed
at which it is graying. I do not, of course, mean the Chinese are somehow growing old at a faster rate. It is a matter of proportion, as China’s number of retirees is fast outstripping its number of workers.

Currently the Middle Kingdom has the kind of worker-to-retiree ratio that rejoices the heart of its economic planners, a five-to-one ratio. Lots of productive, taxpaying workers to pay for retirees.
But in a little over two decades, China’s attractive five-to-one ratio will shift to 1.6 to one, a ratio that is about as economically enviable as foot-and-mouth disease. It spells shrunken tax coffers, reduced consumer spending, and all-around diminished productivity. This kind of transition—more older people, fewer young—is happening almost everywhere in the world, for we now live longer and on balance have fewer children than people did a century ago.

Even so, this transition to a graying society took shape over more than fifty years in the West. Consequently, countries there have had more time to stock up for the gray years ahead economically and socially. (Many might argue that even these preparations are inadequate.) In China, the aging transition will happen in just one generation, and the cupboard is woefully bare.

This aging transition is the result of two things happening at once: people living longer, fewer being born. The former has nothing to do with the one-child policy; the latter, everything. Because of the one-child policy, China’s aging transition will be a tsunami, its speed breaking with enormously forceful effect.

By the mid 2020s, China will be adding 10 million elders to its population each year but losing 7 million working adults.
China’s army of pensioners is already creating shortfalls: in 2013 pension shortfalls reached 18.3 trillion yuan, over 30 percent of GDP, and will continue to escalate.
Half of China’s thirty-one provinces cannot pay retiree costs and must get bailed out by the central government.

Of all the negative potential repercussions of the one-child policy, this is one we can see happening before our eyes. We don’t know if China’s gender imbalance could lead to a more warlike nation or greater domestic turmoil. We can’t be sure if China’s cohort of Little
Emperors could make for a nation of pessimistic, solipsistic, low risk takers. We can’t even be certain of the extent to which the one-child policy will crimp China’s future economic growth.

We
do
know that short of some cataclysmic plague or war, China’s vast cohort of workers will grow older. And that means by 2050, one in every three people in China will be over sixty.
Ted Fishman, author of
Shock of Gray
, notes, “If they were their own country, China’s senior citizens would be the third largest country in the world, behind only India and China itself.”

II

In our family home my mother kept three porcelain deities in our living room.

Fu, Lu, and Shou—the gods of Luck, Prosperity, and Longevity—were not of course as important as Guanyin, Gautama Buddha, and the ancestral tablets, which occupied the place of honor on a special five-foot-high rosewood altar.

When I was a child, this altar loomed above me, brimming with flowers, incense, and fruit. I associated this cornucopia with corporal punishment, for, after suitable chastising for my various misdeeds, I would be made to kneel before it, clutching my ears.

Naturally, I grew to hate it all: the incense, the ancestors, and even Guanyin’s calm simper. More comforting to the eye were Fu, Lu, and Shou, little dolls the length of my forearm, a child’s fingertip to elbow. The affable trio perched separately on a wooden cabinet, each with its own little plinth. I didn’t have to kneel to
them.
No fresh flowers ever graced this trinity, but nonetheless, there they were, a visible manifestation of all that could be hoped for in this life.

Fu and Lu, both black-bearded gentlemen in flowing robes, were hard to tell apart. Shou—Longevity—was the easiest to recognize, a
bald old man with a bulbous forehead. Put a red stocking cap on him and he could pass as a Sinified version of a benign Saint Nick.