One Child (6 page)

Yet it was impossible to escape the fact that Underpants was also the grandest propaganda office in the world.
Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Inga Saffron blasted architect Rem Koolhaas for giving China’s
TV monopoly “the architectural equivalent of a bomb.” The tower’s size and structure, she wrote, would “always remind you of how small you are, and how big the state.”

I remember interviewing those who’d been evicted for Underpants’s erection. They had lived in low-rise redbrick buildings, mostly empty by the time I visited. All the windows had been smashed, some etched with messages like “Want human rights.” Many apartment dwellers complained they were given inadequate compensation and forced to move. One woman recounted how she’d returned from a trip to find her apartment padlocked, her belongings cast to the ground four stories below. She was so distraught she tried to jump down herself, only to be saved—and subsequently jailed—by local police.

A multitude of mistranslated English signs that had been part of the city’s crooked charm disappeared, replaced by irreproachably boring and correct translations. “Dongda Anus and Intestine Hospital” became the uninspiring “Hospital of Proctology.” “Racist Park” transformed into “Park of Racial Minorities.” No longer would the handicapped be forced to seek “Deformed Man” toilet cubicles. Millions of cars were kept off the roads, factories ordered to stop production. Even the city’s arid beige grass was spray-painted emerald green.

While this was going on, I went for my first pregnancy checkup. The technician bustled in and rubbed lotion over my still-flat stomach.

“What’s that—
oh!
” said my husband, gazing at the heartbeat, pulsing so strongly. It was impossible not to feel excited. We clutched hands, as excited as little children at the beach. Despite myself I started running through possible names, picking out books I would read, stories I would tell, to that pulsing peanut. Seeing the heartbeat made it real.

“Soon you will know the sex,” she said cheerfully.

I knew she wouldn’t be telling me this if I were a Chinese national. To prevent sex-selective abortions, medical staff are prohibited
from revealing the gender to expectant parents. Of course, you can get around it. I might make oblique hints, give a red packet “donation,” perhaps be handed a pink sweet, or a blue. The physician might cough, signifying a girl, or nod, for a boy. That is how things work when the state regulates your womb.

III

The narrative that China’s leaders wanted—China’s coming-out party, China’s global ascendance—was taking over.

Beijing city was setting up invisible cordons to prevent troublemakers from ruining the party. That included bereaved quake parents who tried to make it to the capital to petition authorities for justice, a time-honored tradition. Unfortunately, most were detained long before they made it to the city. They were escorted off trains or banged up in detention cells. Some were even billed for the cost of their meals and lodging while locked up.

Some parents who’d tried to take a tour to nearby Kunming ended up being shadowed the whole time by public security officials. “They can’t even let us take a holiday in peace,” said one father, bitterly. Another said, “My child is dead. Heaven agrees I have a right to scream and shout, but this government, it thinks it is bigger than heaven!”

The count ran down. Thirty days. Twenty-one days.

Online rumors began floating about the Beijing Olympic mascots—Teletubby-like creatures—hinting they represented coming disasters for China. Jingjing, the panda, stood for the Sichuan earthquake. Huanhuan, the flame, and Yingying, the Tibetan antelope, symbolized the Olympic global torch relay, which had been beset by protests over China’s crackdown in Tibet. Nini, the swallow, was linked to a plague of locusts from Inner Mongolia.

The mascots were collectively dubbed
fuwa
—“good-luck dolls”—but online wags took to calling them
wuwa
instead—“witch dolls.”

Censors, of course, quickly shut this down.

Fourteen days. Ten days.

I was in the hospital for my official first-trimester checkup. My doctor was reassuring. “You’re past the hump,” he exclaimed cheerily. He passed a transducer lightly over my belly, frowned, did another pass.

“Never mind, you’ll see it all better when you do the scan,” he said, and smilingly sent me down to Radiology.

After gazing at the monitor, the man in Radiology bit back an exclamation.

“Who’s your doctor?” he demanded. He left abruptly.

I clutched Andrew’s hand.

They told me the heartbeat—the same one that I had seen pulsing so strongly a few weeks earlier—had stopped. I hadn’t felt it, hadn’t known.

Game over.

Later, in my bedroom, I heard the same sort of choking cries I’d heard from Tang. How odd, I thought, before realizing it was me.

Eight days.

I was in the hospital for a D&C. The next day, I was back at work. I was going to act like it had never happened. What happened to me was just a small taste of what happened to the parents in Sichuan. The dream had ended, that was all. Morning had come.

Despite my best efforts, the guilt bubbled up. Did I hurt the pregnancy by traveling to a seismic zone? Carrying heavy bags? Looking at dead bodies? Or maybe it was breathing the polluted Beijing air, or riding a bicycle . . . I told myself sternly not to be irrational. Miscarriages are common in the first trimester. Still, the little voice remained.
Your fault, your fault. See what you did to your
wawa.

Zero days.

The opening ceremony was held at the Bird’s Nest Stadium, the world’s largest steel structure and very likely its largest folly too, for
after the Games the costly building would serve almost no practical purpose. To cut costs, they scrapped plans to build a retractable roof. With no cover, the stadium would be too hot or too cold most of the year.

On this day, the air smelled of rain, and we nervously fingered the rain ponchos placed inside our Olympic grab bags.
The Weather Modification Bureau had deployed twenty-six control stations to fend off rain clouds before they got to the Bird’s Nest.

With temperatures in the nineties, the Bird’s Nest was more like a wok. Everyone—China’s Politburo, George W. Bush, and David Beckham—was cooking. Raising my binoculars, I zoomed in on athletes on the field, picking out seven-footer Yao Ming. Sweat stains bloomed all over his scarlet blazer. The basketballer had walked in to thunderous applause with an adorable nine-year-old. Lin Hao, a quake survivor, had pulled two classmates from the rubble. Two-thirds of his classmates had been killed.

Of the two, it was really Yao whose existence said more about the one-child policy and what might have been. Born in 1980, Yao belonged to the first generation affected by the policy. He was the eleven-pound child of towering basketball players. Spotting his potential early on, sports officials fruitlessly lobbied for Yao’s parents to be given an exemption to the policy.
They’d wanted more Yao champions.

Increasingly sports recruiters complain that Chinese parents are reluctant to subject their precious one-and-only to this system, where young athletes are plucked away from their families and relentlessly drilled. Looking at the parade of athletes, I thought it was funny that the one-child policy could eventually spell the end to this sports system.

One Olympic gymnast told my colleague her meal portions were so tiny, “it was like cat food.” She said, “I never realized until I traveled overseas that other athletes did this for
fun.
” Guo Jingjing, known
as the “Goddess of Diving,” suffered from extremely poor eyesight, a common condition among China’s elite divers, who start high-impact diving before their eyes are fully developed.

Yao himself believes the one-child policy fostered selfishness, a lack of trust, and “may be one reason why we struggle in team sports.” Certainly the Chinese have a sporting inferiority complex because, although they periodically win medals in Ping-Pong, diving, and gymnastics, they don’t fare as well in commercial sports like soccer and basketball.

Sports insiders call this the “Big Ball, Small Ball,” theory, arguing that China can do well only in sports that emphasize precision and mechanization—“Small Ball”—but not in sports that need creativity and teamwork—“Big Ball.” Beyond sports, it’s become a metaphor for everything from China’s education system to its economic prowess.

On this night, it was clear China was gunning for Big Ball status.

I was live-blogging the opening ceremony and trying not to think about miscarriage, or children, or the earthquake, which had all linked in my mind to become one giant lump of misery. I thought the Olympics, with its relentless push to celebrate China’s glory and bury the history of its excesses, would be a good venue.

But even here, it was impossible to escape reminders.

Take the venue itself. Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous dissident artist, likened to Warhol, had been a consultant on the Bird’s Nest design. He ended up disavowing his role in its creation, saying the Chinese government had turned the Olympics into a sham.

Ai had gone to Sichuan ten days after the quake to film the disaster and was a vocal critic of the school collapse cover-up. Later on, he tried to create a database of the names of all the children killed in the quake. For his efforts, he was beaten, detained, and slapped with a $2 million fine for unpaid taxes.

At 8:08 p.m., the show began in a deafening burst of fireworks,
floating fairies, spacemen, and synchronized tai chi performers. There were 2,008 cherubic children, representing China’s different tribes. It was all a lavish spectacle choreographed by Zhang Yimou, who had once been persona non grata for making films with themes critical of the regime. In recent years the director had toned down and was now considered safely rehabilitated. Detractors now called him China’s Leni Riefenstahl.

Zhang had certainly pulled out all the stops, with set pieces giving spectators a quick romp through five thousand years of Chinese culture, touching on the Silk Road and Great Wall. In one set piece, the word
harmony
blazed brightly.

An angelic little girl sang the popular “Ode to the Motherland”: “Our future is as bright as ten thousand radiating light beams.”

A giant globe rose from the floor of the stadium. Was this China’s Big Ball moment? Balanced on top, a Medusa-locked Sarah Brightman kicked off with syrupy sweetness, singing the Olympic theme song “You and Me”: “. . . from one world . . . we are one family . . .” The lyrics are overwhelmingly banal.

I dashed away a tear. How absurd! To be moved to tears by Sarah Brightman!

And then, my heart broke.

IV

Nothing was what it seemed.

Those 2,008 children representing China’s tribes? They were all Han Chinese.

That little singer? She was lip-syncing, a last-minute replacement because the actual singer wasn’t considered pretty enough.

The fireworks viewers saw on their TV screens? Computer-generated imagery.

Zhang, the ringmaster, would fall from grace for violating the one-child policy after online rumors floated that he had sired several children. Family-planning officials ended up slapping a $1.2 million fine on him. The man who orchestrated China’s biggest show would end up the man with the biggest fine in the history of the one-child policy.

China’s coming-out party did mark the country’s ascendance as a global superpower, especially after the Lehman Brothers collapse on Wall Street a few months later, which set in motion a chain of events that underscored America’s shaky economic status. But far from displaying a can-do, fearless spirit, China would become increasingly paranoid about maintaining control, clamping down on media and displaying increasingly territorial behavior with its neighbors.

A few months after the Olympics, activists unveiled Charter 08, a manifesto advocating reform along democratic lines. China responded by jailing one of its authors, Liu Xiaobo. In 2010, Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but was unable to collect it since he remains incarcerated.

Influential Tsinghua University academic Sun Liping wrote, “The Olympics marked a beginning, it can be said, of the stability preservation regime in China. Looking back now, it might be said that the Olympics were something we did that we ought not to have done.”

V

Six years later, I arrived in Anren, a little town southwest of Chengdu. Anren is a fairly prosperous-looking little place, with an expensive prep school and lots of new buildings imitating the old Chinese style, with curved sloping roofs, just like in kung fu movies. Signs indicated a Four Points Sheraton was imminent.

Anren is the pet project of Fan Jianchuan, a real estate tycoon and history buff. In a country that has institutionalized the art of collective forgetting, Anren is a chimera. Fan has built a Xanadu of museums documenting modern Chinese history. All in all, there are fifteen museums, spanning the period from the Japanese Occupation to the Cultural Revolution—the touchy bits that have been mostly excised from other, more orthodox collections in the country. (Beijing’s National Museum, the world’s largest museum, has room for only three lines of text alluding to the ten-year Cultural Revolution.)

I went to Anren because it boasts two museums on the Sichuan earthquake. I was curious to see how they have memorialized the event. It is always a source of frustration to me that Chinese museums, stuffed with so many exciting artifacts from five thousand years of civilization, are mostly curated by a clutch of didactic, prosy bores with no sense of drama or storytelling. Would this be the same?

At first, it seemed that propaganda was going to win the day. One building was stuffed with dioramas, diagrams, and pictures praising the government’s swift response to the quake. Beijing’s swift response was admittedly praiseworthy—especially contrasted with the Bush administration’s Katrina response—but it all made for dull viewing.