One day in October 2001, I made my way to Heathrow airport to pick up the son of a family friend. This was in the days before Chinese students had started coming in numbers to the UK and a tall, skinny Chinese youth standing at the airport exit was quite noticeable.
Du Zhuang, frail and as insubstantial as plasterboard, was pushing his suitcase with one hand, and holding his phone with the other. He was not looking around, but listening to the person on the other end with single-minded devotion. On his face was the serious, almost devout, expression of someone receiving an edict from the emperor.
It was only when I was standing right in front of him that he finally looked at me, and smiled. In those days, Chinese people did not hug or exchange pecks on the cheek, while shaking hands was for grownups only.Instead, Du Zhuang passed me his mobile phone, saying, “My mother’s been waiting to speak to you!”
Hearing her shout down the phone it was as though she had jumped out in front of me. I will never forget his mother’s first words that day: “Xinran, my son is in your hands now! Remember to help him to open his suitcase, he can’t do anything!”
She said something else, but I was too stupefied to process it. “Xinran, did you hear me?” she demanded. “You absolutely must help him open his suitcase. He doesn’t know how to deal with it. Hello? Xinran?”
I stood there in a daze, hardly knowing how to reply. “Big sister, you want me to open his suitcase for him? Which suitcase?”
Clearly irritated by my confusion, she said, “His suitcases. He doesn’t know how to open a suitcase, I packed everything for him.”
I was even more confused, “He doesn’t know how? But they’re all his own things? But he has graduated from his university?”
“Yes, yes, yes! They’re all his things, everything in the case is his own stuff.”
“Oh, is there something in the case you’re worried might get broken?”
“No! He doesn’t know what’s packed in the cases and he doesn’t know how to hang up his clothes, so you’ll have to open everything for him, OK? Say you will. I handed him over to you, remember.”
It may sound humorous, but it took me almost a decade before I truly understood the full implication of those words. In the past 30 years, China’s one-child policy – which, with some exceptions, ruled that each couple are allowed just one child – has prevented 400 million people from being born. This means that by 2014 China had raised nearly 140 million Suns or Little Emperors, as the only children are often called, in the wake of this. The policy has also led to an imbalance between the sexes – according to the country’s census in October 2014, by 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women among 20- to 45-year-olds.
It is not just demographics that the policy has changed, but emotions. But it was only after listening to the stories of the first generation born into this policy that I heard the truth of their parents’ stifling overprotection. The relationship between mother and child, that most treasured of all relationships, has, in many cases, descended into mutual recriminations.
Take Golden Swallow, a young Chinese student I spoke to in 2002. Having never learned to cook, shopped for food or even ordered for herself in restaurants before leaving China, she was really struggling with everyday life. Yet I was shocked when she told me: “I hate my parents because they raised me as a pet for 23 years. To this day I still can’t live like a normal human being.”
Since then, Golden Swallow’s words to me have been echoed by a rising chorus of China’s only children. Yet being a good Chinese mother who lives in a one-child society is hardly simple. Aside from the need to have a full-time, professional job in order to be seen as an independent woman, you also must be a tiger mother, or at least a “nonstop wheel” – driving your only angel to a full schedule every week: art classes, music lessons, and practising “upper-class” sports (golf, fencing, horse riding, etc) – as well as two to three hours of Chinese characters and maths every day. Failure to do so might see you branded a criminal by your family.
So perhaps it is not surprising that the parents I have spoken to have reacted violently to the only children’s allegations. One replied: “Is the mother keeping her child as a pet or is the child keeping her parents as slaves?” Another, whose daughter, Wing, had been studying in Britain for almost four years, asked: “Can it really be that those parents, who have known no freedom since the day their only child was born, appear as slaves in their children’s eyes?”
Wing rarely went back to China to see her parents and was even “too busy to answer her family’s weekly phone call from China” she said.
Wing had a different perspective. “Ever since I was little, my life has been ruled by the second hand of a clock, revolving around the face of my parents; every second, every tick,” she says. “I didn’t lose a second in 20 years. All I knew was that as long as I kept pace with that ticking second hand, my parents would be happy, I wouldn’t be scolded by my teachers or teased by my classmates.
“I never thought about what kind of person I might want to be when I grew up. I never knew my parents’ hopes and dreams for me besides study and health. I didn’t even know I had any rights and opportunities beyond studying, eating and sleeping. I never went outside during the holidays, as my parents thought the world was full of kidnappers and con artists.
“I never watched television at home. I didn’t understand my classmates’ games and couldn’t join in their conversations. I could only play by myself secretly …”
Can it really be possible that her parents didn’t allow her to play?
Wing smiled weakly. “If they had known they wouldn’t have been happy any more.”
Once again I clapped a hand over my mouth, wishing I could cover my eyes that were welling up with tears. How many sons and daughters are crying and shouting “Why?” at their mothers and fathers? How many parents are asking themselves the same question, over and over again during sleepless nights?
I have interviewed more than 100 single children face to face since 1989. I have gone back to China twice a year, travelling between urban and rural areas, since I left in 1997, and I keep in touch with many single-child families to collect their news. I have heard from children such as Moon, a talented art student, who abandoned her dreams because she could not bear her mother crying that she missed her. Or Zonghui who, despite being on a full scholarship, spent only 50p a day so he could save money for his mother who had never left their village. But for all that, I still dare not say I have got any answers to these questions. Each child has completely different views on China, the world and the concept of a quality life because of their family backgrounds, living conditions and pursuit of different ideals, but if there’s one point they all seem to agree on it’s family and love – the same ideals their family elders have.
What I am sure of is that by the time I left China, I realised I couldn’t be a good mother there because I simply couldn’t see my little boy running on that education wheel like a tiny rat.
My Chinese family and friends couldn’t understand my urge to give him freedom and warned: don’t follow the naive western way – your boy might complain one day if you don’t push him to learn those life skills.
How to be a right mother for my only child? I still don’t know, but I have tried very hard. I wanted to give a free space to my son to let him observe, to feel, to experience, to find his way to his dream life. Can Panpan understand and value what I have offered to his life, which is so different from other Chinese mothers? I can only hope time will show I wasn’t wrong.
Buy Me the Sky by Xinran is published by Random House, £12.99. To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
Panpan’s thoughts on leaving China aged five
To someone born in 1988 in China, being a single child was the norm; I have no siblings, but neither did any of my friends at school. So it came as a surprise when I moved to the UK in 2000 to find that my new friends were not their parents’ only child.
Being a single child does have perks. No one ever fought with me for my toys. No one ever objected going to my favourite restaurant. No one ever took away from me the undivided attention of my parents. Throughout my childhood, I sat at the top of the family hierarchy, worshipped like a god. To quote a Chinese saying, I was the “Shining pearl in the palm of the hand”. With good reason; my grandparents fought in the war, my parents had to suffer the Cultural Revolution, and in the 1980s, when things started getting better, my parents had me, and only me. I can’t imagine what it feels like for two entire generations having gone through all the bitterness and hardship to finally see me brought into this world.
If you are a single child in China, you deserve the absolute best, starting with schools. The philosophy is that a good kindergarten education will ensure the highest chances of being placed in a good primary school. Only then can the child perform better than his peers and make the entrance exam to a top middle school. This would provide the opportunity to be considered by Tsinghua or Beijing University. With any luck, they might just outshine the other 2,999 applicants for the same place. After graduation, the parents hope that a degree from one of the best universities will give their child a slight edge when they are interviewed for one job position along with 999 other hopefuls. One simply does not underestimate the importance of a good kindergarten in China.
But education alone is not enough. To make it in today’s world, you have to be multitalented because to the admissions tutor who assesses a few thousand applications all boasting identical academic prowess, the candidate who can juggle flaming woks on a unicycle stands out.
It’s now easy to see why Chinese children take on so many extracurricular courses. Parents enrol their children in dancing lessons because who knows if their child will turn out to be the best ballet dancer in China? Let’s not forget singing lessons to go with that. Last but not least, extra Chinese calligraphy tuition would benefit the child both in and out of school. Oh, and I forgot about piano lessons – everyone has them, right? At this point, the hours of free time a child from a respectable Chinese family enjoys amounts to zero. A friend of mine hired a tutor for his seven-month-old baby. I asked him what for and he replied, “Motor coordination.”
I remember that I did my homework until midnight, went to sleep and got up at 6am for school. I don’t remember much else from my school years in China. And that was without all the extra lessons.
My mother wanted me to be successful, but she didn’t compare me to others. She only wanted me to do my best and encouraged me for trying. I now work as a private tutor in maths and science, and although my mother has always wanted me to work for a large corporation, deep down I think she is proud and glad because I’m doing something that I love. By Chinese tiger mother standards, she has failed me; I think she made a good decision.
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