Each time I write acknowledgements, I am reminded of the narrowness within words and between lines. Every expression of thanks feels like a new seed planted in my life, so that my writing and life are lived in a green forest of gratitude.
It was Toby, my husband, who first encouraged me to write this book. He said that the world needs to understand this age created by China’s first generation of only children. An age highly vulnerable to storms within the family, with every member suffering from this pressure in isolation. It is an age when social awareness and values have mutated, and what is being passed on to these new lives has had to navigate a series of massively changing faults and dislocations. It is an age of power politics, but also one of constraint, as China will struggle to expand its supremacy in the outside world when its people are unwilling to send their only children off to be soldiers. Thank you, my Toby, for being the driving force behind my writing.
But it was my only son Panpan who really caused me to live within this book. I once longed for many children, and dreamed of their games, squabbles and noisy jokes. I dreamed of presiding over their debates, dreamed of my brood sharing the small responsibilities of the household, dreamed of taking them to the fields for picnics, tasting and enjoying the delicacies each child had produced, and I dreamed of them one by one creating families and careers for themselves and presenting me with a series of cherubic grandchildren! The one-child policy deprived me of the right to become a mother to a crowd of sons and daughters, but by a stroke of great good fortune, I did become Panpan’s mother. From that day forth, I warned myself never to let Chinese parents’ traditional power or social pressures destroy my only son.
Like the mothers of all the only children in this book, the price I paid for my child was my own life. I was turning myself into bricks and mortar for his happiness, even willingly letting myself rot away into compost so that he might grow well and thrive, but I myself was never free. I piled all my hopes on his lonely shoulders. It had never occurred to me that the dreams of parents weigh heavily on their children. It was only when I met the young people described in this book, my son’s contemporaries, and saw their struggles and hardships that I became aware of Panpan’s loneliness. I would like to thank my child, Panpan, for sharing the weighty burden of life with me for twenty-four years. For working hard and forging ahead to repay his mother for raising him, and for helping me to enter into the hearts and souls of only children.
No matter how limited the space, and regardless of the poverty of my language, the one thing I must not leave undone is to thank the young people in this book. Without them, I would have had no way to understand this unique age of only children in such detail. Without them, I could not possibly have had this multi-layered reading of the only-child phenomenon. Without them, it would have been impossible for me to understand as I do the direction in which China is developing. Without them, I would not have been able to write this book. Without them, I would perhaps never have experienced my own dear child’s solitary happiness, anger, grief and joy.
Thank you, Du Zhuang, for the clashes you went through in your first taste of independence. You opened the door that led me towards the first generation of only children. Thank you, Golden Swallow. Your brave flight gave me more space to see your generation. Thank you, Wing, for your ability to change the channel of your life, and ease my anxieties as a mother of an only child. Thank you, Lily, for the honesty and candour with which you live your life. Your pursuit of your beliefs comforts and inspires me with the knowledge that there will always be people to carry on China’s traditions. Thank you, Moon, for your wise and far-sighted views, your perceptive understanding of Chinese society and your pain at the changing world of family emotions that has led me to ponder China’s only-child families. Thank you, Shiny, for your description of the many-coloured lives of only children. Your stubborn affirmation of China’s rights and wrongs reawakened my passionate spirit, which age had come close to driving into hibernation. Thank you, Firewood, for your will to strive against your fate in this world of the new millennium. You confirmed for me Chinese people’s strength of will, like a single spark that sets the plains ablaze. Thank you, Glittering, for your ethics and ideas on right and wrong founded on emotions. You left me deeply moved by the Chinese spirit living within you single sprouts, a spirit that is becoming more healthy and vigorous by the day. Thank you, Flying Fish, for your daughterly love that politics and society could not destroy. It was a balm for my pain when I heard of the fathers and mothers who abandoned their only children for personal gain. Thank you, my ‘teachers’. With your boundless energy you have nurtured wings as wide as an eagle’s in your insect-like living spaces. You have given humankind pride in, and hope for, the Chinese people!
I am certain that from today onwards, China will thank your generation and your parents’ generation for your gifts. Because of the price you paid, the spirit and roots of Chinese people have not dried up. The painful experiences of two generations of Chinese have not been forgotten. China’s future has not been cut off or lost its way from its history because of man-made politics, because you hold the generations together, forming a link between what has gone before with what will come after.
My thanks to all the volunteers at Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL).1 Without your knowledge, your confirmation of my ideas and your contribution to my collection of experiences, this book might have been no more than the far-distant image of a lonely sail in the flood-tide of only children, buffeted to and fro by the current in China’s age of great collisions. The support of the MBL volunteers has made this book more like a member of a vast crew of only children on the same ship, observed and gazed at from afar by the skies and oceans of the world.
Thank to my office staff, Nicola Chen, whose wise and intelligent questions often inspire me, and Cui Zhe, who assisted my recording and typing with her thoughtful questions on behalf of her post-80s generation. My thanks to Esther Tyldesley and David Dobson. They are not only university teaching fellows and the translators of my other books, but also valued teachers of mine, who have done the most to teach me the wisdom that comes from self-knowledge, and from that to know today’s China. Every time we have a conversation, the time flies by, our topics always tightly packed with a little bit of everything, sweet, sour, bitter and spicy! Whenever I send them the manuscript of a book, I always wait for their comments like a primary school student waiting for a mark, an experience of longing and terror. It is as if they hold a ruler across my heart, one that might at any moment rap me for my ignorance! Without their knowledge of China and understanding of me, without their feeling for and awareness of China’s culture and language, few Westerners would know the China whose story I wish to tell, or my own complex feelings towards China. Without translators, people would never be able to understand each other, or have a common understanding of peace and democracy.
I do not know how many more opportunities I will get to thank my editors on the printed page. Over the years I have been writing, I have seen people excitedly put everything they see and hear, all their perceptions, into the world of video, without ever really considering the matter. While paper, pen and ink and printed books are disappearing from under our fingertips, and gradually becoming words and images from history, I know that my own writing will be read on a screen in the end. But I am one of the lucky ones, who the people of the future may look back upon with longing, because I often still drink tea with my editors, hug them and scrawl points from our discussions on paper. I am so grateful to my editor Judith Kendra and her team for sharing all this with me, for what may be the last time, and observing with me this epoch-making era of Chinese only children. Without Judith’s wise choices and professional guidance, this book would exist only in my heart, and the best it could hope for would be to wait as scrap, longing to find a use.
The list of people I would like to thank seems to be growing much faster than the days and months of my life. The same applies to you, my reader, for getting to know me here. I cannot go without thanking you for your time and interest, and for your thoughts and feelings that have travelled alongside mine, and for sharing this book with me from the first page.
1 See Appendix III: The Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL)