Since 1999, China has entered an aging society. Along with the aging population, there is an unprecedented one-child era.
A large number of post-80s and post-90s and their parents are in different places, facing fierce competition at work on one side and various parental retirement dilemmas on the other side – for example, “Should I give up work and go back home when my parents suddenly fall ill? give up my job and go back home? ” is a kind of multiple choice question.
Unlike large families, only children enjoy the full range of love from their parents, but as their parents age, they bring with them the intertwined problems of assets, time and emotions. When these problems are near or have already occurred, confusion and helplessness become the norm for them.
Illness
Standing in the corridor of the hospital, the moment I learned that my mother was diagnosed with cancer, I felt that the sky was falling.
Xiaoyu is 26 years old, an interior designer, and has been living in Suzhou since she went to college. Due to her work, she has not been back home to Yangzhou on holidays for a long time. This year Qingming Festival was the first anniversary of her grandfather’s death, so she decided to go home. When she arrived home, she found out that her mother was in the hospital.
Her parents didn’t expect her to come back on Qingming Festival, so they panicked for a while. Her father told her that although her mother needed an operation, it was only a minor problem, and that the operation was scheduled after the Qingming Festival, so she should not worry and return to Suzhou after the holiday. But Xiao Yu didn’t feel at ease and insisted on accompanying her mother to the surgery. After going back to Suzhou to simply take care of some work, she returned home in a hurry.
At that time, her mother was already in the operating room. At first she thought her mother’s condition was not that serious, but it was only when her aunt, uncle and even grandpa and grandma arrived at the hospital, with her father sitting next to her with no expression, and the operation lasted for almost 5 hours, that she realized something was wrong. She pulled her aunt into the corridor and asked her mother if her illness was serious, only to learn that her mother was diagnosed with endometrial cancer and that pathological biopsies would be done after the surgery to remove the uterus to determine if it was advanced.
Xiao Yu said that she “couldn’t do it all at once”. On the night of the surgery, her mother was hanging on the IV in the hospital bed, and her tears were flowing uncontrollably. The next day, she saw that she had mistyped many words.
Dad is usually a very spontaneous person, but this time the whole person is tense, always sitting without saying a word. She felt that Dad should be more upset than herself, so she did her best to hide her sadness at home and comfort the elders in the family. She didn’t tell anyone about her mother’s illness, except for a few brief words when she took leave from work with her leader.
During that time, she suddenly wished she had a brother or sister who could actually empathize with her.
She had to wait for three days for the test results, and during those three days, she thought a lot – she didn’t think this day would come so early. Her grandparents were still alive and her parents were only in their early fifties. She thought that it would take her middle age for something like her parents’ sudden illness to happen. She didn’t have any savings, but at this moment, all she could think about was “no matter how much it costs, I have to treat my mom”. In the past, she felt that the farther away from home, the better, but this time, she was determined to return home to live as soon as possible.
The day after her mother’s surgery, she contacted an agent to list her house in Suzhou and wrote on her phone, “Suzhou, I’m giving up on you. “
Many people feel that the feeling of being unable to do anything and having no one to share when their parents suddenly fall ill is the biggest moment of collapse for an only child. Because the working hours are relatively flexible, during the period when she went home to take care of her mother, Xiao Yu felt that her work was not affected too much, and she was glad that she was not a 9 to 5 worker.
Dependence
As a much-loved only child, Xiaoyi is the envy of many of her friends.
In 2016, right after she graduated, her parents bought her a house in Suzhou, and her father pays the monthly mortgage. At the beginning of her career, she worked as an apprentice for two years under a famous designer in Suzhou, during which she was not paid and depended on her parents for support.
Xiao Yu’s parents had a very good relationship, they had been doing business for many years and had their own life circle, they didn’t bother her much. After this incident, Xiaoyu realized that she had never needed her parents so much. The family’s WeChat group is very active every day, and she calls her mother almost every day when she is in Suzhou.
Xiaoyu had taken the initiative to ask if she wanted to sell her house in Suzhou and go back to Yangzhou to live. But her parents’ answer was always: “Don’t do it for us, it’s most important for you to be happy. “
Like Xiao Yu, many only children enjoy a lot of love, which has created an unprecedented and complex parent-child relationship in contemporary China. The emotional attachment between many parents and their children is very strong, and it also confirms each other’s existence and importance more and more when problems come.
Bai Bai, 34, lives alone in Korea, with her parents in China. In recent years, she has always felt her mother’s strong desire to “control” her. Whenever she called, her mother would always say she envied “other people’s daughters” who worked in the city, found a good match, lived close to her parents, and could go back to her mother’s house every day. She complained about the parents’ shortcomings among relatives and how her father was not satisfied with all the little things he did.
Bai Bai felt very helpless. When she graduated from high school, her mother offered to let her go to Korea to study. At that time, Bai Bai’s cousin was doing well in Korea, so her mother thought she could see the world and have someone to look after her. The first few years, her mother has been supporting her development abroad, but after Bai Bai formally worked, her mother’s ideas began to fluctuate as she got older: seeing other people’s children around, she wanted Bai Bai to return early; but within a few days, she changed again, saying that she could stay outside to “make a difference “.
At first, Bai Bai would seriously comfort his mother, but now he is used to it, perfunctorily: “Am I too indifferent? Why should I spend an hour listening to some useless negative energy output? “She feels that her mother has always interfered in her affairs. As an undergraduate, she studied journalism and communication, and when she wanted to change her major in graduate school, her mother was dead set against it. She was forced to continue studying a major she didn’t like and ended up not pursuing a related career.
She felt that nowadays her parents are healthy and both have enough pensions, so they don’t need to take care of themselves for the time being. After all, returning to her own country would mean giving up the career she had accumulated over the years and starting over. “Maybe this day always has to come, but I want to live my life as best as I can now and don’t want to be tied down by them. “
For many only children with strong personalities, it is indeed difficult to live happily with their parents.
Xiao Gu lives in a single-parent family. After the death of her grandmother, she was worried that her mother was lonely, once received her from her home to live together in the city where she works, but it did not take long for the conflict to continue: Mom wash dishes without detergent, the reason is that “detergent is not environmentally friendly “The bowls are covered with grease stains visible to the naked eye; mom can’t figure out garbage classification, often throwing toilet paper into the food waste bag; two people sleep in one room, Gu will be woken up early in the morning by the sound of mom watching short videos …… would have liked to take care of each other, but they don’t fit in with each other.
Some parents are aware of this and will actively choose to “not give their children any trouble”. The mother of Xiaoyu mentioned several times that she and her husband were planning to go to a nursing home in the future: “A high class one, very expensive, with everything inside, we have saved enough money. But Xiao Yu was very angry and said, “Are you crazy? As long as I live, I won’t let you go to a nursing home. “
Sometimes Xi thinks that if all her relatives die one day, she will be lonely but in a very relaxed state: “You can always live without your life because no one will really care about you anymore. Right now, I am afraid to get sick or die, and so are my parents. I think it’s actually quite exhausting. “
Choice
In order to avoid sudden accidents, some young people choose to save for a rainy day.
Li Yutang, 30, works in Australia. He used to go back home a few times a year to spend time with his parents; after the outbreak last year, he didn’t return for more than a year. Thinking that he might live abroad for a long time, he began to be anxious about his parents’ retirement.
At the beginning of the year, Li Yutang decided to make a conscious effort to help his parents develop healthy habits, and to do so, he came up with a simple and brutal solution – to directly purchase living supplies for them. Each month, he sends them a box of olive oil, twice a month of fresh fish, a box of kiwis, and low-glycemic-index carbohydrate foods such as quinoa and chickpeas. In addition, he has them do daily exercises and stretching.
In his words, he was “teaching nutrition to two little kids in their fifties. The parents, who lived a conservative lifestyle, initially resisted and even got a little angry, telling him, “Stop sending it, you can’t eat everything you send now! “. Because he didn’t want to waste it, he gradually got into the habit of eating it, and now his father drinks a cup of black coffee every day and reminds him not to forget to buy it.
Yu-Tang Li feels that “love yourself” and “love your parents “These two things are firmly tied together, the parents are healthy, they can also live a few more years of easy life. He believes that the inner anxiety of an only child is something that his parents’ generation cannot understand. He tried to bring his parents to Australia to live with him in the past, but because there were not many people around to talk to, his parents felt very uncomfortable and didn’t want to leave their homeland in their old age, so it didn’t work out.
Many young people choose to help their parents plan their retirement arrangements early: buying commercial insurance, visiting retirement facilities, learning about medical and nursing care, and so on. At the same time, only children are thinking about their own lives as they experience their parents’ retirement process firsthand.
Li Yutang has been saving for a rainy day, and when each paycheck arrives, he will regularly save a portion of it. If he plans to have children in the future, he will choose to have more than two, because he doesn’t want his future children to be as torn as he is – no one to share the responsibility, and no one to understand his situation.
She wants to be like her parents, giving all their love to one child, being the only one for each other, giving their all, “two bowls of water are not even! “Two bowls of water are not equal.
On the third day after Xiao Yu’s mother’s surgery, the doctor informed her that the results of her pathology tests were early, basically nothing dangerous, and she could be discharged home. She shed tears in front of the doctor and her mood cleared up all of a sudden.
The day she was discharged from the hospital was her mother’s birthday. She bought a cake for her mom and posted a photo of the three of them in her friends circle with the caption: “It’s a beautiful day. “
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