The 8-year-old Su Heng has a small suitcase with “things that she must bring if she leaves right away tomorrow”. Every night when she goes to bed, she hangs a small purse on a string around her neck, filled with the New Year’s money she received, “afraid of being called up suddenly and having to leave.”
Su Heng’s first 12 years of life were marked by four transfers, and in 1996, just one month after her birth, she was sent to a distant relative’s home in a neighboring county to be fostered. When she reached kindergarten age, her “parents” sent her to live with an “aunt and uncle”. At that time, Su Hen did not know that the “aunt and uncle” were her biological parents. In the first grade, she was hurriedly sent to her sister-in-law’s house in Anhui Province. In junior high school, she returned to her biological parents’ home again.
She was the second child not “allowed” to be born under China’s 40-year-long one-child policy. To avoid exposure of their origins, girls like Su Heng bounced from family to family as they grew up and did their best to digest the confusion, anger, anger and hatred that came with it.
“This is not a cold that is cured, it is an irreversible injury. It’s like a person who suddenly breaks an arm, he is very sad during that time, but later he still lives his life as usual, but you ask him if he has thought about it now? Is the arm well? It’s still not good enough. More than ten years later, talking about that experience, Su Heng used four words – “shadow like”.
A Dislocated Childhood
When she was three or four years old, Su Hen was sent back to her biological parents’ home by her foster family. Her older sister, Su Yun, who was five years older than her, didn’t know at first that this “follower” was her real sister. She wrote in her diary that her cousin was always living in the house and was very annoying. The “cousin” is dark, thin and small, “quite introverted She called her mother “auntie”.
Later parents told Su Yun, this is not to tell others, to hide the “real sister”. Su Yun didn’t think much of it, and thought it was good to have a little friend at home “to call on”, so she let her sister go to her mother’s grocery store every day to get two eggs and a bottle of calcium AD milk to take home. The young Su Hen did not know that she was a child.
The young Su Hen did not know that he was living in his biological parents’ house. Once her father was burned by fire, her sister Su Yun started to cry, and Su Heng didn’t know why she was crying, “I cried when I saw her crying anyway.
Like Su Heng, Fannin’s childhood was also “confusing”. She was born in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, and was placed in foster care with her sister-in-law since she was a child. Although her sister-in-law would always say that she was “brought up for someone else,” Fanning decided that her aunt and uncle were her biological parents. Aunt told her that because there was already a sister in the family and family planning was strict, she could not let others know that Fanning was born to them. Hearing more of this, Fannin felt depressed, “I ran to ask my mother (aunt), why say I am helping others to bring, can not say my sister is helping others to bring? “The adults all laughed.
Fannin did not know that the “sister-in-law and aunt-in-law” who were extra close to her were her biological parents. Aunt” and “uncle “Every week will take a printed red and green floral pattern of the thermos to the home, pour out the cordyceps boiled chicken soup or bird’s nest to her to drink, and occasionally to Fanning to buy two new clothes.
“Every year, my birthday is also celebrated by both families together,” said Fannin, sitting in her dress in front of the glass table where the cake was placed, as the two families clapped together and sang her a happy birthday song. “It’s been like that since I was a kid, you don’t have a comparison, you don’t think it’s a weird thing.”
Life with her biological parents lasted until the night before Su Hen’s first grade final exams. Her uncle coaxed Su Hen that he would take her out and drive a motorcycle to Wenzhou overnight and change trains, where she fell asleep on the late-night train and arrived in Anhui the next day. Su Hen was thinking about her final exams, but her sister-in-law, whom she hadn’t seen a few times, told her that she would have to live here from now on. Afraid of being traced, she was told to call her sister-in-law “great aunt”. After hearing this, Su Hen cried and cried all the time, and once she ran out on her own, with her sister-in-law chasing after her and accidentally breaking her foot. Su Heng turned around and saw his sister-in-law, stopped, and followed her home.
In Anhui, every time there was a fight, the children would say “Go back to your Jiangsu”. She is actually from Zhejiang, but her name has the word “Su” in it. Once she scratched a little boy’s face with a few red marks, and when the boy’s parents and sister came over, the father slapped the boy’s face and said, “How can you play with such a wild child? ” – Su Hen still remembers these words. The boy’s sister pointed at Su Hen’s nose and scolded him, saying things like “bastard” and “wild child” over and over. “wild child” and other words. Su Hen felt so helpless that tears crackled down and she could only hide in her flat and cry.
Later, her sister-in-law’s son often played guitar, told stories and played with her. She felt close to her chubby, bitter-speaking sister-in-law. Slowly Su Hen no longer wanted to run away, but she still felt strongly insecure. In the suitcase, which could be taken away at any time, there were a few Barbie dolls costing five dollars each and a few doll clothes. The dolls were bought with her own saved pocket money, and she got a dollar or two every time she helped her aunt and uncle buy vinegar. The clothes were made from scraps of cloth she found in a tailor’s store, and she learned to make stitches on the side by helping her great-aunt thread her needle when she was a child. In addition, the suitcase contained some of her clothes, which technically belonged to Su Hen’s nephew, the great-aunt’s grandson – he was a year older than Su Hen – and shared some of the old clothes he had worn with Su Hen.
More than a decade later, Su Hen learned that the overnight transfer had occurred during a “rivalry” in his father’s workplace. After Su Hen’s father retired from the military and worked in a hospital, a colleague who “wanted to screw him” reported Su Hen’s family for being overweight. The parents who received the news had to send Su Hen away quickly. For a long time after that, they did not dare to let her go home again.
The reports and searches under the family planning policy disrupted Su Hen’s and Fan Ning’s childhood and even their entire lives, and forced mothers like Wang Yulian to endure the pain of sending away their own flesh and blood.
A daughter without a “birth certificate
24 days – Wang Yulian clearly remembers this number, the number of days her daughter stayed with her after she was born.
It was 1995, and Wang was pregnant with her second daughter. She says family planning was strictly enforced at the time, and in rural Zhejiang, she always heard stories of arrests. “Someone was pulled to be tied, the roof of the house was lifted, the things in the house were moved, the wife couldn’t be caught, and her husband was taken away and fined.”
The whole pregnancy was about running and hiding. “Scared to death. Every time I heard about the arrest, Wang Yulian, who was pregnant, hid in her old home, in empty houses and duck sheds where no one lived. Because the child is “not planned”, there is no birth certificate.
Without a birth certificate, the child is not a “legal birth” and cannot be born in a hospital. Wang Yulian found a private birth attendant in advance. It so happened that the day before she gave birth, the birth control officers found this woman, removed the birth bed and fined her 7,000 yuan. The next night at two o’clock, Wang Yulian had abdominal pain. Her family drove her from the countryside to the city in a caravan, but her husband came out and said, “He’s not home,” and didn’t open the door even after ringing the doorbell again.
At 3 a.m., Wang Yulian stood in the middle of the road with her mother, sister and neighboring sister-in-law, crying. It was January in the winter, and Wang Yulian was wrapped in a cotton jacket, her stomach already hurting so much that she couldn’t stand up. Wang Yulian thought: “family planning ah, the hospital will certainly abort the child, people say will be a needle into the child will die, but born on the road how to do, obstructed labor is over. “
Around 4:00 a.m., a tricycle master heard the cries seeking over: “You do not cry, is not the birth of a child ah? I’ll take you there. The master drove them to a folk midwife home. It was a vegetable market, downstairs is a store, upstairs is a private house. The midwife told Wang Yulian’s family not to make any noise, or they would be discovered. The stairs are made of bamboo and are very narrow. The people below pushed and the ones above pulled, and Wang Yulian struggled to get up the stairs.
During the production, Wang Yulian has been holding back from making too much noise, “for the sake of the child, to live ah”. At five in the morning, the daughter was born, “fat face, more than nine pounds”. The daughter was sent to foster care after being raised around for 24 days, and Wang Yulian remembers her “hair was thick” before she was sent away.
The company’s main goal is to provide a safe and healthy environment for the children. Wang Yulian is on edge every day, she said again, “It’s scary”. The foster care fee is 500 yuan per month, and the milk powder is extra.
When she misses her daughter, Wang Yulian will take her milk powder to see her and hold her for a while, but only for a while, “there are many people in the village, I’m afraid people will recognize her”.
The daughter has been weak and sick since childhood, and when she was sick, she would be taken back to her grandmother’s house by her foster carers, and she changed several families before and after. The family guessed that she might not have been vaccinated or hadn’t had enough breast milk. In China, newborns can receive free vaccinations such as BCG, Pertussis, Hepatitis B, and other “immunization plan” vaccines. Because of the “illegal birth”, Wang Yulian’s daughter was not vaccinated.
When her daughter was three years old, her sister-in-law’s family opened a kindergarten, and Wang Yulian took the opportunity to bring her daughter back. When she first came home, her daughter stared at Wang Yulian and did not speak, “look at her eyes, she did not dare to call her mother, recognizing her birth”.
The daughter was born without an account, a “black account”, until the fifth national census in 2000, just in time to go to elementary school, only to register in. The census is the land of life. The family has a lot of people who are not interested in the family. The family has a folklore saying that if you don’t have a child for a long time, you can have one soon. Later, the brother remarried and had two daughters, and the account could not be registered, so the biological father came back from abroad and did a paternity test to move the account of Yulian’s daughter.
In the sixth census conducted in 2010, it was found that 13 million people in China did not have a hukou, which means that about one in every 100 Chinese is a “black household That means about 1 in 100 Chinese is a “black household”. According to a survey by Wan Haiyuan, an associate researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission’s Institute of Macroeconomic Research, the number could be even higher. Of the 13 million people without hukou, about 7.8 million belong to over-born people, most of them women, mainly in rural areas. Wan Haiyuan pointed out that men have a significantly higher status in rural areas and are more willing to go to police stations to voluntarily register male babies for hukou.
Without the coincidence of Yulian’s brother, most over-born families would have to pay “social maintenance fees” in order to register their children. Su Heng’s family found connections to get the family registration at his aunt’s house. Fanning, who is now studying for a PhD in Hong Kong, had a fake hukou book made by his parents who “knew someone at the police station” to attend elementary school.
Fanning’s father is a public employee of a state-owned enterprise and will lose his job if he has a second child. The mother has been working normally when she was pregnant, the due date coincided with the National Day holiday, before and after a few more days off, used to give birth and sit on the moon, as if nothing had happened. Fannin did not change to the real family register until middle school, registered in the name of the aunt, the relationship written niece.
“It’s a bizarre thing how family planning can limit a person’s reproductive rights. “Growing up,” Fanning asked, “this policy completely structured the lives of my generation, and many people can’t live with their biological parents because of it “.
The girls in foster care found that growing up and returning to live with their biological parents became an awkward, even traumatic, event.
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