📝 The Home of a Spare Child
As this theme song “There’s No Warm Home Without You” rang through the cinema during one particularly touching scene between the mother and daughter leads, little me sat in the corner sobbing even more desperately than the girl in the film. It was my third year of primary school, and I was there with all the teachers and students from my school, watching a film based on true events called “A Single Child’s Story.” The boys in my class who sat beside me laughed at me for getting too into the story, but as I wiped away my tears, I told them that they didn’t understand a damn thing. The girl from the film was desperate for a loving home – and I was no different.
⭐️ Book Review: “ONE”
Eve Smith’s “ONE: One Law, One Child, 7 Million Crimes” immerses us in a dystopian future where a green-tech paradise conceals a family-planning hell. It builds on the very same premise that led to the One-Child Policy in China: in order to avoid famine and environmental catastrophe, births must be controlled no matter what. Only this time it happens in a future UK where climate tech and the eyes of an Orwellian government are omnipresent.
⭐️ Book Review: “The Strength of Water”
Before I read The Strength of Water, all I knew about the gold rush in California was how Chinese men suffered and struggled to make a living; After reading the story, I had a much deeper understanding of how Chinese women survived and thrived in a totally foreign environment.
📝 ‘Grandpa refused a Covid vaccine. A month later, I was loading his body into a hearse of corpses’
The Telegraph invited Shen Yang to share her opinion on the latest Covid outbreak in China. Through a combination of her personal experience and stories from her friends and relatives, the article explores the reasons for the low vaccination rates and how this new wave of covid is affecting medical staff and ordinary citizens.
📝 End of 2022 marks time for China to end its ‘zero-Covid’ roller coaster
South China Morning Post invited Shen Yang to share her roller-coaster journey with covid in China.
📝 China’s zero-Covid policy is not helping its drive to raise birth rates
South China Morning Post invited Shen Yang to share her opinion as an excess child on the increasing declining birth rate in China and the failure of the latest attempts to increase the population.
📝 ‘I’m competing with millions of people for food’: What life's really like in locked-down Shanghai
To better understand people’s real life under the infamous 2-month Shanghai lockdown, The Telegraph reached out to Shen Yang and four other local residents to collect their stories. This piece contains Shen Yang’s perspective on her quarantine experience.
🖋 The Road Not Taken
Publishing More Than One Child was the culmination of a 10 years long journey. And it all started by taking a different road. This short post is my way of remembering that journey and getting ready for the ones that await me.