The Guardian

China

Shen Yang

Over the last few years, there has been a rise in young Chinese authors writing memoirs about their upbringings as illegal children under China’s notorious one-child policy. In Chinese jargon, they are called “black” children; a reference to their lack of a birth permit. According to Chinese government statistics, in 2015 at least 13 million people – or 1% of the population – had such a status.​

Now that the one-child policy has been relaxed, the stories of these illegal children will soon be a part of China’s national collective memory. But to those who grew up tainted with this humiliation, the scars are permanent. One is Chinese writer Shen Yang, who wrote her story in part to extinguish the nightmares that still haunt her.

Her memoir, More Than One Child, is not intended as a piece of neatly crafted literature, but as an open and honest collection of memories from China’s transition years. Shen Yang says it was not easy to write; she was born on 1 January 1986, by which time her mother had been on the run from the authorities for nine months. “I broke a law simply by being born. If the family planning authorities discovered my existence, my mother would be carted off to the clinic to have her tubes tied, and our family would be heavily fined. I may have been born on a lucky day, but I could not change my destiny.”

Outside her birth home in Shandong province, slogans were papered everywhere: “If you have children illegally, we will legally demolish your house”, and “One excess birth and the whole village gets their tubes tied!” Local authorities used this propaganda to stop “extras” like Shen being born.It was even worse for a girl; Shen was the second daughter, with a sister who was four years older. In rural China, despite the stringent one-child policy, authorities would sometimes allow couples whose first child was a daughter to have a second – as long as he was a boy. Boys could be used as manual labour to help feed the family, go to big cities to work and, when they married, sustain the family’s bloodline.

Shortly after she was born, Shen Yang was smuggled to her grandparents’ house in a nearby city. At the age of five, she was adopted by her uncle and aunt until she was 16, to avoid the authorities’ attention. But they had an unhappy marriage, punctuated by rows and bouts of domestic violence.

As Chinese society evolved, however, so did Shen Yang’s destiny. Now 35, she’s married to an Italian designer and has been living in Shanghai for the past few years. Her childhood trauma of being an illegal “extra” is still there, but writing has been a process of reconciliation with her past. 

— Vincent Ni

More Than One Child, translated by Nicky Harman, will be published by Balestier in September.