⭐️ “More Than One Child” Review, by Rosie Milne
At the beginning of More Than One Child, Shen Yang writes, “I broke a law simply by being born.” She was her parents’ second daughter, and she is referring to the family planning laws which until recently saw China’s One-Child Policy strictly enforced. Her childhood was thus essentially intertwined with politics, but her memoir of that childhood does not serve a political narrative; it is instead a personal attempt to exorcise ghosts, heal old wounds, and secure recognition for “excess-birth children”, a community of young adults who are still suffering in China from their non-status.
These excess-birth children are among Shen Yang’s dedicatees, and in her dedication, she calls theirs “the invisible lives.” Now that the family planning laws have been relaxed, there is no guarantee that the stories of excess-birth children will become part of China’s national collective memory. More Than One Child has not been published in China, but if these invisible lives are forgotten at home, the memoir should help to ensure they are not entirely forgotten in the English-speaking world.
More than One Child: Memoirs of an Illegal Daughter, Shen Yang, Nicky Harman (trans) (Balestier, September 2021)
After Shen Yang was born, she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents, years she describes as “my happy times”, but she was not her parents’ only excess-birth child, desperate for a son, they had two more daughters, and when she was five Shen Yang was sent to live with a paternal aunt and uncle, so that her beloved maternal grandparents could care for her youngest sister. Her aunt and uncle lived hundreds of miles away from the rest of the family, and there followed for Shen Yang eleven years of misery in which she barely saw her parents, or her sisters, in which she was routinely abused and treated as a burden, degraded as “Damn Brat”, occasionally slapped about, and treated with disdain at school, where she did not excel.
It’s an open question, and one that Shen Yang does not address, to what extent her predicament was the result of her parents’ moral failure in flouting the law because they wanted a boy. But if More Than One Child in part depicts selfish Chinese parents, it nevertheless retains its urgency and remains a testament not only to Shen Yang’s resilience, but also to that of a generation of excess-birth children.
Shen Yang tells the stories of two of those children, her school fellows Wei Wunjun, and “the sunshine boy”, Lü Yangguang. Wei Wunjan was lucky in that she lived with her parents and her siblings, who loved her. However, she suffered as a baby from hydrocephalus, and her school-fellows teased her mercilessly about her big head.
Lü Yangguang was the cleverest boy in the class but he lived with an aunt and an uncle who inflicted upon him abuse even worse than that suffered by Sheng Yang at the hands of her relatives. Despite his brilliance, his education was cut short, because he lacked the hukou, the official certificate which enabled students to progress to High School and beyond—Shen Yang also lacked a hukou, until her aunt managed to buy her one off a relative, which she then used under an assumed identity.
Wei Wunjan’s and Lü Yangguang’s stories are not incidental to the memoir. In her Introduction, Shen Yang writes: “The voices of excess-birth children must be heard. Their stories must be told. This is not only my story, it is their story too. This book commemorates the childhoods of all China’s excess-birth generation.”
More Than One Child would be important and interesting as an historical record regardless of its literary merits, but these are considerable. It is vividly-written and thoughtfully-structured. Though as a child Shen Yang was often weeping, her recollections of doing so never descend into self-pity. She can write about the bleakest circumstances with humor. She manages to find something good in the most miserable situations – her bullying uncle’s grape vines provide them both with solace, an English teacher inspires her to learn the language from love, not in order to pass exams. As an adult, she is evidently humane, and forgiving.
It is always difficult to comment on language in a translated work, but Nicky Harman’s translation reads fluidly, and colloquially in English, and thus enables Shen Yang to make direct personal contact with the reader.
In translating More than One Child, Nicky Harman clearly had to come up with new English terminology for the Chinese introduced during the One-Child Policy to describe children, whether they were first-born and legal, or subsequent children and thus illegal.
I asked her about how she went about developing this new English vocabulary:
Chinese is very concise and that conciseness had to be reflected in the translation. 独生子女, just four characters, for the legitimate, licensed first-born, the ‘only-birth-son-daughter’. I called them ‘only-children’, hyphenated. Finding an English word for the illegal ones was a different problem. In Chinese, they were variously called 超生儿, literally, excess-birth-children, or 小黑孩. This term presented me with a problem, because it means ‘black child’. Not, of course, a reference to skin color, but to the fact that she or he had been born illegally. I tossed around a number of possibilities before settling on using the pinyin, heihaizi.
Shen Yang writes about the wall slogans used to promote the One-Child Policy. She explains:
“At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, when family planning was strictly enforced, and social controls were tightest, the ubiquitous wall slogans were intimidating and even contained direct threats.”
I asked Harman whether translating wall slogans presented special difficulties. She said:
Translating slogans is a bit like translating song lyrics. They have to go with a swing. Puns, alliteration, rhymes, Chinese slogans have them all, and my translation had to reflect that. Take the slogan 结贫穷的扎，上致富的环. I rendered this as ‘Give the snip to poverty, coil yourself in money.’ I used ‘snip’ to keep the reference to tubal ligation/vasectomy, and ‘coil in money’ to pun on the birth control coil. Another slogan, 该扎不扎，巨额严惩，该流不流，拆墙扒房, I translated as ‘If you won’t have your tubes tied, we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks; if you won’t have an abortion, we’ll pull a ton of bricks down on you.’ It helped that in English, to come down on someone like a ton of bricks means to criticize or punish severely, and the second part refers to the practice of punishing multi-birth families by pulling their houses down. The word play in the English does not reflect the Chinese, it is original. But the translation accurately conveys the meaning.
More Than One Child is both a moving account of one woman’s determination to overcome scars resulting from a childhood shrouded in secrecy and silence, and a testament to the endurance of the community of excess-birth children..
Reviewed by Rosie Milne