The how many children question
Only on two occasions in the past year and a half that I've been in China have I been asked or told something directly about the family size policy in place in China. Once, last year in the mall, a fellow shopper said something odd to me about foreigners being allowed to have as many children as they wanted, which was followed by her own maniacal laughter, and another time one of the first visits I made to the Nantou Church. It isn't something I bring up myself, unless I know someone really, really well, because it is a profoundly impossible topic to grasp as an American (and as it turns out, for some Chinese people).
But when several times over the course of our Guangxi weekend total strangers asked us how we felt about it, I was a bit uneasy. Earlier this year, parts of Guangxi were in all-out riot over the implementation of the family planning policy. Guangxi has a mostly rural farming population, a type of people hurt economically by the tight controls on family size and timing(counter to the mindset that people shouldn't have more children than they can afford is that many urban, upwardly mobile Chinese couples are happily one-child or child-free, much like their Hong Kong counterparts, and the poor rural farmers are fighting for their rights to have additional children), as well as their traditional values being eradicated.
So I felt very much on the defensive when asked why we only had one child when foreigners can have as many as they want, or if we had an opinion about the way "it" is done here. We had no way of knowing if the feelings from the spring were still raw or felt at all in this part of Guangxi, or if this is just the question that foreigners get all the time in non-urban parts of China. At first I didn't know how to answer these questions, because we only had one child with us, and the whole truth is much too sad and personal to share with strangers (or maybe it isn't). Then I remembered something that appeared to satisfy one and all. I told them that Randy is the father of five children. Oh, okay, questions over.
But when several times over the course of our Guangxi weekend total strangers asked us how we felt about it, I was a bit uneasy. Earlier this year, parts of Guangxi were in all-out riot over the implementation of the family planning policy. Guangxi has a mostly rural farming population, a type of people hurt economically by the tight controls on family size and timing(counter to the mindset that people shouldn't have more children than they can afford is that many urban, upwardly mobile Chinese couples are happily one-child or child-free, much like their Hong Kong counterparts, and the poor rural farmers are fighting for their rights to have additional children), as well as their traditional values being eradicated.
So I felt very much on the defensive when asked why we only had one child when foreigners can have as many as they want, or if we had an opinion about the way "it" is done here. We had no way of knowing if the feelings from the spring were still raw or felt at all in this part of Guangxi, or if this is just the question that foreigners get all the time in non-urban parts of China. At first I didn't know how to answer these questions, because we only had one child with us, and the whole truth is much too sad and personal to share with strangers (or maybe it isn't). Then I remembered something that appeared to satisfy one and all. I told them that Randy is the father of five children. Oh, okay, questions over.
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