China
China:
The world’s most populated country with over 1.3 billion people, 637.5 million are women.
Statistics:
- for centuries, Chinese families without sons feared poverty and neglect; the male offspring represents continuity of lineage and protection in old age
- the age-old bias towards boys, combined with the one-child policy imposed since 1980, has produced the largest, the highest, and the longest gender imbalance in the world. The male surplus rose to 120 boys for each 100 girls
- predictions for the next decade are that some 40 million Chinese men will be unable to find wives due to the ‘scarcity’ of females as a result of kidnapping, trafficking, and selective abortions
- women, who are up to 9 months pregnant with their second or third child may be taken to the hospital by regional population control officials for induced abortions
Personal Impact Story
Daughter,
Great distance has separated us. Twenty-two years by rock, earth, water, and monsoon wind. I write slowly. I try to remember your face. A true Chinese face, round, and dignified.
I have buried the memory of you deeply within. My heart feels like a hardened tomb, cold, filled with no light. But every year around this time, the time of your birth, a memory tremors through my body, sharper, more painfully than the contractions that delivered you into our cruel world.
Auntie An-wa told me it would help if I did not think to name you, if I imagined your birth a still-birth the moment we discovered you were not a boy. Her first child was also a girl, she had it soon after the government made their decision to allow only one child for each family. But I named you anyway, the name of a flower I learned about at school.
Your father was so excited that day, he was sure you would be a son. We drove a week before your arrival, hours and hours by bus, winding through rice fields, bicycles, and Changsha heat so we could get help from a better doctor. Your father held me to the bed, buried his face in my chest, cried with me after he quietly nodded his head at the doctor who took you out of the room.
Your face: oval eyes, high cheekbones, flat nose. I see it a thousand times, on every street, in every shop, every temple. But it is not your face. You are not here with me. My beloved Violet, flower of my womb, joy of my heart for one day, pulled from me and taken away.
I wanted to scream at him, the doctor, I’ve wanted to yell, “Just one!” That’s all you were, just one more child, surely there would have been room enough in this country and food. But no. It is a cruel world. Who am I to defy its rules?
Today would be your birthday, daughter. You would be twenty-two years old, beautiful I am sure, and strong. I will hide this letter with all the others I have written, forget you for a time. It’s too painful to live remembering you.
*the above story is based on facts but is fictional, for actual statistics order 30 Days of Prayer for the Voiceless today
