The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Rippling Effects of China’s One-Child Policy

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Nanfu Wang grew up under China’s one-child policy and never questioned it. “You don’t know that it’s something initiated and implemented by the authority,” she tells The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan. “It’s a normal part of everything. Just like water exists, or air.” But when Wang became pregnant she started to understand the magnitude of the law—and the suffering behind it. Wang’s documentary, “One Child Nation,” explores the effects of one of the largest social experiments in history. She uncovers stories of confusion and trauma, in Chinese society and within her own family. After Wang’s uncle had a daughter, his family forced him to abandon her at a local market so that he and his wife could try for a son. “He stood there, across the street, watching to see if somebody would come and take the baby,” Wang tells Fan. “He wanted to bring her home, but his mom threatened to commit suicide. . . . He felt so torn. There was no right decision.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Behind the environmental crisis and everything that you've heard about human impact on the planet, there's another crisis that you don't hear much about at all. Because even the word is practically taboo at this point. Overpopulation. We're pushing toward 8 billion people on the planet. Hardly any government wants to do anything about it and certainly not ours.

That may be largely because of the example set by China historical. China did do something about overpopulation, something drastic and ultimately brutal. From the 1970s until 2015, China put into effect the one-child policy, and the consequences of that policy will be felt for generations. Nanfu Wang is a filmmaker and her documentary, One Child Nation, looks at the toll that policy took on her family. She talked with Jiang Fon, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker. Can you briefly explain why you chose to make a film about the one-child policy?

So China's one-child policy started in 1979 and ended at the end of 2015. I was born in 1985, six years after the one-child policy started. My co-director, Jalian, was born in 1983 or 84, I believe. And we both grew up under the policy. And for me, I became a mother two years ago. Congratulations. Thank you. And being pregnant and having my first child really made me question a lot of the things that I never thought about.

I just couldn't imagine how millions of women lived under the fear of not knowing whether they could protect the child that they were pregnant with. And I started asking my mom what it was like for her generation when they had to be sterilized by the government. And what she told me made me realize that I really didn't know the one child policy at all. I am a product of the one child policy. I was born in Chongqing and moved here at the age of seven. And what I remember of that experience was the posters of two parents and one child plastered on every available surface and also in all textbooks. And of course, I was too young to question that a family could be defined by anything other than a mother, a father, and a child. For you who stayed in China past adolescence and spent your young adulthood there,

was there questioning or interrogating why it is that families have to be policed in this way? Was there at all, what was that process of questioning like if there was a process before coming to the U.S.? I don't think I had questioned the one-child policy to that extent when I was in China. The message was everywhere. Everywhere you could see, it was like a tree standing there, there is a wall building there. It's like a building that you go to school and you pass by every day. So at some point, you just stop paying attention to it.

You assume that it's a normal part of existence of the universe. And you don't know that it's something that is, initiated and implemented by the authority, by a visible hand, you assume the background of your life is normal part of everything, just like water, air existed there. I wish I could say something to my mom. Like most people in China, she believes the policy was necessary for China's survival.

But I wondered if people like her really thought it was worth the sacrifices each family made. What I found really poignant about the documentary was the number of your family members that featured in it. And I wondered what that process was like asking your mother and brother and grandfather and aunts and uncles to be involved.

How much convincing to take you. Yeah. All of them, to certain extent, was reluctant for different reasons. My grandpa, my strategy, I told him, I wanted to record your whole life story on camera as a record. So my son, your great-grandson, grew up, he could understand and know you, like in that way.

And so I actually talked to him for like over five hours and literally like from the moment he was born to now. And my brother was shy. He didn't want to be on camera, and he did it for me. And I think my mom also did it because I was her daughter. She would do anything. I asked her. And my uncle was really hard for me to request the interview because I knew how painful it would be for him to tell the story about the daughter that he gave away. He left to die. Right. I mean, that was one of the most gut-wrenching moments in the film. I think. You know, your uncle just in brief, you know, describes this experience of being, you know, forced to let his, you know, firstborn, a girl die because the family just wanted a boy so badly. Can you take us through kind of what happened after your uncle abandoned his daughter of the market and how that story lived in the family? I think I was old enough. I was a child. I don't remember how many years I was like sex or something when my mom actually helped my uncle to take the baby to the market. And only until now I was making the film and asked my mom. And my mom, of course, told the story in a much more vivid way. And then when I approached my uncle and he told me the story from his first person perspective.

which was he stood there across the street, watched to see if somebody would come and take the baby and watched the baby cry and wanted to bring her home. But then his mom threatened to commit suicide and he couldn't do that. And he felt so torn. There was no right decision. He believed that his mom was going to commit suicide, which we all believed. I told my mother about that moment. in the film immediately after watching it because it haunted me so much because I think your uncle's

description of the mosquito bites that plague, the little girl as she was left in the market, was so incredibly vivid. And I felt this strange guilt of being alive because it felt it was just by sheer luck that I also in China was born and got to be kept. And there is this element of just a very cruel lottery at work where who determines who dies and who lives seems very, very random. And, you know, your name is Nan Fu and Nan, I know, is the character for man or boy. And, you know, And for me, too, my name is Jia Yang, which it's more of a boy's name than her girls. And it was born out of my parents' desire that I would be a boy.

And in a way, I have this very strange relationship with my name where I'm perversely proud of it because I think, well, you know, I made it. You know, the faded boy did not. And I'm here to stay. And I always in China am addressed, you know, on emails as Mr. Fan, you know. But I was wondering what your relationship with your name has been. So, yeah, Nan means men and Fu means pillar. Pillar of the family, pillar of the country.

And when I was a child, they've told me that they gave me the name and they hope that even though I was a girl that I could be like a man and be the pillar of the family. And when my father passed away and I was 12, it became something that I felt it was his hope for me. And it's something that he left for me. So weirdly enough, like you said, I also felt proud of my name. Right. In a way that I would often have that kind of conversation with my dad after he died. look, dad, I made it.

Like, I am stronger than men now. Right. So toward the end of the documentary, you mentioned the irony in the fact that you left a country that enforced abortions to go to a country, the U.S., that restricts and debates the right to abortion. Can you talk a little bit about this irony? Yeah, restriction of reproductive rights.

is not unique to China. And we really wanted people who are outside of China to see the film and to really reflect on their own society, to look at where the propaganda is and whether they have mistaken propaganda is, what women should not do with their own body should be their own choice. And I think in America where I now live, I would have assumed that in a country where respect of freedom and the respect to rights would have recognized the reproductive rights for women as the basic rights, but it wasn't that case. And to me, that was just really sad and shocking to see.

In 2015, we got the news that the party ended the one child policy. What is your idea of China's family planning model today? And are you optimistic that this society will encourage more freedoms? I really wanted to be optimistic, but I don't think that I am optimistic, especially over the past three or four years. I've seen how the society got tightened up even more, how the VPNs are being cracked down, and how more and more activists were arrested, and how the civil society is even more closed than before.

Yeah. So the answer is the resounding no. Yeah, and we now have a president who has a limited term. Yes. we now have an emperor in effect. So has your mom and brother watch the film and has it done anything to change their perspective? My mom and my brother were both at the premiere at Sundance in January.

It was the first time they ever came to like a screening of my films. My mom, her entire life in the village, she's never been to a movie theater. Oh, wow. Yeah. So my mom watched it, and then she said, it was so true what you showed in the film. It was exactly like what I saw, what I, like, and what I saw is even worse. I've seen way worse than this, but I still think the policy was necessary. So she was really, I think it really struck me how effective the propaganda was.

Will this documentary be screened ever in China? Is it allowed to be screened in China? It has been shown in Hong Kong. It will be shown in Taiwan. And we also have screening in a lot of Mandarin-speaking, Chinese-speaking areas. And in China, some independent film festivals have reached out and wanted to show underground screenings. And if the country would ever change, the first step would be the awareness for

people to know what happened, then once their awareness start to change, that's when their action would be changed too. Filmmaker Nan Fu Wong, whose documentary One Child Nation is in the theaters now. She spoke with the New Yorker's Jayong Fon. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for today. Thanks for being with us, and if you've enjoyed the show, I just want to remind you you can subscribe to the podcast and catch up on anything. you missed. See you next time.