One Child (4 page)

Despite the No Smoking sign, Liu puffed away furiously. Tang said little and ate less, sitting stoically as tears crept down her cheeks.

By the third day, she was so dehydrated no more tears flowed. Liu forced sips of tea down her throat, dampening her blouse in big Rorschach blotches. It looked pretty, like a design that was meant to be.

Their story was like that of many other migrant workers. They couldn’t make a living farming rice on a tiny patch of land, especially not with their daughter’s school fees to pay, so they left and became
liudong renkou
—literally, “flowing population.” It’s a poetic name for China’s migrant workers, who drift from the countryside to the city, going from menial job to menial job. Without the city
hukou
household registration, they cannot access urban social services like schooling and health care. That’s why Liu and Tang couldn’t bring Huimei with them to Beijing.

The
hukou
is a form of economic apartheid that creates a permanent underclass and prevents the population of China’s teeming cities from overflowing to unmanageable numbers. It is also a cleaver that cruelly separates families like the Lius for months on end. Liu and Tang hadn’t seen their teenage daughter for more than a year.
When I asked them for a description, Liu couldn’t remember if she had long or short hair. What did she like? What was she like? Tang said, vaguely, “She loves to watch TV, but she is a good girl.”

There are about eight hundred miles between Beijing and their home village, the formidably named Iron Gourd Village. The distance is in some sense helpful to note—it is roughly equivalent to, say, the distance between New York and Chicago. But economically and culturally, it is like a trip to the moon.

There’s no running water in Iron Gourd. No villager has sat on a plane. Everybody under the age of forty eventually makes the trek to a city—any city—forced by poverty or boredom, returning to brag, or breed, or both. Everyone in Iron Gourd is named Liu, or married to someone named Liu. Infanticide and bride buying are things of yesterday and not the distant past, and the spring rains that tunnel through the earthen roads make the place impassable for parts of the year.

And yet the place has beauty, with craggy hills and velvety blue lakes that match the skies above. On days when she coughed black phlegm in Beijing’s sooty air, Tang would dream of those faraway blue skies and wonder why she ever left. Life on a work site was even more primitive than life in Iron Gourd. With no washing facilities, you wore the same clothes until you threw them away and bought new, a stunning piece of extravagance she marveled at. They cooked on a smuggled hot plate, drank water from buckets once used for paint. Tang had saved that rose-colored coat in her bedroll—no mean feat as they trudged from work site to work site, everything they owned on their backs—so that she’d have something tangible to show the folks back home, some shiny emblem of their adventures.

Now, as the train chugged homeward, she cursed the curiosity that made her leave. “It wasn’t all money,” she said wistfully. “We just wanted to go out and have a look.”

Now she was mentally flogging herself for leaving Huimei be
hind. She said, “We all avoided this tragedy. But my baby didn’t,” again and again, like an incantation.

It was hard to hold a good conversation or build up any kind of rapport. The carriage was crowded, they were worried and disinclined to talk, and their accents were difficult to understand.

I was also ducking in and out of the carriage in an effort to evade railway officials, who found out I was a reporter and forbade interviews. This made Tang and Liu even more stiff and self-conscious.

I had always liked train journeys for the lulling sound of rails, the flashing landscape, and the feeling of being inexorably borne to a certain destination. But this was a prickly ride, sour with tension and fear. Everyone kept their phones by their sides like expert gunslingers, cocked for any new information.

Bit by bit, the news seeped through.

Casualties estimated at twenty thousand. Then thirty thousand. The earthquake’s epicenter had occurred in the city of Wenchuan, where some 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed in the first three minutes.

Tremors were still shaking the region. Whole towns were being evacuated.

They were pulling more dead bodies from the rubble than live ones.

Twenty-four hours into the journey, Liu and Tang heard that 183 bodies had been pulled from Huimei’s school.

“She’s dead,” sobbed Tang.

“You can’t say that yet,” insisted Liu. “You can’t say that yet.” His eyes glared.

The uncertainty left hope alive. One man sat nearby with an ashen face. He had just gotten a call telling him that his child was dead.

Somewhere between then and Xian the water ran out in the toilets. The rank smell of urine drifted out, mingling with clouds of cigarette smoke.

Liu and I fell into conversation with another villager, Ding Wanlong, who was considered an outsider because he was one of the rare few not born in Iron Gourd. He’d been relocated there after his first home was razed to make way for a dam. Ding was proud because he’d managed to build a second home from money squirreled away from construction jobs in far-flung cities.

“It’s a two-story building, very comfortable,” he said, puffing a Diamond brand cigarette.

He paused a beat. “I’m going to have to rebuild all over again.”

A few hours later, he got a call. The quake had in one stroke orphaned him and made him homeless. His mother was buried in the rubble of his ruined house.

We chugged past Xian, home of the terra-cotta warriors, and were told the rails had been repaired enough for the train to forge on. This was a welcome bit of news, saving the Iron Gourd group a ten-hour bus journey. After the last train stop, we would take a ferry and hike up some hills.

At this point, almost everyone in the group had bad news—some relative killed or maimed, some home wrecked, some both. Tang and Liu had heard nothing from Huimei though.

Liu unbent a little as the trip went on. As we chugged on, sipping beer, he told me about a relative who’d bought a wife. The bachelors of Iron Gourd were finding it hard to find brides. Few women, especially with ever-increasing prospects of factory jobs in cities, were willing to brave the hardships of life in the small village. Years of family-planning policy had also contributed to a staggering gender imbalance. If you had to choose to have a boy or a girl, you chose a boy and gave the girl away, or looked away tacitly while the midwife took care of your problem. So there were almost no young women of marriageable age in Iron Gourd, unless she was your sister or your cousin.

This relative, said Liu, was so lonely and so harangued by his family for his failure to add to the family line that he succumbed to the
blandishments of a town matchmaker, borrowing and scrimping for the bride price.

“So, what happened?”

“She ran off, that’s what!” he said, chuckling, using his teeth to rip off a beer bottle top.

We laughed, then stopped when a phone rang. Another death was announced.

The train tunneled its way south through Hebei, Shaanxi, and Shanxi, China’s heartland, a landscape that looked like it was steeped in tea. Coal dust pollution. For Americans, the car is the American way. Jay Gatsby roars through capitalism, individual freedom, and the good life. For China, the train is the metaphor. Everyone’s on board, there’s no chance to steer, and it’s clickety-clack to collectivism’s dream. Years later I was reminded of this reading Dickens: “The power that forced itself upon its iron way—its own—defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death.”

Once we got off the train, things sped up like one of those montage sequences in the movies. It was a nightmarish dream sequence. Rows of suddenly homeless people sleeping on the streets. Us, hunkering down in line at the ferry terminal as the loudspeakers blared:
We are here to help you. We are here to help you.

We were boarding the ferry when a woman shrieked. She’d just heard: someone she loved was killed. They carried her on board, stiff as a corpse.

And then we were on the water, chugging past dramatic craggy mountains, Alpine-style scenery.

Tang stared blindly, running through her mind countless scenarios that ranged between hope and despair. In the best scenario Huimei was untouched, though somehow inexplicably unable to reach a telephone or a relative. Then there were the possibilities of injury,
memory loss, crushed limbs—painful to a parent, but still tolerable. Or perhaps Huimei was buried in the rubble somewhere, drinking her own urine, calling for her mother in weak croaks.

“There’s still hope,” counseled Liu. “We don’t know anything until we get home,” he said.

When we landed, we hiked miles up the mountain. It was there that I began to see the damage the quake had wrought. We clambered past landslides, crushed cars, and caved-in buildings. A group of People’s Liberation Army soldiers marched by, shovels on their shoulders.

After seeing Tang and Liu stagger to the hills in search of their daughter’s body, I left. In truth, I ran. I ran because I had a deadline. I ran because I thought there was nothing more I could do for them. I ran because I didn’t want to be there. I ran, and I will always feel guilty for the unseemly haste with which I abandoned them on that ruined road.

Weeks later, I would try to make reparations by journeying back. I met Liu on top of a windy cemetery. It wasn’t where Huimei was buried, for she had been hastily interred in a mass grave not far from the school. Rather, Liu had chosen that spot because its vantage point made it easier to detect the approach of informers and spies.

By this time, authorities were in full cover-up mode. Many children had died in crumbled schoolhouses—called “tofu schools” for the way they’d crumpled under the tectonic onslaught. Scores of parents were calling for a probe of corruption in school construction. They would show up at devastated school grounds, clutching pictures of their dead children—including some of their mangled corpses—calling on authorities to take notice, to investigate, to do something, anything. So the authorities did: they shut the protests down.

Liu didn’t look well. The wiry frame that I had seen carry enormously heavy bags with ease seemed shrunken, tentative. He smoked incessantly. Tang wasn’t there. She rarely left the house, didn’t see anyone, he said.

He asked, “Those pictures you took of us, can you destroy them?”

Reluctantly, I told him we had already run the story.

His face fell.

“Don’t worry, most readers aren’t even in China,” I said hastily.

I didn’t tell him the photo I took of him and his wife, looking resolute, had been on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal.

I remember taking that picture, carefully positioning my camera to capture Tang on the boat, gazing into the distance. She had looked so weary, so hopeful. It was before they reached journey’s end.

“We don’t want to talk anymore,” he said. “We have no words left.”

Suddenly, an explosion of sound. We jumped. Peering around the headstones, I saw mourners lighting firecrackers. No matter happy or sad, Chinese ceremonies have a certain similarity. Fireworks explosions precede the birth of babies, weddings, New Year celebrations, and funerals. We exchange money when people are born and when people die. Red packets at birth become white packets at funerals. The same observances give some kind of comforting sameness to the rituals of birth and death, a sense of circularity, of coming home.

Liu showed me a document he’d been forced to sign. It acknowledged he was accepting money for the death of his daughter and absolved officials of culpability.

It said:
I pledge to come back to normal life and normal production as soon as possible.

A great wave of indignation washed over me.

“So, you see . . .” He shrugged.

He hesitated, turned, and began trudging down the hill, a figure that grew smaller and smaller until it was swallowed by the countryside.

I never saw him again, but his life and mine developed a strange symmetry.

For when I began my journey with them, I had been pregnant.

Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.

—
Yiyun Li
, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

I

I returned from Sichuan sad and weary. I had covered the aftermath of 9/11, as well as car crashes, assaults, murders—all the other, more ordinary acts of beastliness that humans inflict by design or careless will. Nothing made sense. I was tired of being a professional voyeur. At night, I tossed and turned, dreaming in odd snatches of Tang, Liu, and others I’d talked to.

There was a woman, I remember, who had come to me saying, “See my child, my beautiful, beautiful child.” She’d thrust two pictures at me. One was a smiling teenager. The other was a mangled tiny form, unrecognizable. In Sichuan, people colloquially refer to children as
wawa
, the same word as “doll.” On and on it floated in my
dreams. See my
wawa.
My
wawa
is dead. Can you help me find my
wawa
?

And then, on a hunch, I took out an at-home pregnancy kit.

I couldn’t believe it when the pink line showed. I made my husband, Andrew, get another kit. And another.

An hour later we had five sticks, all testing positive.

At first, I was afraid to let myself feel anything but cautious joy. I have polycystic ovarian syndrome, a common but little-understood hormonal disorder that is one of the leading causes of infertility. I’d been diagnosed in my early thirties, and I remember reading about the symptoms with wry disbelief. If you had PCOS bad, you could be
both
hairy and bald, or develop severe acne and yo-yo weight gains.