The joy of giving life was paired with fear for the family’s uncertain future. Li Fen gave birth to her second daughter alone in this room on December 9, 1993.
She gave birth to a translucent and beautiful baby girl. On December 9, 1993, she endured excruciating pain to deliver her second baby at home, alone - she dared not find a midwife.
She lived in fear and anxiety every day during her pregnancy, hiding in her mother’s home. “If caught, they’d not only destroy our house and burn the furniture, but also abort my baby and sterilize me with force - no hopes for more babies,” Li Fen said. Having had one daughter already, Li Guoming and his wife, Lǐ Fēn 李芬, decided to conceal Li Fen’s second pregnancy. In Wuli, in order to secure a male heir, many families behaved like soldiers engaged in guerilla warfare. But if the family already had two daughters - becoming a “two-daughter household” - the parents would be persuaded to have a sterilization procedure. In the 1990s, the family planning policy allowed a rural household to have a second baby if the first one was a daughter. And so, Guoming decided to shoulder the responsibility of producing a family heir. “It broke our hearts to see the old man in such despair,” Li Guoming said. He was surrounded by no one but sagging graves. But Li’s father, after a few drinks, ran out to cry on the mountaintop. Everyone knows that daughters are more well-behaved than sons, but you can’t change a rural mindset.”Īfter Li’s older brother had two daughters, he threw a banquet at home to celebrate. “You’ll be called ‘that extinct one,’ meaning your root is cut, a terrible thing to say. “In the village, if you don’t have a son, you’ll forever be shamed,” Li said at his home in Jiujiang in the fall of 2019. When China instituted its family planning policy in the 1980s that limited each household to one child, the village was struck as if by a thunderbolt. Wuli Village in Jiangxi Province is a rural community with deep-rooted patriarchal traditions - and sustaining one’s ancestral lineage through male heirs remains a sacred duty. Li Guoming had named his daughter Lǐ Mèngyán 李梦妍 - meng meaning “dream,” yan for “beautiful.”Ī shy speaker, Li hesitated for a long while before explaining how he came up with the name, blushing up to his ears: “I named my daughter Mengyan because I dreamt that she left me I hoped to see her when I woke.” Inside the orphanage, the girl was called Jiāng Lì 姜丽 - Jiang being the last name of the orphanage head at the time, after whom all the orphans were named.īut these were not her real names. I’ve translated the following, which is about two-thirds of the original story, from Chinese to English.Īt the orphanage, Lǐ Guómíng’s 李国明 daughter was given the name Lǚ Èr 吕二 ( er meaning “second”), randomly jotted down by the village head who carried her there. The original Chinese version can be found at SandwiChina.
To protect the people involved, pseudonyms are used for all the Chinese characters in the story, as well as the author. This story was reported by Chinese journalist Wei Jia in 2019. It is a testimony to what the system cannot crush: a pure human heart. It reveals layers of the bizarre realities of contemporary China, how the power system works from the ground up, and the lengths a rural couple must walk to find their lost child. It provides a rare window into which we see the affected Chinese parents’ internal struggles. What follows is the story about a Chinese couple’s unrelenting search for their daughter.