So Be It

In our coach, Ms Luo, 31, with her two children (a 5 years old girl and a 3 years old boy), saying goodbye to the husband/ father. They live in Dongguan, one of the main export factories centre around Guangzhou. They are going back to Chongqing (22 hours of train away) where the husband’s family lives in a countryside town. There, the children will enjoy free education (the chinese government has just been introducing in the last 2 years free education until the end primary school; but this is only possible in the school of the district where you belong, hence most migrants within China have to send back their kids to their place of origin for education). Husband will keep working in Dongguan, but she needs to watch out kids education so she will go (see next post) and they won’t see each other before next year.
But none of them seem to mind the situation.

When I raise my surprise, the answer is ‘that is the way it has to be’, implying ‘why complaining or even thinking about it’? Husband has a good position in Dongguan, education is free in Chongqing, so the current separation makes sense and that is enough to simply accept it.
We will get the same quiet reaction with no trace of revolt or indignation when she will tell us about her second pregnancy. In one child policy China, if local authorities find out you are pregnant for the second time before the birth they will systematically force abortion, whatever the number of months of pregnancy.
That’s how she quietly tells us the story of this woman from her town: she was more than 8 months pregnant when local authorities found out and gave her an injection which was aimed at damaging the baby brain to give her the choice between a mentally disabled child and abortion. The point here is not if the story was true or not, but the way she told it to us with no trace of revolt or indignation. In a country that has been virtually always considering itself as too populated ‘it has to be’ (whatever the way).
Fortunately she was luckier and she successfully hide her pregnancy until the end: she therefore had to pay a 12,000RMB (about two months and a half of their current household income) fine and the boy can now enjoy the same rights as his elder sister.
So be it as well with change and this woman way to cope with it. Salaries have not increased in the last two years in Dongguan, and when asked to describe the consequences of Society change, she is first describing a widening gap between richer and poorer.
Change is just another fact of chinese Society, so why questioning it?