Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [58]
The pièce de résistance, however, is achieved for the 1982 Austinmer Public School Book Week Character Parade, which I attend as the web from Charlotte’s Web: a navy-blue bodysuit onto which is attached a miraculous web French-knitted out of silver twine (the glorious extent of which isn’t apparent until I hold my arms out like a T-square) with the words Charlotte’s Web French-knitted in the centre and a glamorous spider hanging to one side, as if she’s just finished spinning. She’s made of two grey pompoms, with pipe-cleaner legs and dazzling beaded eyes. I can’t remember if she had eyelashes or not, but in my memory she does.
This is how my family does costumes, thanks to two parents of vast imagination—a mother who’s an artist with a history of creating fabulous outfits, and a father who’s an engineer with hidden talents in ping-pong-ball adaptation, French-knitting and pompom fabrication.
I watch the other kids arrive in their shop-bought superhero outfits, their shop-bought cowboy hats and holsters. My flippers sparkle. My tail swings round. My silver web shimmers in the sunlight. Unique.
In this photograph, Bi Kaiwei looks thin to the point of gauntness, his eyes closed and his mouth tight. He lives in Wufu, works in a chemical plant there, had a little girl, Bi Yuexing, who was thirteen years old. His daughter, his only child; she was killed in the Sichuan earthquake in 2008.
If it’s impossible to write about only children without invoking the single-person ghost of Granville Stanley Hall, it’s also impossible to write about only children without invoking the billion-person population of China and its famous—or infamous—one-child policy. ‘Have fewer children; live better lives,’ the government slogan declares. And in 2008, the world was paying particular attention to some real lives behind that phrase. On the one hand, the stories were about those only children killed in Sichuan’s rubble—more than seven thousand, some said. On the other, with the Beijing Olympics imminent, they were about the pianistic prodigy Lang Lang. As the young Chinese superstar who would be centre stage when the Games began, he embodied not only the happy-endings of international opportunity and success but also the worst kind of pressures and expectations that Chinese parents—and often, people suspected, any parents—were suspected of harbouring for their lone offspring. Here were Lang’s parents paying half a year’s salary to buy their two-year-old son a piano. Here was Lang’s father moving thousands of miles with the young boy to pursue his musical education while Lang’s mother stayed behind and kept up her job. Here was Lang’s father, furious that his son had missed two hours’ piano practice, thrusting pills into his son’s hand and insisting he take them or throw himself from their tiny balcony. Because missing practice meant certain failure. Because failure meant death—there was no going home and admitting that your little boy was not going to be an international megastar.
A father advocating his son’s suicide: the suspected story of China’s suspect little emperors and empresses—as their millions of only children were tagged—writ large.
The problem seemed to be one of many eggs and just one basket. In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, some bereaved parents expressed their grief in terms of having had to pin their every hope on just one child. ‘And this is the return we get,’ said one mother.
Children mourned in the language of profit and loss, of capital and investment. This is the return.
In the photograph of Bi Kaiwei, he is holding a photograph of Yuexing; you can see how tightly