Country Driving [76]
Wei Jia kept his hands impatiently on the dash while we waited. Five minutes later, the boy’s father returned. He was alone. We kept driving.
THE CROPS SHIFTED AS we descended into the Beijing plain. There was more corn here, as well as wheat, and the harvest had started earlier; walnut trees were already stripped bare. Roadside villages became bigger, with real traffic: buses and cars and minivans. There were shops, too. Suddenly words appeared everywhere—in these larger villages, the government had covered brick walls with family planning slogans. “Daughters Are Also Descendants,” proclaimed one sign. “Planned Birth Benefits the Country.” Usually I found the slogans oppressive, but here they were almost reassuring. Nobody had bothered to paint them in Sancha—that was the clearest indication that the village was dying.
In fact, if any young people had stayed in Sancha, they wouldn’t necessarily have been limited to a single child. A couple who initially gives birth to a girl is allowed to have another baby, with a maximum of two children. Sancha is granted that right because of its remoteness, and because of the traditional desire to have a boy who can help with farming. But if you descend to the Beijing plain, a journey of less than ten miles, the rules change, and families are restricted to one child regardless of gender.
The Chinese planned birth policy is heavily localized, depending on geography and ethnicity. It requires an enormous bureaucracy, and in the countryside I often saw evidence of enforcement. During my drive across the north, in Gansu Province, I once saw a new Iveco van with the words painted across the side: “Planned Birth Services Vehicle.” It was equipped with police lights, propaganda speakers, and a gas-powered generator; the back doors opened to reveal a sink and two hospital-style beds. I talked to the driver, who told me that they took the van into rural areas, where they performed surgeries. When I asked about the most common procedures, he matter-of-factly jotted two terms in my notebook: “abortion” and “tying tubes.” In that region, family size depends largely on race: Han Chinese are limited to one child; urban Mongolian residents can have two; and rural Mongolians are allowed to have three.
In Sancha, people can have two children if the first is a girl, and there are other exceptions as well. Because the Weis care for the Idiot, they can legally have another child, but Wei Ziqi refused; he believed that raising two children would be too expensive. Chinese with aspirations often feel that way, especially in the cities, where the government has been effective in convincing people that they’re better off with only one kid. Urban Chinese rarely complain about the rules, and they tend to be scornful of those in the countryside who try to have more children. But one unintended result of the policy is a marked gender disparity. Accurate statistics are hard to come by, because some rural people avoid registering their children, but the most reliable figures indicate that there are 118 boys born for every 100 girls. Even the government acknowledges that it’s a problem—the National Population and Family Planning Commission has reported that there will be thirty million more men of marriageable age than women by the year 2020. That’s the same year that Wei Jia will turn twenty-three.
It’s illegal for a Chinese doctor to tell a pregnant woman the gender of her child, but bribes are common. Once, I accompanied the Weis to a doctor’s appointment in Huairou, where the hospital room contained an ultrasound machine. Printed atop the equipment