Xinran: A One-Child Mother on the Two-Child Policy

By Noelle Mateer, March 16, 2016

This is part of our series of interviews with some of the speakers at the 2016 Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival.

Xinran is a woman with excellent timing.

The prolific author published her book on the one-child policy just months before the policy’s repeal.

“When the one-child policy ended on October 28th, I was on my book tour in Bali. I was interviewed by over 40 media worldwide in three days,” she says.

Xinran has long been a trusted voice on Chinese society. But in the wake of recent policy changes, her work is more important than ever. Published last year, Buy Me The Sky is a compilation of essays, each one focusing on a different only child born in the 1970s – the first generation to grow up during the one-child policy.

“I was both happy and crying,” says Xinran of her reaction to the news. “I was happy for its end, so that more Chinese parents could have one more child, and Chinese single children wouldn't feel lonely, like my son and many others do.

“I was crying because it’s too late for many parents, including myself.”

Xinran has made her criticisms of the late policy known – she did, after all, write the book on it. While technically writing on government policy, Xinran’s deeply empathetic tone renders Buy Me The Sky anything but stiff. The result is a complex look at the one-child society – but it’s complex because it’s human.

“I am surprised by how different they are from one another,” she writes in the book’s introduction of the children she profiles. “Yet, in the eyes of ordinary Chinese people, they are lumped together as the only-child generation. However, I believe that, by the time you get to the end of this book, you will perhaps, like me, have been moved by each of them.”

It’s this deeply caring, concerned attitude that first shot Xinran to fame in the 90s. As host of the popular radio show Words on the Night Breeze, she gave thoughtful life advice to her predominately female callers. Her resulting book The Good Women of China later became the handbook on women’s issues in China.

In 1997, Xinran moved to London – but not before giving birth to her own only child, Panpan, now 28. She credits him for much of her interest in the one-child policy. “I am a part of the one-child family society,” she says.

I get the feeling she’d be concerned regardless – fame has clearly not eroded Xinran’s celebrated sense of compassion. “I hope I’ve answered your questions well enough!” she writes in an email, the same one in which she casually mentions getting interviewed by dozens of international media outlets last year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Xinran is also an activist. Her charity The Mothers’ Bridge of Love helps those who abandoned during the one-child policy and adopted and raised in the West. She also remains concerned for the children featured in Buy Me The Sky – now adults, of course – especially in light of recent policy chances.

“They will be the most affected generation because they are over 35 years old,” she says. “It would be a big challenge for them to have second children, and their parents, now older, might not be able to help them raise the new baby.”

Xinran’s own son was born in 1988, and as such, she classifies him as part of the second generation to grow up in a one-child society – a generation she describes in Buy Me The Sky as “caught between the old and the new.” It’s for him that she tries to make sense of Chinese culture.

“All of my writing is for my son’s generation and their children to know what China is really like,” Xinran says. “And also, to tell them [my son’s generation] that all of the past makes up the roots of China today and its future. We could forgive the past, but we shouldn't forget it.”

Buy Me The Sky was published by Ebury and is available on Amazon or at The Bookworm.

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