A mother’s tale of distress, desperation and delight
Print Edition
For Guo Min, easing of the one-child policy arrived late.
At tremendous risks to her life, she became a mother at the age of 57 to twin babies.
Now 60, she has to work as a part-time accountant in 10 small companies to support them. She gets a pension of about 1,000 yuan (US$164.20) which is not enough to pay for her husband’s medical bills and her children’s expenses.
“If I had two children before, my life would not be what it is now,” Guo said after learning that Beijing has started to allow couples from one-child family to have a second child.
Guo had a daughter Liu Linghui from a previous marriage. Divorced when she was only 30, she took the girl with her to Beijing from her homeland in east China’s Jiangxi Province, the Legal Evening News reported yesterday.
Guo married again when she was 46. Life seemed complete until disaster struck when Liu, her only child, was killed in a car accident in 2005.
It not only left her devastated, but also put her in a small group that has come to be known as shidu jiating — families who have lost their only child. They were too old to have another child.
Liu’s death left a huge emptiness in Guo’s life. And then she took a bold decision that very few would even dare to think.
She withdrew all her savings — 60,000 yuan — and decided to have an embryo transfer.
Pregnancy for an older woman can be a painful experience besides being risky.
But she overcame all that and delivered twins three years ago. The boy is named Ren Jiabin and the girl Ren Jiayi.
Reborn as a mother again filled the emptiness she felt after Liu’s loss, but it also brought with it physical and economic burden.
Worse, Guo’s husband was hospitalized in July 2013 for cerebral infarction, and since then she has become the sole breadwinner of the family, the newspaper reported.
To cut costs, she sent her two children to a private kindergarten for which she paid 300 yuan every month. Though they are still very young, Guo keeps worrying about their education expenses in future.
All she does now is plug away, working nights after putting the kids to bed.
“What I long for most now is to sleep for three days,” Guo said.
Guo feels if she had had two children when she was young, she wouldn’t have taken the risks to become a mother again in such an advanced age. But she insisted she did not want to violate the one-child policy.
‘They have each other’
Guo welcomed the easing of the one-child policy. She hopes that both her kids can have two children. “Even if they lose me, they have each other,” Guo said.
China’s oldest mother is Sheng Hailin who gave birth to twin girls in 2010 when she was 60 years old.
Her story is very similar to Guo’s and she also needs to support her family, the Southern People Weekly magazine reported.
Sheng delivers lectures on child care that takes her to different cities in the country. In December, she traveled to nine cities, including Shanghai.
“I stay at one place for one to four days. When I have to catchplanes, I don’t have time to eat,” Sheng told the magazine. “I almost work at the cost of my life.”
Traditional Chinese beliefs dictate that families should have as many children as they can to look after the parents in their old age. However, the family-planning policy that took effect in the late 1970s limited the majority of urban families to just one child.
Health authorities said at least 1 million Chinese families had lost their only child by 2010. It was rising at an alarming 76,000 every year.
Physician-turned-sociologist Yi Fuxian is even more pessimistic, estimating that as many as 10 million Chinese families have lost their only offspring, Xinhua news agency reported.
Yi’s calculation is based on national census data: 218 million children were born as their family’s only child between 1975 and 2010. Out of every 10,000 newborns, 360 died before the age of 10 and 463 died before 25.
“Statistically, that means 10.09 million out of China’s 218 million members of the one-child generation die before reaching 25,” Yi said.
In November last year, 32,519 netizens participated in a sina.com poll over the new family planning policy in China. The survey showed 66.8 percent said they wanted to have a second child.
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