I have two children so I tell a lot of
bedtime stories and here’s this one once
upon a time I was an adventurous foreign
correspondent I roamed the world I move
constantly with my passport in my pocket
and I plow through disaster zones like a
housewife plowing through Costco and now
I am a housewife plowing through Costco
and that last disaster zone that I saw
was when my six-year-old vomited into
the swimming pool after he had eaten
watermelon chance so it wasn’t pretty
so what happened right what happened
kids there what happened now at some
time in all our lives we will ask
ourselves the question should I have
children and increasingly for many of us
the answer is No
[Music]
or maybe just one and you know it’s easy
to understand why because kids are very
expensive and they are no guarantee of
financial or emotional stability in your
old age and if you’re working full tilt
at your career you’re gonna be better at
one job or the other
probably not both because they’re only
24 hours in a day right and you’re gonna
spend all 24 hours feeling guilty
because you’re only one place at one
time and in 2008 I was coming up against
some of these now-or-never questions as
I was coming to the end of my fertile
years I was working in The Wall Street
Journal in China and we just won the
Pulitzer the year before I just wasn’t
sure if I could get off that
merry-go-round it wasn’t easy for me
this kid from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to
get that far and I just simply wasn’t
sure if I could really juggle being a
mother with being a new town working to
timezones and then China’s biggest
earthquake in decades happen
this was an 8.0 and it ripped through
central China with more force than the
atomic bomb at Hiroshima
they even felt the tremors as far as
Bangkok and more than 70,000 people were
killed which is about half the
population of Pasadena
now when citron is the source of a lot
of China’s migrant labor so when this
earthquake happened there were a lot of
people all around China who were
desperately trying to get back home to
find out what had happened to their
loved ones and I followed a group of
migrant workers from Beijing to their
home village and it was a very long
journey that took well over three days
and span the distance of somewhere
between new
in Chicago and for most of this we
walked we took trains we took boats they
were too poor to fly and besides the the
quake had ripped up all the roads and
rails and when we got back from a lot of
them it was a sad homecoming they came
back and they found a lot of your kids
have been killed in the earthquake and
not only that because this area had been
a test ground for the one-child policy
before they launched it nationwide many
of them lost their only child and in a
matter of just weeks I saw a lot of
parents rushing to hospitals desperate
to reverse these sterilization
procedures that they have been forced to
have which is also part of the one-child
policy for example I met this couple the
Jews and they had lost your 16 year old
daughter in the quake and within 10 days
he was back in a hospital to have a
reverse vasectomy he was 50 and she was
45 but they were desperate to try they
told me in in their village you know
their neighbors were just starting to
shun them because they saw them as a
childless couple that might be always
borrowing things be helpless people with
no children to protect them and I will
never forget that tremor in his voice
when he said when I see my friends with
grandchildren it’s it’s really hard and
then when all this was happening
I discovered that I’m pregnant right so
I am having a child when I am writing
about other people who have lost your
children and this much unexpected
happiness omits other people’s misery
it just felt obscene and I was pregnant
for three months long enough to see the
heartbeat long enough to get excited and
then after three months the heartbeat
stopped
and for the next few years after that I
would spend my time trying to get
pregnant it felt like this was a job
that I hadn’t finished did I had a
incomplete assignment and through the
course of this trying I just kept coming
up against people who have facing the
one-child policy for example when I was
in Beijing and having IVF I meant a lot
of people who are using it as a way of
getting around the one-child policy
because if you get twins or triplets
it’s considered as one life birth so you
are not breaking the rules and so this
kind of spawned that whole
buy-one-get-one-free policy and when I
didn’t get pregnant I decided okay I got
to give up the job maybe if I move away
from China’s pollution to sunny
California and make it lucky but even
here I kept bumping across many Chinese
nationals who were having fertility
treatments many of which were either
illegal or hard to get in China because
of the one-child policy I mean I
remember talking to a woman in Brentwood
California and she had had three
children by surrogate for a couple in
Shanghai I also met many many people who
have been involved in the China adoption
process which is also a byproduct of the
one-child policy for example I met a
farmer who had his daughter stolen from
him and he now believes that she’s
growing up in Illinois I met many girls
who had been adopted here who have grown
up and are now torn India loyalties
between their families here and their
desire to search for some family back in
China so time and time again I would
come up against people who were forced
to very explicitly calculate the cost of
parenthood against a backdrop of the
one-child policy because it made it very
clear
were fines if you broke the one-child
policy you could lose your job you might
be liable for all sorts of very heavy
fines or you might even be taken away
for a forced abortion and so after 37
years of this policy China was having
big problems their birth rates were
plunging and they were going to have big
big problems maintaining the economic
growth rates or taking care of their
elderly so last year they decided to
switch things up and they move to a
two-child policy and then they started
actively encouraging people to have more
children so that’s right the one-child
policy became – please have one more
child policy but very few people are
biting and this is because the one-child
policy has fundamentally changed a lot
of people’s understanding of what it
means to be a parent having one or none
is now seen as the ideal for success for
happiness for a less crowded society
approaching childbearing with a mindset
headed that is three pots calculation
has become ingrained in China’s psyche
and so as a result of this in the next
ten years China’s population is going to
fall by 2100 it could have fallen to
about 500 million which is about what it
used to be in the 1950s and now no other
country has ever drastically reduces
population without war or disease in the
way in this way and this will transform
Chinese society to the point where 1 in
3 people are retirees where schools are
going to close and be replaced by
retirement homes and hospices we’re
children are increasingly going to
become a rarity some of them may be
spoiled singleton little emperors
perhaps
so maybe the greatest object lesson of
the one-child policy is we cannot be too
rational about Parenthood because it was
and will always be a great leap into the
unknown with an infinite capacity to
stretch our understanding of what it
means to live and to love and so this is
the part where I come to the end of my
story
I gave up my job I wrote a book I became
a mother and when I look back at the
turn my life has taken I hardly
recognize myself I there’s no more
sudden John’s to exotic places
there’s no quickening of the pulse for a
fast breaking story
I have to stay rooted I have to give of
myself I have to lose myself now at
night I still tell my children bedtime
stories and some of them are old Chinese
folk tales like the story of Chung oh
the lady on the moon or favorites from
Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm
brothers and most of this have a magic
landscape where mothers sometimes exit
where stepmothers appear where children
are cast out where eternally hungry
wolves prowl and one day I’m going to
tell my children the story of a country
that was once so poor the Emperor ruled
that each family could only have one
child and how a great sadness came over
the land and people gave away their
children or stole other people’s
children or sought the help of magicians
to make that single precious child that
breast and brightest in the land and how
a great sadness came over the land and
fewer and fewer babies were born
and it became a country of the old now I
don’t know the ending to that story and
then I will lie awake listening to the
rhythm of their breathing the most
peaceful and frightening sound in the
world
p.m.
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
bedtime stories and here’s this one once
upon a time I was an adventurous foreign
correspondent I roamed the world I move
constantly with my passport in my pocket
and I plow through disaster zones like a
housewife plowing through Costco and now
I am a housewife plowing through Costco
and that last disaster zone that I saw
was when my six-year-old vomited into
the swimming pool after he had eaten
watermelon chance so it wasn’t pretty
so what happened right what happened
kids there what happened now at some
time in all our lives we will ask
ourselves the question should I have
children and increasingly for many of us
the answer is No
[Music]
or maybe just one and you know it’s easy
to understand why because kids are very
expensive and they are no guarantee of
financial or emotional stability in your
old age and if you’re working full tilt
at your career you’re gonna be better at
one job or the other
probably not both because they’re only
24 hours in a day right and you’re gonna
spend all 24 hours feeling guilty
because you’re only one place at one
time and in 2008 I was coming up against
some of these now-or-never questions as
I was coming to the end of my fertile
years I was working in The Wall Street
Journal in China and we just won the
Pulitzer the year before I just wasn’t
sure if I could get off that
merry-go-round it wasn’t easy for me
this kid from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia to
get that far and I just simply wasn’t
sure if I could really juggle being a
mother with being a new town working to
timezones and then China’s biggest
earthquake in decades happen
this was an 8.0 and it ripped through
central China with more force than the
atomic bomb at Hiroshima
they even felt the tremors as far as
Bangkok and more than 70,000 people were
killed which is about half the
population of Pasadena
now when citron is the source of a lot
of China’s migrant labor so when this
earthquake happened there were a lot of
people all around China who were
desperately trying to get back home to
find out what had happened to their
loved ones and I followed a group of
migrant workers from Beijing to their
home village and it was a very long
journey that took well over three days
and span the distance of somewhere
between new
in Chicago and for most of this we
walked we took trains we took boats they
were too poor to fly and besides the the
quake had ripped up all the roads and
rails and when we got back from a lot of
them it was a sad homecoming they came
back and they found a lot of your kids
have been killed in the earthquake and
not only that because this area had been
a test ground for the one-child policy
before they launched it nationwide many
of them lost their only child and in a
matter of just weeks I saw a lot of
parents rushing to hospitals desperate
to reverse these sterilization
procedures that they have been forced to
have which is also part of the one-child
policy for example I met this couple the
Jews and they had lost your 16 year old
daughter in the quake and within 10 days
he was back in a hospital to have a
reverse vasectomy he was 50 and she was
45 but they were desperate to try they
told me in in their village you know
their neighbors were just starting to
shun them because they saw them as a
childless couple that might be always
borrowing things be helpless people with
no children to protect them and I will
never forget that tremor in his voice
when he said when I see my friends with
grandchildren it’s it’s really hard and
then when all this was happening
I discovered that I’m pregnant right so
I am having a child when I am writing
about other people who have lost your
children and this much unexpected
happiness omits other people’s misery
it just felt obscene and I was pregnant
for three months long enough to see the
heartbeat long enough to get excited and
then after three months the heartbeat
stopped
and for the next few years after that I
would spend my time trying to get
pregnant it felt like this was a job
that I hadn’t finished did I had a
incomplete assignment and through the
course of this trying I just kept coming
up against people who have facing the
one-child policy for example when I was
in Beijing and having IVF I meant a lot
of people who are using it as a way of
getting around the one-child policy
because if you get twins or triplets
it’s considered as one life birth so you
are not breaking the rules and so this
kind of spawned that whole
buy-one-get-one-free policy and when I
didn’t get pregnant I decided okay I got
to give up the job maybe if I move away
from China’s pollution to sunny
California and make it lucky but even
here I kept bumping across many Chinese
nationals who were having fertility
treatments many of which were either
illegal or hard to get in China because
of the one-child policy I mean I
remember talking to a woman in Brentwood
California and she had had three
children by surrogate for a couple in
Shanghai I also met many many people who
have been involved in the China adoption
process which is also a byproduct of the
one-child policy for example I met a
farmer who had his daughter stolen from
him and he now believes that she’s
growing up in Illinois I met many girls
who had been adopted here who have grown
up and are now torn India loyalties
between their families here and their
desire to search for some family back in
China so time and time again I would
come up against people who were forced
to very explicitly calculate the cost of
parenthood against a backdrop of the
one-child policy because it made it very
clear
were fines if you broke the one-child
policy you could lose your job you might
be liable for all sorts of very heavy
fines or you might even be taken away
for a forced abortion and so after 37
years of this policy China was having
big problems their birth rates were
plunging and they were going to have big
big problems maintaining the economic
growth rates or taking care of their
elderly so last year they decided to
switch things up and they move to a
two-child policy and then they started
actively encouraging people to have more
children so that’s right the one-child
policy became – please have one more
child policy but very few people are
biting and this is because the one-child
policy has fundamentally changed a lot
of people’s understanding of what it
means to be a parent having one or none
is now seen as the ideal for success for
happiness for a less crowded society
approaching childbearing with a mindset
headed that is three pots calculation
has become ingrained in China’s psyche
and so as a result of this in the next
ten years China’s population is going to
fall by 2100 it could have fallen to
about 500 million which is about what it
used to be in the 1950s and now no other
country has ever drastically reduces
population without war or disease in the
way in this way and this will transform
Chinese society to the point where 1 in
3 people are retirees where schools are
going to close and be replaced by
retirement homes and hospices we’re
children are increasingly going to
become a rarity some of them may be
spoiled singleton little emperors
perhaps
so maybe the greatest object lesson of
the one-child policy is we cannot be too
rational about Parenthood because it was
and will always be a great leap into the
unknown with an infinite capacity to
stretch our understanding of what it
means to live and to love and so this is
the part where I come to the end of my
story
I gave up my job I wrote a book I became
a mother and when I look back at the
turn my life has taken I hardly
recognize myself I there’s no more
sudden John’s to exotic places
there’s no quickening of the pulse for a
fast breaking story
I have to stay rooted I have to give of
myself I have to lose myself now at
night I still tell my children bedtime
stories and some of them are old Chinese
folk tales like the story of Chung oh
the lady on the moon or favorites from
Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm
brothers and most of this have a magic
landscape where mothers sometimes exit
where stepmothers appear where children
are cast out where eternally hungry
wolves prowl and one day I’m going to
tell my children the story of a country
that was once so poor the Emperor ruled
that each family could only have one
child and how a great sadness came over
the land and people gave away their
children or stole other people’s
children or sought the help of magicians
to make that single precious child that
breast and brightest in the land and how
a great sadness came over the land and
fewer and fewer babies were born
and it became a country of the old now I
don’t know the ending to that story and
then I will lie awake listening to the
rhythm of their breathing the most
peaceful and frightening sound in the
world
p.m.
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
Please follow and like us: