If You’ve Ever Eaten Toad – C.M. Saunders

I grew up an only child in Loudi, a small city in China’s Hunan province. Some girls in China grow up bathed in disappointment, their family resentful of their femininity when boys are considered the only worthy bounty of parenthood. Like a booby prize. We have less earning potential, lower career prospects, and can’t even carry the family name forward. In ancient China, when a girl got married she effectively joined another family and was disowned by her own. Even with all the government propaganda aimed at persuading the public that having a baby girl isn’t that bad, some girls never feel truly accepted by their parents and live their lives with the constant burden of being a disappointment. I was one of the lucky ones. I was never left in any doubt that my parents truly cared for me. My father used to call me his ‘little bird’.

In any case, the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy which was in effect when I was born was nowhere near as restrictive as outsiders were led to believe. It was mostly enforced in overpopulated cities. In some more rural regions, if a married couple’s first child was a girl they were allowed to try again, without facing the steep fines usually levelled at those who tried to flaunt the system. This was merely another form of taxation. They taxed your ability to have a family. But the real tragedy lay with those couples who tried a second time only to get another girl. Twice the disappointment and double the mouths to feed.

Some girls never recover from this crushing responsibility. Knowing that they, the culmination of their parent’s dreams, will never be able to make those dreams come true. The hardship for our parents never lessens. Without a son’s ability to earn a high salary, their old age will be difficult and torturous. Influenced by Western concepts like feminism and equality, the younger generation of women in China have learned to fight. Not with their fists, but in other, more subtle but no-less effective ways. The one-child policy created a skewed gender population, and today there are far more men than women. This has emboldened women and put them in positions of relative power. Especially the beautiful ones. But like I said, I am no flower. I am just a blade of grass.

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