‘MOTHER GAVE BIRTH TO MY SISTER SECRETLY’
Zang Sha barely remembers meeting her younger sister during her childhood. In 1985, when the Communist Party of China (CPC) was sharply focused on implementing the one-child policy, Zang’s mother found herself pregnant with the second child — a child who would not be accepted under the rule of law. Zang was three at that time and the family was staying in a city called Baoding, close to Beijing. The parents had one option: give birth to the baby in a rural area (where the one-child policy was more relaxed) or abort the foetus. As it turned out, Zang’s parents didn’t have to pay any fine as they succeeded in hiding the child. Her mother stayed at her parents’ home till the baby was born. If Zang’s mother’s condition had been known to the authorities, she would have been forced to abort the child and pay a fine. “My parents had to give birth to my sister secretly, risking being punished for breaking the one-child policy. As a result, my sister was not on my family’s household book (the mandatory government registration which allows children to welfare schemes) and did not grow up with us,” Zang said. Her younger sister, though now reunited with the larger family, declined to speak. She spent her childhood and adolescence with her maternal grandmother and an uncle away from her own parents and elder sister. The lives of the two sisters were different as they were forced to grow up separately for fear of government repercussion and fines. Zang’s parents secretly sent money for the child’s upbringing and education and met her only occasionally. The situation changed with the years but the impact of the separation has remained; for one, the younger sister could never fully communicate with her parents in a way Zang could. “Consequently, when she grew up, it was difficult for my family to communicate with her as we looked at things from different perspectives,” Zang said, a sense of loss and guilt evident. Zang, a housewife, and her husband, who works in a construction company, decided to have two children so that her first child would not suffer the pangs of loneliness. Since this was before the two-child policy began to be gradually implemented in early 2014, she ended up paid a fine of 40,000 Yuan (` 4 lakh approximately) to the local government for the second child. “I wanted to educate my child on what love is and how to love someone,” Zang said.