For What It's Worth

Every American traveling to China will ask about China’s One-Child Policy as sure as he or she asks about the Great Wall, bargain shopping, and “what exactly is that meat I’m eating?”

For many Americans, the One-Child Policy equates with China as searingly as Maoism, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, and foot binding. The right to bear children (or not) is as sacred as the right to bear arms. The right to choose our fate, express our individuality, to have no bindings on our feet, speech, earnings, education, or sexuality is our American Pie.

But nothing is as simple as it looks.

Many Chinese families have more than one child. People from ethnic minority groups are excluded from the One-Child Policy, as well as couples who both come from single-child families. Our guide in Yangshuo outside famed Guilin was from the Yao minority group and the seventh child in her family. Our daughter spent time in a mid-size Chinese city this summer where officials look the other way in response to the heavily Catholic population.

However, when the policy is upheld, couples are assessed a fine commensurate with their income. The more money you make, the more children you have, the more you pay. Fines rise to as much as six times one’s annual salary, and can double again—the equivalent of 12 years work—if a couple is extremely wealthy.

In these situations, what do parents do? They simply pay.

In his exquisite book River Town, Peter Hessler recounts his two years living in the town of Fuling along the Yangtze River in the late 1990s. A Peace Corps worker, Hessler taught English in a teachers college, and he inevitably addresses the One-Child Policy:

My students were part of the last peasant generation whose fines had been minimal. The second-year speaking class had thirty-five students, of whom only two were single children. Those two were free and the rest had cost very little, if anything at all. Diana cost one hundred yuan. Davy’s little brother cost three hundred yuan. Rex had a 650-yuan sister, while Julia’s brother was only 190. Jeremy was one hundred yuan. He was the sixth child in his family, and the older five had all been girls. That was a very well spent one hundred yuan if you were a Chinese peasant. [River Town, p 263]

A ¥190 yuan fine for Julia’s brother was at that time less than US$25. ¥300 for Davy’s little brother amounted to US$36 and change — a small price to pay, not to just bear a son who would carry on the family name but a son bearing the filial responsibility of caring for his parents in their old age. In traditional Chinese culture, sons are as much one’s pride as one’s insurance policy, retirement, social security, and long-term health care—an incomparable investment.

Fines today are much steeper than a mere few hundred yuan. But many Chinese are both more wealthy and no less desirous of children, son or daughter. I read of one expectant couple throwing down ¥200,000 (current US value $26,000) on an official’s table as if to defiantly say “Just try to stop us.”

What of our worth? What would someone throw down for us—even before we were born and knew what we could do, what we looked like, whether they liked us, whether we were worth it?

For years, I had little idea of my worth—didn’t know my value, how to weigh it, whether I measured up. Could I quantify it with how much my parents spent to feed, clothe, and educate me? Could I measure it by what people said about me or in the dossier of accomplishments I scrambled so hard to garner? If I disappeared off the face of the earth, would anyone notice? What price would someone pay for me?

In another chapter, Hessler writes of hiking through the rural mountains outside of Fuling. He encounters peasant farmers working the fields and the conversation eventually turns to children:

Some children had come over to look at me, and I noticed two small boys standing together.
“What about them?” I asked. “They look like brothers.”
“That’s right,” the old woman said. “Their parents had to pay a fine.”
One of the boys was about four years old; his brother was six or seven. They were filthy, and they stood tentatively on a wheat terrace above us, afraid of the "waiguoren" [pronounced “why-gwoh-rhjun,” meaning “foreigner”]. A little girl of about five came over—a tiny thing with wild black hair and dirt-smudged cheeks. Wide-eyed, the child stared at me. She had enormous coal-black eyes, like my youngest sister, Birgitta, when she was little. I smiled, and the girl smiled back.
“She’s the third in the family!” one of the women said.
“Oh,” I said. “They must have paid a big fine.”
“No,” the woman said. “Their house was tuile!” [“tway-luh”]
“What?”
“Their house was tuile!”
“Tuile?”
“Right!”
I couldn’t believe it, so I quickly sketched the character on my notebook. “This tui?”
“That’s right.”
It meant a number of things: to push, turn cut, infer, shift, postpone, elect. But when you tui’ed a house it meant simply that you knocked it over. The local planned-birth officials had pushed over the girl’s house because she had been the third child.
I had read of such things in the foreign press, but I had always assumed that they only happened in very remote areas. But then I realized that I had been walking all day, and this small beautiful valley was nothing if not remote.
The old women were shaking their heads and looking at the little girl. She wasn’t comfortable hearing this conversation and something in her expression said: sorry. Undoubtedly there were complications to growing up when you knew that your birth had caused your family’s home to be knocked over. But there was also something else in her eyes; it was vague and undefined and meant, essentially: Some things are worth more than money and houses. The old women saw it, too. One of them tousled the girl’s hair, and then she ran off to play with the other children in the unplowed fields. [River Town, pp 353-355]

Tuile. Knocked down. But not knocked over.

Would someone have absorbed the same loss for you, for me? What is a life worth among the billions that have experienced the spark of life for even an instant? If we were an unwanted child — unwanted by people who decided ahead of time that our footprint was not worth taking up space—would someone pay a fine for us? Surrender 6 to 12 years’ wages so that we could have a room in their home? Allow their home to be bulldozed and run into the ground for our sake?

Some of us know that it’s already been done. But it wasn’t a just a house. It was everything he had. God the Creator of the Universe gave up His son, Jesus, so that we could live. Jesus allowed his whole life to be knocked over when he ws crucified. The Bible says “he was a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45 / Matthew 20:28) Jesus gave up his life for ours.

This is how Eugene Peterson rephrases what the apostle Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans:

Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn't, and doesn't, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn't been so weak, we wouldn't have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him. [Romans 5:6-8, The Message]

I’d venture that Chinese family wasn’t ready when they came to knock down the house. The little girl certainly wasn’t. She was absolutely helples. She hadn’t lived long enough to be deemed good or worthy or noble. But they ran it over anyway, as if they could run over her life, erase her existence.

When Christ died more than 2000 years ago, before we were even born or conceived in our parents’ or friends’ or any government officials’ minds — when he died so we could live, what were we worth? Not anything humans could see, but in our eternal Father’s heart, more than imaginable.

The best part of any good story is in the after—after the house is knocked down, after the money is thrown down, after Jesus died. Only after do we realize we have worth.

It’s then that we develop the vague something that makes us stand out amid the rubble of a fallen house.

It’s then that our hearts become imprinted with the words “Even Though.” Even Though others thought us worth nothing, Even Though we violated policy and were not part of their plan, Even Though we believed we had no value, Even Though our lives were of no use whatsoever… someone paid the fine and gave up everything for us.

As Peter Hessler writes, “Some things are worth more than money or houses.”

We’re what it’s worth.