This morning I heard a really surprising news from the radio. I was braiding my hair, and all the sudden the man from the radio said that China’s authority has decided to abundant the One Child Policy. I stopped immediately and ran to the computer. Turns out it is true that China eventually change its One Child Policy into “Two Children Policy”, all couples now are allowed to have up to two kids.

My life is deeply affected by this decades old policy. My parents are ordinary working class people in the urban area of south coast China. I was born in the 90’s as my parents’ first child, and they knew I was going to be their only child.

However sometime things go as the unexpected way. When I was three, my mom was pregnant accidentally. For a while, my parents was actually considering about keeping their second child. But they quickly figured out that wasn’t an option. Both of my parents work at the public sector, they would be both facing the risk of being fired from their jobs. Even if they were able to keep their jobs, my mom would need to go hide in somewhere else until the laboring. Eventually, they decided not to keep the child and my mom did the abortion.

Of course as a three year old I knew none of those, but I remember growing up how badly I wanted a sibling. Because of some family issues, we wasn’t close with any of my cousins either. I ended up being alone quite often during my childhood. When I was older and got to know about my unborn sibling, probably was a brother, I wished he was giving the opportunity to come to this world. I would imagine my life with him sometimes. We would probably flight a lot, but we would be really close too. I would think about how his was going to look like, more like my mom or my dad. I would even think about if he was going to be really popular, that all the girls would probably try to hang out with me just to get to know him. But none of these would ever happen, because all he had ever been was an egg-like embryo.

My generation in China perhaps was the generation that got affected the most by the One Child Policy. The change won’t make my life any better since now I decided to make Canada my home, but I still feel happy for the families in China. Although with the inflation I doubt how many families could afford a second child, I still wish some little kids can finally have their little siblings.