Quotes of the Day
It's a chilly evening in this land of yellow earth and the matrimonial bed for Liu Dehai and Hai Hongmei is laid with a quilt embroidered with the characters for "double happiness." The words are also pasted on the wall, a bright-red portent of good fortune for just-married Chinese. Next to the bed sits a new pleather sofa, plastic wrap still hanging from its arms. This should be a place of contentment and hope, but Liu's mother doesn't want anyone observing too closely. "Please," she says, hands frantically kneading the quilt, "do not speak of this room." Indeed, the newlyweds point to the desperation that has engulfed the hardscrabble villages of China's central Shaanxi province. For Liu and Hai are not just husband and wife but also first cousins.
In some Asian countries, such as Pakistan and Indonesia, marriage between close relatives is tolerated, even encouraged. The attitude is at least you know who you're getting and, if there is any wealth to share, you can keep it in the family. Most everywhere else, the practice is a social stain. Yet for increasing numbers of Chinese, the issue isn't a matter of choice—but survival. China is facing an alarming dearth of young brides. Two decades of restrictive family-planning policies have resulted in a drastic gender imbalance—the country is missing 50 million girls who would have been born if not for sex-based abortions and female infanticide. Sons are valued far more than daughters in China because males maintain the family line and care for parents when they grow old. Girls, on the other hand, leave their parents' home for their husband's clan when they marry. In China's poorest villages, fathers don't even count their daughters when asked how many children they have. "Two strong sons," says a millet farmer surnamed Yang when asked about his family. As an afterthought, he adds: "Two donkeys. A pig. And one daughter."
But all these strong sons will one day need strong wives. Now that the offspring of China's one-child policy are reaching marriageable age, millions are finding there just aren't enough women to go around. With so many men to choose from, women are loathe to live in, say, the mud caves where many Shaanxi peasants make their homes. So men in the countryside are resorting to drastic means to continue their family lines, including wedding women who once had little hope of marrying, like those with physical or mental disabilities. Brothers share one wife. The most desperate of all, though, are those who marry members of their own family. Pretty girls who could have their pick of men in the cities are instead told they must stay home and marry internally—all for the good of their family clan.
Liu Dehai never imagined he would wed his shy first cousin Hai Hongmei. But Liu's parents couldn't make enough from Shaanxi's parched earth to buy their son a wife. Desperate, his mother asked her sister for a big favor. A few days later, Liu was informed he would be marrying his kin. "It can be unsafe to marry cousins," says Liu's mother. "But what can we do?"
While not as risky as once thought, marriage among first cousins nearly doubles the chances of birth defects. Reminders of the potential dangers fill neighborhoods just a few miles from Liu's village of Nanliang. In the roadside hamlet of Chenzhuangke, a first-cousin couple grieve for their young son who died of a rare blood disease. In the nearby city of Yan'an, a brother and sister squat in the mud-brick slums, signing a secret language to each other. Both Cao Shuai and Cao Jing were born deaf-mute. Everybody in the neighborhood thinks they know why: their parents are first cousins. And last month in Yan'an county, a severely retarded newborn girl was found abandoned by the side of a dirt road. Authorities tracked down her parents, only to find out they were a brother and sister, eking out a life together in a dark, cramped cave. And the situation could worsen. Chinese demographers estimate that in some rural areas, 80% of children between ages five and 10 are boys. "You think the problem seems terrible now," says a U.N. official based in Beijing. "But wait until all the kids from the one-child policy years have grown up. That's when the epidemic will really hit."
No one knows exactly what the impact a surplus of tens of millions of men will be on society. Sociologists predict that both military and monastic life will become more popular. But these institutions will only be able to soak up a limited number of men, and the government fears a rise in crime, prostitution and drug use as a swarm of bachelors roam the countryside. A hint of that future has already arrived in Shaanxi's Qiaogou village, where children play under a dusty apple tree, tossing scraps of vegetables as makeshift toys. The noise is the raucous glee of boys being boys. There is only one girl playing among them. Seven-year-old Xiaochun is astonished when asked what he thinks his future will hold. "I'll get married and be a good farmer of course," he says. Where will he get a wife? After all, there's only one girl among his playmates. Xiaochun furrows his brow and considers the question. "I think in other villages far away, there are many more girls," he says. "I will get my wife from there." Across China, millions of young males are hoping the same thing, but only a few will ever meet the woman of their dreams.
- HANNAH BEECH Nanliang
- Village bachelors look for love close to home