Fascinating, occasionally horrifying, account of the effects of the one child policy on families, how it wasn't as simple as we've often heard here, and how that interacted with the adoption industry.
...The Dying Rooms brought attention to the warehouse-like conditions in some of these orphanages. But it did something else too: It popularized the image of deeply patriarchal Chinese families who blithely discarded their daughters in pursuit of a son, and of a Chinese culture so hostile to taking in other parents’ children that Chinese girls faced no other option than being adopted abroad.
What Johnson and her research associates found, however, as they interviewed thousands of Chinese families, was that this picture was far from complete. Talking to rural Chinese parents who relinquished daughters, other rural families who took those daughters in, and a third, almost entirely unrecognized category of parents—those who hid over-quota, unregistered children from population control officials—Johnson learned that few families in the region used the expression “more sons, more happiness” that was supposedly typical of Chinese son preference.
By contrast, many of those two thousand families spoke extensively of their desire for both a daughter and a son, since having both, they said, would “make a family complete.” This idealized family was so important that, for years before and even during the one-child policy, many parents who only had sons adopted daughters in order to thus “complete” their families. And where daughters were given up, among the families Johnson met, it was never casual, but almost always an agonized decision that, in the context of government repression, could hardly be called a choice. It wasn’t the people, in other words, so much as the policy.