She wasn’t really a part of her birth family again until after her brother was born four years later. Her fate as an unacknowledged daughter wasn’t uncommon among women born during that era , where the edict to limit births often collided with family pressure to have a son. “The one-child policy created generational trauma,” said Mei Fong , author of “One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment,” a book on the policy. The rates of suicide among rural women have come down in recent decades, which some researchers have attributed partly to China’s economic development. In 2015, Zhu started collecting personal stories from women who were abandoned or grew up as unacknowledged daughters.

Source: Wall Street Journal November 16, 2024 05:10 UTC