[ESSAY] “One Child, Three Lives” by Lina Ma

HeyTea, High Salaries, and Family Money

^{A HeyTea store in New York}

Inside a rooftop lounge in Manhattan, Scarlette sits in a cute pink T-shirt and wire-rimmed glasses, a cup of HeyTea’s “Very Grape Cheezo” in front of her. The drink’s warm scent rises from the glass. It is the second day of her period, and she looks somewhat tired. Every so often, her eyes drift towards the window as she pauses to think.

Having recently graduated with a master’s degree from New York University, Scarlette is navigating the uneasy transition of looking for a job in the United States. When I ask why, amid such a difficult job market, she had the courage to leave a stable corporate job in Hong Kong and start over in America, she takes a sip of her tea and says quietly, “Because of my mother’s unconditional support. It has given me a kind of diqi (底气), the confidence to walk away whenever a job makes me unhappy.”

Across the country in Pittsburgh, Bernie has just logged off from his high-paying technology job, which he describes as “feeling absolutely great.” An only son from Qingdao, Shandong, Bernie has also been able to build a life abroad with his family’s financial backing. Yet I recognise something different in the way he talks about that support. Many only daughters, myself included, feel a quiet sense of guilt when spending their parents’ money, particularly when that money represents years of savings and enormous tuition fees. Bernie describes it with ease: “They just support me unconditionally, money straight to you.”

Then there is Elain, who grew up as an only daughter in Zhejiang before her parents made the costly decision to have a second child. Her story begins where the other two diverge, with a family choosing to have another child and a daughter suddenly being asked to make room for someone else.

The contrast among these three young Chinese people points to a deeper gender divide within the generation that grew up under China’s One-Child Policy. For many only daughters, parental support can become a far-reaching safety net. It gives them the freedom to study abroad, change careers and leave home, while they also navigate differing expectations within their families. For an only son, the same family resources can feel far more readily available. They become a cushion beneath his choices, allowing him to pursue opportunities far from home while other women in the family remain nearby and assume responsibility for caring for parents and elders.

Forging Diqi:
Three Generations
of Daughters

^{Scarlette’s grandmother}

Scarlette’s sense of diqi (底气), the quiet confidence that allows her to navigate the world on her own terms, was built over generations. It comes from a family in which women’s education, work and independence have long been taken seriously. For Scarlette, that legacy has become a powerful safety net, giving her the freedom to take risks far from home.

Scarlette grew up in Zhengzhou, Henan. Her parents divorced when she was in primary school. Her father remarried and started a new family, while Scarlette was raised primarily by her mother, who worked at a state-owned bank. Her mother devoted much of her time and income to her daughter, paying for dance lessons, painting classes and preparatory courses throughout her childhood.

Scarlette says that this commitment to supporting daughters came from her mother’s side of the family. “No one in my family ever looked at my education as an investment they needed to ‘recoup’ (回本),” she says. Education was something the family valued for its own sake. They were willing to spend money on a daughter’s future because they believed she deserved the opportunity to build one.

That belief reaches back three generations. In the 1920s and 1930s, Scarlette’s maternal great-grandfather (太姥爷), a tradesman from a conservative village in eastern Zhoukou, travelled to cities including Shanghai and Guangzhou. He saw women attending school there and returned to Henan determined to educate his own daughters.

He had four daughters and no sons. Even during the early years of the People’s Republic, when food was scarce and families were struggling to survive, he continued to send all four girls to school. He scraped together the money for their tuition and insisted that they receive an education.

One of those daughters was Scarlette’s grandmother, who was born in 1936. She eventually attended university and became the only female doctor at her local county hospital. For a woman of her generation, her career represented an unusual path towards professional independence.

“Because of this family legacy, I grew up believing that a woman must rely on herself, have her own career and support herself,” Scarlette says. “It was simply common sense.”

That belief shaped the choices Scarlette made as she grew older. When she attended university in Hong Kong, her family covered four years of tuition fees and living expenses after she narrowly missed out on a scholarship because of differing policies for liberal-arts and science students. After working in Hong Kong for nearly two years, she decided that she wanted to leave her stable career in finance and pursue a master’s degree at NYU. Her family supported that decision too, covering the cost of her tuition.

There are still small points of friction between Scarlette and her mother, most of them rooted in the generational differences between them. Her mother, who has spent most of her career at a state-owned bank, sometimes holds a different view of how money should be spent and what makes a life worthwhile. Scarlette, meanwhile, sees travel as something that does not necessarily require a practical justification.

“To me, travelling doesn’t need a reason. I just need to go,” Scarlette says with a laugh.

Their differences rarely develop into serious disagreements. When Scarlette calls her mother from New York, their conversations often feel more like exchanges between two adults than conversations between a parent and child. They discuss their lives, share opinions and talk about the world around them.

Her mother’s support has given her the freedom to leave, explore and change direction, while the women in her family have passed down a strong belief in female independence. Looking out over Manhattan, Scarlette carries that legacy with her. Her mother’s money has helped create her freedom, and she has learnt to accept that support without allowing it to determine the life she chooses.

^{Scarlette’s mother}

The Gilded Cushion

View from Bernie’s apartment in Pittsburgh

Compared with Scarlette’s leap into the unknown, still accompanied by the quiet anxieties of leaving home, Bernie’s path has been remarkably smooth. His choices have been carefully planned, generously supported and largely free from financial uncertainty.

Within his extended family in Qingdao, Shandong, Bernie was the only grandson. His parents, both of whom held secure jobs in the state sector, carefully structured his daily routines as he grew up. When he went through gaokao, they even created a spreadsheet comparing between two hundred and three hundred potential university majors.

From his undergraduate years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), to graduate school in the United States, money was never a source of conflict between Bernie and his parents. His family paid for his education and supported his life abroad without making him feel that he was depriving them of anything. The financial anxiety that can accompany parental support for many only daughters was largely absent from his experience.

But Bernie’s freedom to build a life abroad is not simply a product of financial support. He can remain in the United States, pursue a high-paying technology career and live thousands of miles from Qingdao without feeling that he is abandoning his responsibilities at home. Part of that freedom comes from knowing that someone else in the family has stayed behind.

That person is his cousin, the daughter of his father’s brother.

After studying in the United Kingdom, Bernie’s cousin returned to China at a time when finding a good job was difficult. She eventually settled in Qingdao and secured a stable position in the state sector. Although the day-to-day physical care of the family’s oldest members is still undertaken by Bernie’s parents and their siblings, his cousin has assumed a different role as the family’s social glue and emotional anchor. She is physically present to organise family gatherings, host dinners for aunts and uncles on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and keep the older generation company. Bernie acknowledges the relief her presence provides with striking matter-of-factness: “Because my cousin is in Qingdao, the family burden is much lighter.”

Her presence also gives Bernie’s parents another way to remain involved in family life. In many Chinese families that have raised only children, parents can become deeply focused on their child, particularly after retirement, when work no longer occupies much of their time. Because Bernie’s cousin lives nearby, his parents can instead spend time helping to care for her children. “It gives them a sense of purpose, something to do, so they won’t be so bored,” Bernie explains.

The arrangement allows Bernie to remain far from home without becoming the sole focus of his parents’ attention or the family’s expectations. His cousin remains nearby, maintaining family relationships and helping to keep the older generation connected, while her children give Bernie’s parents another source of companionship and a continuing role in family life.

Seen in this light, Bernie’s “gilded cushion” extends beyond the money his parents provide. His freedom is also supported by the women who remain close to the family and undertake the everyday work of being present.

The arrangement reveals a quieter form of the gendered division of family responsibility. The “real” only son is free to leave because another woman has remained behind. Her role may not involve traditional full-time eldercare, but she helps absorb the everyday work of care and connection that allows Bernie to keep moving forwards.

^{Ocean view in Qingdao}

The Eldest
Sister’s Shackle

If Scarlette has a safety net and Bernie has a gilded cushion, Elain’s story shows what happens when a family chooses to step beyond the boundaries of the One-Child Policy.

Born and raised in Zhejiang, Elain grew up in a family shaped by the local tradition of liangtouhun (两头婚), sometimes translated as a “two-sided marriage”. Under these arrangements, neither spouse formally marries into the other’s family, and the children maintain close ties with both sides of their extended family.

This changed when Elain was in kindergarten. Her parents decided to have a second child, another daughter. At the time, the decision came at a considerable cost. Both parents left their secure jobs at a state-owned company, surrendering their “iron rice bowls” (tie fanwan, 铁饭碗), while the family paid a substantial family-planning fine. Elain’s younger sister was born soon afterwards.

For Elain, becoming an older sister also meant assuming a new set of expectations.

Even before her sister was born, her family began telling her that she would have to grow up. “You are about to become a little adult,” they told her. “From now on, you need to be more mature, set a good example and generally be more considerate towards your sister.”

The pressure to be a responsible older sister was compounded by the gender hierarchy she encountered around her. Within her family, among relatives and throughout the broader environment in which she grew up, she saw both implicit and explicit preferences for boys. Relatives sometimes made dismissive comments about girls in other families, reinforcing the idea that sons were still valued differently from daughters.

Elain grew up watching these assumptions shape the way people talked about children, family and the future. When her own sibling was born, however, she felt something different: relief that she had a sister.

“I felt lucky that my sibling was a girl,” she says. “I think girls can understand each other in a way that is different from having a brother.”

That feeling grew even stronger as her sister became older and developed her own sense of gender equality. Rather than seeing her sister as a rival for family resources, Elain came to regard her as an ally, someone who could understand from her own experience what it meant to grow up as a girl within the same family and social environment.

Rewriting
the Terms of Life

As this generation enters adulthood and begins confronting questions of marriage, children and the future, the tensions inherent in the safety net, the gilded cushion and the eldest sister’s shackle become increasingly difficult to ignore.

For Bernie, resting comfortably on his “gilded cushion”, the familiar combination of marriage, children and home ownership remains a largely unquestioned path. “I am an only son; my parents could absolutely never accept me not having children,” he says. For him, traditional expectations surrounding family and lineage fit naturally into the life his parents have imagined for him.

His plan is straightforward: work in the United States for four or five years to build his career and accumulate savings in US dollars, then return to China, find a job, marry and raise a child whom he hopes will grow up in China. There is little sense of conflict in this vision. Each step follows naturally from the one before it, forming a life trajectory that feels both familiar and secure. On his gilded cushion, Bernie can progress through these milestones with little need to question whether they are the right ones for him.

For the women of this generation, those expectations can feel very different.

Elain, now attending graduate school in New York, has begun to question some of the assumptions about marriage and motherhood that shaped her upbringing. Her mother sometimes encourages her to marry and worries about what life might be like for a woman who remains single into old age. Elain, however, no longer sees marriage as a guarantee of lifelong companionship. A spouse could become ill or die, she points out, leaving a person alone regardless of whether she had married.

For now, Elain has chosen not to allow these concerns to determine the life she wants for herself. Living away from home has given her more space to reflect on the expectations with which she grew up, while allowing her to maintain a harmonious relationship with her parents.

Scarlette has chosen a different form of distance. She has remained in New York, continuing to expand the possibilities available to her. Living thousands of miles from home also gives her space from the expectations and scrutiny of her extended family. She can make decisions about work, relationships and where to live without having every choice measured against a familiar family script.

The One-Child Policy reshaped Chinese families on a vast scale, changing not only how many children families could have, but also the position each child occupied within the family. Its effects were never evenly distributed. For some daughters, being an only child opened doors that had never been open to earlier generations of women. For others, becoming an older sister brought new expectations and responsibilities. For only sons, meanwhile, family resources and freedom could follow a more familiar path, sometimes supported by the quieter labour of women who remained closer to home.

The policy is gone, but the families it created are now entering a new stage of life. The children raised under it are studying abroad, changing careers, leaving home and deciding what kind of adulthood they want for themselves. They inherited the same era, but not the same position within it. Gender, birth order and the shape of each family have given them different forms of freedom, different expectations and different ways of imagining what a life can be.

As Scarlette finishes her warm glass of grape tea in Manhattan, the contrast among these lives remains unresolved. The same generation that grew up under one of the most consequential social experiments in modern China is now discovering that there was never just one way to be an only child, nor one way to inherit the future.

^{How to cite: Ma, Lina. “One Child, Three Lives.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 14 Sept. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/09/14/one-child-policy.}

Lina Ma is a freelance journalist and research writer based in New York, and a fellow at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. She covers gender, culture, and social change in contemporary China. She is a contributing writer for The Diplomat and Global Voices. You can get in touch with Lina via LinkedIn or email.