Alec Ash - Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China

For my father

In this book I follow the lives of six young Chinese born between 1985 and 1990, telling their stories from childhood to late twenties. For those who have English names, I use them for familiaritys sake. Dahai and Xiaoxiao dont, so I use their Chinese nicknames instead, which is how their friends know them. Fred is her English name but also serves as a pseudonym, and details about her family have been left out at her request, out of concern for her fathers position as a Communist Party official.

Other Chinese names and words are in Pinyin. For terms with a simple English equivalent, I use it, but for some of the more common or interesting terms I give the Chinese too. A few tricks help pronunciation x is shh, q is ch, c is ts, z is dz, zh is dj and js are hard.

Everything in quotation marks is in translation from the Chinese, except where marked as originally in English. All money is in yuan (RMB), which was roughly ten to the pound sterling for most of the period covered, the childhood and early teens of the twenty-first century.

Dahai (Yu Hai) Military child, netizen, self-styled loser, born 1985 in Hubei province

Xiaoxiao (Liu Xiao) Small-business owner, dreamer, born 1985 in Heilongjiang province

Fred (anonymous) Officials daughter, Ph.D., patriot, born 1985 in Hainan province

Snail (Miao Lin) Country boy, internet gaming addict, born 1987 in Anhui province

Lucifer (Li Yan) Singer, aspiring international superstar, born 1989 in Hebei province

Mia (Kong Xiaorui) Fashionista, rebel, former punk, born 1990 in Xinjiang province

It had been a decade since Dahai buried his diary.

The leather journal was waiting in the dry earth beneath a pine tree, at the top of the mountain behind his childhood home. He was eighteen when he put it there, in a dark teak box used for storing tea leaves, along with a pack of cigarettes and some old photos.

Born in 1985, he was a child of new China. His was the first generation with no memory of Tiananmen, let alone of Mao. A generation of only children born to a country changing as fast as they were. Natives of its hurtling present, inheritors of its uncertain future. The thin end of the wedge. In the diary he wrote about worries, wishes, fragile dreams... but mostly about a girl.

The May heat frazzled as he topped the summit. But which was the right tree? He unfolded an army-green spade from his backpack and plunged it into the ground, feeling for a hollow wooden thunk. Construction workers rebuilding a pagoda nearby took pictures on their phones, amused as he pockmarked the landscape with holes.

Dahai ignored them. He was almost thirty now, married, and dug for his early years.

The fruit came from all over China. Apples from Xinjiang, pears from Hebei, tangerines from Zhejiang and Fujian. Every so often there might be dragon fruit from Hainan island in the far south, or clumps of baby bananas on the stem. They came by thirteen-metre-long truck, all the bounty of the land spreading its seeds, to the back door of the wholesale fruit shop which Xiaoxiaos parents ran, in the far north where no fruit grew.

Winter took the skin off your fingers here, north of the wall. The blanket of hard land above Beijing, previously known as Manchuria but simply called the north-east in Chinese, is the head of the rooster which is supposed to be Chinas map. From its crest, you can see the Aurora Borealis and the midnight sun. Temperatures get down to minus forty, and snowfall comes up to your waist. There are still a few lonely Siberian tigers, who stray over from Russia without proper visas.

Heilongjiang province is named for the black dragon river which snakes along its border with Russia. Four hours by train from the provincial capital, tucked between Inner Mongolia to the west and Siberia to the north, is Nehe. Rows of identical apartment blocks are still under construction, as if the city had bloomed spontaneously from the tundra-like earth. But for a frozen river that you can drive a truck over in winter, it could be any other small Chinese city of just half a million people. Here, on 4 September 1985, Liu Xiao was born.

She was delivered by a midwife at home, on her parents bed. For the first hour she didnt cry, and everyone was beside themselves. Then she began bawling to the gods and they tearfully wished she would shut up. At the age of seven days her ears were pierced with a needle and red thread, an old tradition to bring good luck and health. Seven days was also how long it took for her mother and father to name her, leafing through a fat dictionary to find a character they liked. In the end they settled on xiao, which means sky or clouds and is part of an idiom about a loud sound resounding through the heavens like her first ear-splitting cries. In another tone the word means small or young, and from an early age her pet name was Xiaoxiao, little Xiao.

Xiaoxiao was a girl, and if she married her own child wouldnt continue the family name of Liu. The one-child policy, implemented in 1980 not long after Deng Xiaoping ushered in Chinas reform era, meant that her parents couldnt legally have another. But families were still catching up with the idea, especially further out from the urban hubs, and the law was far from monolithic. Xiaoxiaos parents waited another four years until her father left his strictly supervised work unit, then had a second child anyway a son and got away without paying the hefty fine.

These post-80s only children, bearing all of the hopes and wishes that their parents missed out on in the Mao years, are mollycoddled to comic extremes during infancy. They are helped up after every fall, and wrapped in more layers of protection than a porcelain vase in transit. Add the attentions of two sets of grandparents, and the pampering snowballs into a smothering excess. In her first winter months, Xiaoxiao was only occasionally visible underneath layers of baby thermals, her cheeks the same shade as her crimson padded jacket.

Until the age of seven, she lived with her maternal grandparents in a countryside hamlet two hours drive out of Nehe. Their courtyard home had pigs, geese, ducks, chickens, a dog and a single bed: a platform of clumped earth above a coal-fired stove, called a kang, on which Grandma, Grandpa and Xiaoxiao all slept in a bundle of shared warmth. Layers of newspaper were pasted across the walls and ceiling; headlines about Deng Xiaopings southern tour of China in the early nineties found better use as cheap insulation. The only entertainment was traditional folk storytelling on the radio, while Xiaoxiao sat on her grandmothers lap.

It is common in China for grandparents to raise a child while mum and dad work long hours in cramped city conditions, sending back money. Tens of millions of the post-80s generation grew up like this. Those in the countryside whose parents are migrant workers far away are called left-behind children. Whatever the circumstances, to be separated from your parents leaves its mark. Xiaoxiaos mother remembers with pain one time when she visited her daughter after being half a year away in Nehe. She went in for a hug only to see that Xiaoxiao didnt recognise her, but instead hid behind Grandma.

Xiaoxiao moved back in with her parents shortly after, into the flat where she was born. Close at hand, on the edge of town, was the family fruit wholesalers. She liked to play in the warehouse, which smelt of apples. Cardboard boxes were stacked high to the ceiling, forming corridors that got narrower with each new delivery. At first she assumed the trucks that arrived were from nearby, or maybe from her grandparents village. Then her father showed her on a map of China where some of the fruit came from, and she never looked at the trucks in the same way again.