To the Editor:
Chi An, the heroine of Steven W. Mosher’s A Mother’s Ordeal: One Woman’s Fight Against China’s One-Child Policy, is not a monster, according to reviewer William McGurn [Books in Review, October 1993]. “Rather, she is an ordinary human being whose own survival, like the survival of those around her, depended on her deadening the normal impulse to empathy and decency.” That was true of the Chi An who enforced China’s one-child policy after the death of Chairman Mao. She was indeed a “participant-turned-victim,” as Mr. McGurn describes her.
But what about the Chi An who “reports the rush of pride she felt when she slapped the president of her college during a public ‘struggle session’”? When Chairman Mao was alive, his supporters did not deaden their impulses; they enjoyed every minute of their violence. It would not be unjust to call Chi An a participant-turned-monster, bearing in mind that monsters can be victims, too.
Two minor points: first, the Chinese character for “good” is not “a son and a daughter,” as Mr. McGurn writes, but a woman and a child; traditional Chinese culture did not consider sons and daughters equally good. Second, while mei, which means “beautiful,” can sometimes mean “American” in compound nouns (meiyuan means “American dollar,” for example), the Chinese word for America itself is Meiguo, which not only means “beautiful country” but also sounds like “America.”
George Jochnowitz
College of Staten Island
Staten Island, New York
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William McGurn writes:
George Jochnowitz raises an interesting point. I suppose how we regard Chi An depends on how we regard human nature. Pascal wrote that man was neither beast nor angel. But it does seem more accurate to describe man as both beast and angel. In the case of Chi An, whatever else we might say, certainly she was ordinary. The Cultural Revolution shows what even ordinary people are capable of when traditional civilizing structures, which temper our baser inclinations, are removed or enervated. The horrible legacy of Communist rule in China is that it will have systematically destroyed all the structures and institutions it had inherited from the past without leaving anything in its wake.
Mr. Jochnowitz is absolutely right about the character for good, which was an editorial slip on my part; I had meant to say mother and child. Indeed, one untold tragedy of China’s one-child policy is that it has forced the abortion of millions of baby girls solely on the basis of their sex—something that does not seem of interest to the American feminist movement. As for the baby’s name, much in Chinese depends on what names sound like and how they are used, as Mr. Jochnowitz notes. And Chi An makes her intentions clear in the book:
I smile anew at the name [my husband] and I have chosen for our daughter, for it is more than just a name. We have named her Mei, which is the way we Chinese say America, the land of her birth. It is a Chinese blessing bestowed on her birthplace.
