The policy allowing couples who were both only children to have a second child was about to be relaxed, and at lunch a few colleagues started talking about it. One of them was waiting impatiently. He was getting ready for a second child.
When we asked whether he wanted a boy or a girl, he didn’t hesitate. “A boy, of course.”
He said that when his wife was pregnant the first time, they didn’t have an ultrasound to determine the sex. His parents only found out after the baby was born. If they had known in advance that it was a girl, he said, there would have been pressure from his family. Then, half joking, he added that he had specially set aside a bottle of French red wine to open when the child arrived. Because it was a girl, they never drank it. It had been aging for years. Now, at last, he would have an excuse to bring it out.
“What era are we living in?” I said. “No one is counting on a son to support them in old age. Why insist on a boy?”
“A boy belongs to his own family,” he said. “When he grows up, he is still part of your family. A girl grows up and marries out. You are raising a child for someone else’s family.”
“A healthy girl is better than an unhealthy boy, isn’t she?” I asked.
Someone said, “If both were healthy, I would still choose a boy.”
“That’s probably a Chaoshan tradition,” I said. “People elsewhere don’t think that way.”
Another colleague, also preparing to have a child, said, “It’s the same all over the country. I want a boy too.” He said girls seemed riskier. “You see reports of rape all the time. With a boy, you worry less. The pressure is just greater.”
“That’s exactly why men are expected to buy houses,” someone cut in.
A male colleague who already had a daughter and could not have a second child said, “If you have a boy, he passes on your Y chromosome. If you have a girl, she passes on your X chromosome, but that X might have come from your mother. So from a genetics point of view, having a boy preserves the man’s genes.”
“Which means your son would also have to have a son,” I said, “if your ancestors’ Y chromosome is to keep going.”
He nodded. “If you can’t have a son, that’s what people call the end of the family line.”
I had never discussed the subject with them before. I hadn’t expected the traditional view to be so strong. After all these years of the slogan “It’s the same whether it’s a boy or a girl,” the message seemed to have made little impression. Perhaps that was not surprising. Thousands of years of tradition, with the inheritance of family property and the continuation of the family line attached to it, had left the empty slogan with little to stand on.