a particular country. People everywhere were reluctant to forego the possibility of producing heirs, of continuing the family. So a compromise solution was offered. The Generation-Skipping Law permitted lottery couples to harvest and preserve their genetic material. From their harvest, a younger generation could create a skipchild. Skipparents were arranged, and after the genetic parents had died and a statutory period had passed, the skipchild would be birthed in a laboratory or implanted in the skipmother and raised by the skipparents as their own.
Like all nations of the world, China, under Socialist-Confucianist rulership, conceded to the law, and charged her people with carrying out its terms. But Chinese people had lived under a one-child policy since the turn of the millennium, at times successfully, at other times less so. Chinese people felt they had already sacrificed to enforce the one-child policy long before the rest of the world.
Producing children—many children—was an honorable and ancient tradition in China. Children were wealth. Children were security. Children ensured proper care for the elderly. Despite degradation of the ecosystem, drought in the south and famine in the north, tradition had changed little over two centuries despite the horrors of the brown ages. Hadn’t China always had drought in the south, famine in the north? What had really changed? In the megalopolises, the rich lived in luxurious domed estates, the destitute lived in the street. Telespace, rather than the corner store, distributed pornography, but there was still pornography. In the junk heaps, semiplast had replaced plastic, which had replaced glass, which had replaced clay pottery, but there were still junk heaps.
Tradition. There were always radicals who decried tradition and always people who revered tradition. Many Chinese had rebelled against the one-child policy. Many more felt the Generation-Skipping Law was an attack on the family. An outrage.
Factions sprang up. The Society for the Rights of Parents organized a virulent opposition to the law. When Zhu was a kid, the Parents burned down and bombed World Birth Control clinics, shot WBCO workers, hacked credits out of local accounts, infected the huge and complex WBCO databases with viruses that turned the data into chaos.
And her? Zhu Wong was raised in the northern village of Changchi, an ancient place long inhabited by humanity. Fields of millet and peas met the bleak concrete of superhighways and processing plants. Chunky patchworked high-rises from the last building boom were nearly indistinguishable from the long, depressing rows of barracks and community housing.
Zhu was entrusted under the law to her skipparents, Yu-lai and Li Wong, each a distant cousin of Zhu’s birth parents. They were in their early forties when Zhu was birthed in a Beijing lab and shipped to Changchi by express mail. Struggling with debts and a fierce desire to own property like their sophisticated upper-class friends in Chihli Province, yearning to escape community housing and the deadening life of agriwork, Yu-lai and Li Wong suddenly found themselves legally saddled with a baby.
She was adorable, of course. Her DNA had been carefully edited, her eyes gene-tweaked green. Some of her parents’ life savings had been invested in equipping the newborn with intelligence, strength, and physical beauty. She arrived with the rest of the savings to provide for her care and rearing.
Who were they really, Zhu’s skipparents? Had they ever loved her? Had they ever considered her their own? Did those questions make any sense when the world groaned under the weight of twelve billion people?
Sometimes she allowed sentimental memories to surface. A lavender kite in the shape of a fish. Her first bicycle, all silver and blue. Shrimp and vegetables for Sunday supper. A trip to the Great Wall, badly eroded from its past glory. The excitement of becoming morphed for telespace when the schools in Changchi were flush with money. Installation of the neckjack and telelink wetware just like kids in the rich countries. The promise of an international profession.
“Little face,” Li would say, “why are you so sad? Such wise green eyes. What do you know?”
But mostly Zhu remembered the day when, at the age of fifteen, she came home from school to the empty apartment. Ransacked drawers, scattered papers. The jewelry her mother—her real mother—had left her, the holoids, the mobiles with bank records, all of it gone. She never forgot the humiliation when she went to school the next day and told the teacher, “My skipparents left me.” The shame and sheer perplexity kept her from tears. She didn’t cry till she was twenty, long after she’d joined