The pain of an only child

Hu Yong, in his 50s, is a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at Peking University. He is also a typical member of the "sandwich generation": his father recently passed away at the age of 96, his mother is 85 and has Alzheimer's disease, his children are all minors, and he himself is at the peak of his career.

In the past three years, taking care of his parents has consumed a lot of Hu's time and energy. He now hardly leaves Beijing's Haidian District. Work and personal life have been cut, compressed, and merged into a routine of "changing diapers, cleaning up poop and urine, bathing, washing sheets, and cooking."

Hu said his days and nights were turned upside down. The daily challenge was to guess when his body would excrete, by observing the amount of food he ate, calculating the digestion time, and constantly asking himself: Do you need to pee now? Do you need to poop?

"A small mistake means double the time spent cleaning, tidying up, and changing clothes," Professor Hu shared.

Hu Yong's story has captured the attention of the Chinese people, especially the 200 million people of the one-child generation. According to data from the China Aging Research Center, by the end of 2022, China will have 280 million elderly people aged 60 and above, of whom about 44 million are disabled.

According to data from the Peking University Survey on Elderly Health and Longevity, it takes an average of nearly four hours a day to care for an elderly person aged 65 to 70. The older the person, the more time is spent caring for them.

Elderly care is the most prominent issue in the country of a billion people.

Having experienced this situation, Alexandra, 34 years old, from Hunan said: "Before my mother got cancer, I always thought being an only child was really good."

Her husband comes from a large family, which Alexandra initially considered a disadvantage because his family's care and investment in education were less than hers. Her parents also had pensions and savings to comfortably travel everywhere.

In October 2020, Alexandra’s mother and mother-in-law were diagnosed with cancer at the same time. It was the first time she felt the benefits of having a large family. During this time, her husband’s siblings gathered to take care of her, while she and her husband had to return to Hunan to take care of their mother.

"I was working in Shenzhen at the time. When I was at the hospital, I had to make work calls until late at night," she shared.

The first surgery was successful, but in January 2022, the disease relapsed and metastasized to the brain. At that time, she had just given birth, suffered from severe sleep deprivation and postpartum depression. The pressure reached its peak, forcing her to seek psychological treatment.

From then on, every weekend, she traveled from Guangdong to Hunan with her mother. After only a few months, her mother's disease reached stage 4 and she was told she had about a year to live. The hardest thing for her was to be the one who had to find and come up with all the medical plans for her mother. When the hospital finally sent her back, she painfully accepted to give up treatment and transferred her mother to the hospice care area.

"Probably the most tragic moment of my life was being alone at my mother's funeral," Alexandra said.

Settling in Seattle, USA, Summer, 38, feels like she is walking a tightrope as her parents age. "Many Chinese people abroad are reluctant to talk about their parents' old age. Everyone just silently prays for their parents' health," she shared.

Summer has lived abroad since 2009 and now has two children, aged 8 and 5. Her parents, who live in Nanjing, are 65 and 63. They had enjoyed retirement. But when her father suffered a stroke in 2020, she felt the pain of being an only child.

At that time, due to the epidemic, all flights between the US and China were suspended. Even if she could go, the quarantine would take a month. Her two children were still young, so she had no choice but to stay in the US. She tried to solve any problems that could be solved with money.

Last year, her father’s hydrocephalus worsened and required another surgery. Her mother fell ill a week before her father’s surgery. Summer took her baby to China for three weeks while her husband worked and raised their older child.

In the past, her parents supported her to study abroad, marry a foreigner, and settle in the US. But she also realized that when she was near death, they hoped that her daughter would live closer to them. Summer and her parents had an open conversation that if they wanted her to send money, they would need to work and not be there all the time. If they wanted her to be there, they would not be able to support their parents. She currently works as a real estate consultant, her job is unstable, and the family's finances depend mainly on her husband.

"After all, I am now at sandwich age, my parents are old and my children are young. If my parents were willing to go to America, many problems could be solved, but they do not want to leave their homeland," she said.

In Zhengzhou, Henan, 34-year-old Avocado is in even more trouble because her parents are sick and divorced. She has to support both of them. In other families, grandparents take care of each other, but she takes care of two elderly people.

Finally, she decided to send her father to a nursing home. However, it took half a year for him to settle in there and move back and forth to many places. Luckily, his health is stable now. But this only child is still worried that health risks to her parents can strike at any time.

Having another child is also Alexandra's plan after her mother fell ill. "Even if my daughter doesn't get married and has children, I won't care, but my husband and I don't want her to have to bear the pain of having another child alone when we die," she shared.

As for Summer, she just wants a little more time for her children to grow up, her parents to slowly age, and for her to have more finances so she can return to them at any time.