‘This Hurts Forever’: Mom's Heartbreaking Diary Entries On China’s One-Child Policy

The one-child policy implemented by China to reduce the country’s population restricted couples to give birth to a single child. The population planning initiative was enforced between 1980 to 2015. The repercussions of the drastic policy left multiple families heartbroken. Now, a woman from China has shared photographs of her mother’s personal diary on Twitter that chronicled how she had to make the difficult decision of parting with her 2-month-old child.

The entries that were written about 3 decades ago contained tear-smudged pages becoming emotional proof of the suffering she braved. The daughter claimed that her mom had to send her sister away to her grandmother’s house to follow the one-child policy. While sharing the pictures of her dairy, she expressed to couldn’t fathom what her mom went through for a long time. But now as she has embraced motherhood, the heartbreaking entries always end up filling her eyes with tears.

“This diary entry was written by my mom, 34 years ago, on the day when she sent her 2-month-old daughter (my sister) away to my grandma’s because of the one-child policy. I never fully understood the scale of heartbreak until I became a mom myself. I will never not cry reading it,” she wrote.

While the entries are in Chinese text, the woman explained the contents of the pages are of the time she last breastfed her child before bidding adieu. The woman who shared their story on Twitter was not even two years old back then. According to the mom’s note, the little her also broke into tears of agony just by sensing the situation even though being quite unaware of what was happening.

“She wrote she breastfed her ‘one more time – the last time in her life’ before they departed. I (then one year and a half) sensed the atmosphere and cried together with her. My sister did come back to us when she was around 5 or 6 years old. But I know this hurts forever,” the daughter added. The family was reunited with their second daughter but the pain that they had to incur remains etched in their memories forever.

A subsequent tweet shows another page of the dairy, which is seen stained with her mom’s tears while she penned her pain. “The second page is stained with tears from 30+ yrs ago. My family is just one among many (millions of) other, and worse, heartbreaking stories. If there will be (I hope) a museum to commemorate the traumas of OCP, that’s where my mom’s diary could be kept,” the daughter concluded.

The heart-wrenching story has been viewed by more than three lakh people on the micro-blogging, leaving many emotional. A user commented, “As a mom now too I can’t imagine the anguish. What a sacrifice your mother and sister had to make. Gosh.”

Another wrote, “God this is brutal.”

One more sympathized, “So sorry about the pain your family and many others went through.”

The one-child policy was ended by the Chinese government in 2016.

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