My parents decided to have another child ten years after my birth, only because of gender preference, even though there was still One Child Policy in China. Since the birth of my brother, my parents have been almost absent in my life. I was not prepared to share my parents’ attention to another sibling. Because of the One-Child Policy, none of my friends had siblings, so I had no one to talk about my feelings at the time.
I used a couple of years to build a wall around my self –– telling myself that I do not need my parents’ emotional support. That was when I decided to leave China and come to Melbourne to study by myself. This project is used as a therapy, to create a conversation between the twenty-year-old me and the five-year-old me. I put my current self in my parents’ position to be a present caretaker.
Old photographs are printed using cyanotypes, which highlights the long-existing gender issue; this issue is brought to present by the use of modern technology of scanner which was used to re-photograph the collage.
Holes, 2019
Text Translation:
“My mum has had thirteen daughters. Because her family was poor, couldn’t look after them all, she only kept eight daughters. The ones after the eighth were all drowned to death.”
“The ways of killing female infant are extremely cruel, but because it has a long history, the cruelness is ignored by people. There are different methods in different areas. Some throw the female infants in rivers and lakes, and some suffocate the female infants in bed. The most common way is drowning them in a water bucket.”
Flower, 2019
Text Translation:
People’s Daily: [Mum gave birth to a second child, the first child felt neglected, her sight dropped to 0.1 (20/200)] Mrs Liang discovered her six-year-old daughter’s vision had dropped dramatically. The examination in the hospital shows that the daughter’s vision is only 0.15 (20/125), but her eyes are in normal conditions, the problem is psychological. After Mrs Liang gave birth to a boy, their second child, the daughter felt neglected by the family, therefore the hysterical blindness.
“I can feel the daughter deeply. I am the first child, and I have a little brother, we are six years different. My dad admits that he prefers sons over daughters and likes my brother more, my mum doesn’t say it, but what she does is obviously favouring my little brother, I can feel it. I feel like I am mistreated.”
- I will be busy when I go back (home) because I need to look after my little brother
- Why big sisters have to suffer these? Why can’t we just be free?
- Yeah, I don’t want to go back anymore, I will have to teach him his homework
- Why big sisters have to suffer these? Why can’t we just be free?
- Yeah, I don’t want to go back anymore, I will have to teach him his homework
“Hope every woman can be free from the external pressure and their psychological cage, be whom they want to be.”
