One Child by Mei Fong

condition among China’s elite divers, who start high-impact diving before their eyes are fully developed.
    Yao himself believes the one-child policy fostered selfishness, a lack of trust, and “may be one reason why we struggle in team sports.” Certainly the Chinese have a sporting inferiority complex because, although they periodically win medals in Ping-Pong, diving, and gymnastics, they don’t fare as well in commercial sports like soccer and basketball.
    Sports insiders call this the “Big Ball, Small Ball,” theory, arguing that China can do well only in sports that emphasize precision and mechanization—“Small Ball”—but not in sports that need creativity and teamwork—“Big Ball.” Beyond sports, it’s become a metaphor for everything from China’s education system to its economic prowess.
    On this night, it was clear China was gunning for Big Ball status.
    I was live-blogging the opening ceremony and trying not to think about miscarriage, or children, or the earthquake, which had all linked in my mind to become one giant lump of misery. I thought the Olympics, with its relentless push to celebrate China’s glory and bury the history of its excesses, would be a good venue.
    But even here, it was impossible to escape reminders.
    Take the venue itself. Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous dissident artist, likened to Warhol, had been a consultant on the Bird’s Nest design. He ended up disavowing his role in its creation, saying the Chinese government had turned the Olympics into a sham.
    Ai had gone to Sichuan ten days after the quake to film the disaster and was a vocal critic of the school collapse cover-up. Later on, he tried to create a database of the names of all the children killed in the quake. For his efforts, he was beaten, detained, and slapped with a $2 million fine for unpaid taxes.
    At 8:08 p.m., the show began in a deafening burst of fireworks,floating fairies, spacemen, and synchronized tai chi performers. There were 2,008 cherubic children, representing China’s different tribes. It was all a lavish spectacle choreographed by Zhang Yimou, who had once been persona non grata for making films with themes critical of the regime. In recent years the director had toned down and was now considered safely rehabilitated. Detractors now called him China’s Leni Riefenstahl.
    Zhang had certainly pulled out all the stops, with set pieces giving spectators a quick romp through five thousand years of Chinese culture, touching on the Silk Road and Great Wall. In one set piece, the word
harmony
blazed brightly.
    An angelic little girl sang the popular “Ode to the Motherland”: “Our future is as bright as ten thousand radiating light beams.”
    A giant globe rose from the floor of the stadium. Was this China’s Big Ball moment? Balanced on top, a Medusa-locked Sarah Brightman kicked off with syrupy sweetness, singing the Olympic theme song “You and Me”: “. . . from one world . . . we are one family . . .” The lyrics are overwhelmingly banal.
    I dashed away a tear. How absurd! To be moved to tears by Sarah Brightman!
    And then, my heart broke.
     
     
    IV
     
    Nothing was what it seemed.
    Those 2,008 children representing China’s tribes? They were all Han Chinese.
    That little singer? She was lip-syncing, a last-minute replacement because the actual singer wasn’t considered pretty enough.
    The fireworks viewers saw on their TV screens? Computer-generated imagery.
    Zhang, the ringmaster, would fall from grace for violating the one-child policy after online rumors floated that he had sired several children. Family-planning officials ended up slapping a $1.2 million fine on him. The man who orchestrated China’s biggest show would end up the man with the biggest fine in the history of the one-child policy.
    China’s coming-out party did mark the country’s ascendance as a global superpower, especially after the Lehman Brothers collapse on Wall Street a few months later, which