Wang Yang, a Chinese writer who lives in the US, is a council member and the vice-secretary of the Los Angeles Chinese Writers’ Association (LACWA), as well as a well-known presenter among art and cultural circles in Los Angeles. She has published five novels and was the writer for the television series Da Nan Fuqi. Wang has received an award for excellence in Chinese writing from the US Congress； In China, she has been awarded the Wujiang Literary Prize.
For me life was a chance occurrence. My existence was an accident. You could even say that it was an ordeal, one that I barely survived.I was not even supposed to be born. My parents were already in their early forties. As they were already raising a son and a daughter, they had no plans for any other children. My mother actually became pregnant two more times before she gave birth to me. Unfortunately, before my would be siblings were ever able to view this world through their own eyes, or even reach infancy, their futures were cut short on an operating table when they were mere cell clusters. In order to completely eliminate the possibility of any future pregnancies, my mother bluntly decided to have an IUD inserted. This was by far the most common and effective contraceptive method at that time in China.
With both a son and daughter in their home, my parents already had all they could hope for. I have no idea how those fragile but somehow tenacious cells (arguably not even yet constituting a “life”) managed to slip past the gauntlet of defenses my mother had prepared and set up camp inside her body. Then one day, despite all her strict precautions, my mother was dumbfounded to discover that she was pregnant again! Their third and fourth children had vanished before being born. What reason, and what need, did this fifth child have to exist?
Several years later, when I had just started learning to read, I stumbled upon the diary that my mother had kept during this part
of her life. In the section pertaining to this particular period, I saw that she had spent each day in a state of painful hesitation. “Should I get rid of it, or should I keep it? Keep it? Get rid of it?”
My heart leapt to my throat each time I read my mother’s descriptions of how she wavered between these two choices. My
mind was in turmoil.
To live? Or to die? Not even Prince Hamlet had faced a dilemma this dire!
(Chapter 1 Rise of the “Third Wheel”)
