When a classmate said she’d be allowed a brother or sister, I realised what it meant: she might die young. It was a sudden insight into tragedy and trauma

One afternoon in the spring of 1997, as my seven-year-old classmate and I played in a tiny park in our Shanghai neighbourhood, she shared a secret: “I’m allowed to have a little brother or sister.” My jaw dropped. No one my age had a sibling except a pair of twins at school. People used the words “sister” and “brother” to mean cousin. Having siblings was an outlandish, outdated, even shameful concept, something older generations had done before the one-child policy was introduced in 1980.

My parents carefully stored our One Child Honorary Certificate, with golden characters on a sleek red booklet, in a bottom drawer, right by my birth certificate. They were good citizens who, by definition, had only one child.