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Miaozi, the author of the lullabies above, lived in Guangzhou, China. Last spring, she found herself pregnant, but soon thereafter, her boyfriend left her to work in the Philippines for an online casino. Miaozi’s mother demanded her to abort the baby, and her father demanded her to find a husband.
As winter came along and Miaozi’s belly was at its fullest, she and ten friends in Guangzhou decided to host their own special wedding, initiating an alternative family organization to care for the baby and each other. They called themselves the Chao Family (超家族), after the baby’s Chinese name Chao, which means either “ultra” or “super” (Miaozi sometimes also pronounces it as cao, meaning “fuck”).
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The wedding event was an immediate small sensation and underground screenings of the documentary video made rounds through several cities over the next months. Miaozi was interviewed by several small media outlets, and later, a documentary video maker began to record their new life together back in Miaozi’s hometown of Jieyang. Due to financial difficulties and China’s hukou **(residential permit) system, she had had to relocate from Guangzhou back to her conservative Teochew hometown alone. A few friends, including myself, visited, and I decided to stay. It was December 2019, during the final stretches of the anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement in Hong Kong—often referred to by protesters as “the revolution of our times”. This was also of course the time in which Covid-19 first broke out in China. Chao was born then, and we think of her, same age as the pandemic, as a wartime baby of sorts.
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#非国 #民主 #自治 #abolish the state
On the first day of 2020, Miaozi, Chao, and I moved from her parents’ home to her family’s village house, the same house where Miaozi herself was born and spent the first twenty years of her life. Then came a period of coronavirus quarantine, which stretched to summer. Conflicts broke out on all fronts in the private sphere as well: between Miaozi and her parents, between Miaozi and her best friend in Guangzhou, between many friends of Chao Family (now she also sometimes lighthearted calls it 吵家族, a homonym of Chao Family meaning “argument family”), and, in a way, between the mother and baby. These lullabies were sung and later recorded during this period of emotional turmoil.
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