Children with no identity, concealed by day, freed by night.
China, the 1980’s. Ming is an only child born to loving parents during the ‘one child per family’ regime. She is lucky, but many children in her village are not.
Second-born children are outlawed. They hide under their houses during the day and live their life only by night. Ming cannot ignore the situation and chooses to sneak out time after time to play with her friends – the children of the night.
Until one night, the authorities raid her village, and brutally remove all the ‘identity-less’ children who are playing outside, including Ming. The militia takes them to a remote children’s house on the southern border of China for re-education.
There, under harsh conditions of cold, hunger and physical abuse, Ming spends her adolescence, despite the fact that she has an identity. The only bright spots in her life are her friends and her love of reading. The longing for her parents grows stronger every day, instilling in her a strong desire to regain her freedom.
Will Ming be able to escape and find her way back into her parents’ arms?
I left my job as spokesperson for the Israeli judicial system after years of working long days. I never saw a movie or play that entire time. It wasn’t easy to leave such a challenging position, a job I had dreamed about from the time I was a law student. I made the decision that I needed a change.
When I left the job, my husband and I decided to take a long trip with our three children to the Far East. The children (then 10, 13, 15) were taken out of school, and our bags were packed. We left on a six-month trip. We landed in Hong Kong, and from there, we took the train to China. That’s where it happened.
We traveled around a few villages, surrounded by quiet pastoral landscapes. One evening, we saw a gathering of children, and approached them, certain that the circus had come to town. But we found that there was no special reason for the gathering that night. When we asked and tried to understand whether something had happened, we found out about the children who only go out at night for fear of being caught. They call them the black children, but they are actually transparent children. They have no identity and are not registered, and as a result, they don’t go to school, have medical treatment, or even ride on the train.
There was a certain moment there, a moment that I’ll never forget for the intensity of frustration I felt. I looked at the sweet children with the Chinese eyes, and became enraged when I thought of the one-birth policy. The cruelty of the policy, the ethical and philosophical question of restricting parents to one child disturbed me greatly, and more than that, I felt physical pain for children who were born outside the law, and have no future.
Since that visit, I returned to China several times, my attraction to its culture alongside my anger at the brutal authorities. I wanted to scream in their place, knowing that they, the Chinese, would be endangering their lives if they were to scream.
At the same time that I left my job at the court, my mother died suddenly, the ground under my feet shook, and orphan hood enveloped me with great intensity; I felt alone in this world, the loneliness of a girl without parents.
Six months after my mother died, we traveled to China. The painful story of the children of the night was mixed with my personal pain, and I wrote the story of Ming, which is also the story of my longing for my mother.
