One child, or two?

Yesterday Say-Yen and I stopped into a local grocery store and ran into these little cuties in the check-out line. No translation was needed for their grandmother to understand immediately that I was completely captivated by them and wanted to take their picture. As I babbled on in English and she chattered back in Chinese, the little girls clearly gave their "thumbs up" in "international kid language," known the world over!

Twins are fascinating to me no matter where I'm lucky enough to run into them, but in China the one-child policy makes seeing twins a rare, almost extraordinary event. Despite a population of over 1.3 billion people, you rarely see them. The speculation would be that since parents get only one chance at having a child, the likelihood of having twins is greatly reduced (but hey, I'm no expert!)

Whatever the reason, twins are very precious in China and these two were no exception.

There's been much international chatter of late about China's one-child policy, politicians and world health officials weighing the pros and cons of government's role in regulating such a personal matter. But whether one agrees with it or not, the reasons for why it exists are abundantly clear, just as they were in Japan several generations ago - i.e., a population racing out of control and not enough resources, space or infrastructure to support it.

Perhaps it's safe to say that the only thing unchanged in today's fast-paced world is the certainty that things will change. Japan, seeing its population declining at an alarming rate, has not only revoked their one-child policy, but now provides financial incentive to couples having more than one child. Martin Luther King summed it up wisely with his quote, "All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem."

After meeting these beautiful little twins in the grocery store today and seeing how proud their mom and grandmom were of them, it made me wonder: Although it's seemingly a long way off, will moms in China someday sit down at their kitchen tables over a steaming cup of jasmine tea, and ask each other, "One child, or two?"