and so you have people feeling anxious. they are pointing fingers, and politics, the art of politics is also to an election. because if you can't when, best laid plans. what politicians do today more so than in the past because of the advent of technology, access to public opinion, more access. so what you see today is shaping how people feel, how politicians talk.

i call the madison avenue you those. >> you had a time when it was more intuitive command was more principled. >> principal and philosophical than what you see today. we see today is techno- politics, and it operates on the right and left. it even gets down to people running for office filtering out in the formula voters that don't show up to the polls. you know what, i don't even want to count them because they are not going to have an impact. what i am saying is that you are making an excellent. there is a reality, and i am not defending it.

but i am describing it, was sometimes makes it difficult absent a tremendous crisis. >> i would concede that. we need to understand democracy. small the ambience two and four year elections. understand democracy is being much more vibrant. who we elect office and how we hold them accountable. grassroots organizing. so whatever has been going on in politics, we saw the ground from. on the ground organizing is taking place which gives me hope. imagine democracy in terms

that are not reducible. we have a crisis of imagination. in the 1st stage, revolution of value, revolution of what we think, happening today command this is the key, what is happening today, people want us to believe that our only options are those that are right in front of us. save this country, transform democracy in a substantive way they have to imagine america a new which will take some work from the ground up. >> you are a scholar. a distinguished scholar. as we begin to wind down, as a scholar you have an

opportunity to talk to an audience all the time. but the young people you talk to represent an important segment. >> what is the role in the revolution of values? versus those who are what i call on the practical side. >> the beauty of a liberal arts education, it creates the conditions for us to engage in that arduous task of self question. so certain of everything. but one of the things about what i do is a very way in

which it forces us forces engagement. ..

that's a role that has sometimes been adopted by the media. >> big money has taken over, hasn't it. >> you only have a handful of televisions and news organizations that have the power and the reach to gather -- but that's what makes social media so important. >> social media has changed a lot. it pretty much allows anyone to level the playing field, however it also requires one to be a lot more sharp in exercising judgment. just because you see it or hear it on the internet, doesn't mean -- no one is editing this

or fact checking it. >> it's been great. >> the hour has been too short. >> congratulations on the book. >> thank you. >> i like a good bit of what you say. i might take some issue in terms of the dialogue, but you have to write a second book on the opposition to the president, and really i like to see write a a book on a forecast of 50 years from now. >> alright, i appreciate you. god bless you. >> god bless you. thank you. >> cspan "washington journal" live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up tomorrow morning, we will discuss the national governors association winter meeting that's taking place in washington this weekend. governor gary of utah, be sure

to watch "washington journal" beginning live at 7:00 a.m. eastern tomorrow. >> joined cspan live tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. eastern for the funeral mass of justice scalia. it's taking place at the shrine of the immaculate conception. live coverage tomorrow on c-span, cspan radio and cspan.org. >> next on book tv, mei fong joins us on afterward to talk about her book, "one child: the story of china's most radical experiment" about the one child policy in china and its impact on the country. this is about one hour. >> mei fong, welcome to "after words". you just published your first book. it's a remarkable book. i enjoyed it immensely.

it's the subject of a lot of discussion. the book is called "one child: the story of china's most radical experiment". in a minute we will talk about why you chose this subject and how you went about answering the questions on your mind. first i think it would be helpful to define for people what it is we are actually talking about. what is china's one child policy? >> evan, the the one child policy is really a bit of in misnomer. it's a name we used to describe a set of rules that china has used to regulate the population. theoretically, you could lightly call at 1.5 child five child for a long time. now they have moved it to a two child policy, but it's laws and regulations. >> it's not one law, but a

basket of policies. >> that's right. >> when did it happen? when did it go into effect question. >> some people counted as 1979, others counted as 1980. i call counted as 1980 when the communist party put out a letter saying saying we are advising everyone to move to a one child family. >> people sometimes imagine this was the kind of policy that would have gone into effect under the chairman now but in fact it went in then. what was going on that people imagine they needed a policy like this? >> people were very poor and china's population was growing and the economy was struggling. it was a significant worry that china was going to overwhelm its shores and there wouldn't be enough to go around and therefore they really did need to do something. >> you right in the book that

you compare the one child policy to a crash diet. like crash dieting this was done for reason that had merit. why was it done? what was the initial rationale that they thought it was going to -- what was the goal and how did they think they were going to accomplish it? >> they said for economic reasons. china was very poor and all the new leadership had stated there legitimacy of raising china out. they had set in a place a goal or a target to reach by the year 2000. looking back from the goal, the planners figured out that this wasn't point a work in the current population growth weight and therefore they needed to radically move to a one child

per family household and able to, shot. a couple shot. economic growth is like a cake. they figured it was a lot easier to control the number of miles as well so that is what they were going for. the sad fact was that china was already reducing population. they had already have a family population planning in place that was much less coercive. it's called the later and longer and fewer program. have children later, have longer longer periods between children and have fewer children. during this period of time, the the average family size had gone to six kids down to three. that was pretty successful. a lot of exploits argued that they should've just kept going at that rate and if they had done that they would still have reduce the population without any of these side effects of the one child policy. >> he was the head of a group of

scientists who drew up the one child policy. what's interesting about them and what a lot of people don't know is that the one child policy was drawn up by rocket scientist he was a russian train scientists who basically didn't have a lot of training in sociology or demography or any of the things we would imagine that somebody who is going to draw up a population policy would have. >> why were rocket scientist designing this one? >> to answer that we have to go back in time. this is coming off the cultural revolution. most of the china's intelligence, the economist and sociologist had really suffered and had no political capital. most of them didn't have computer to work out these calculations that you needed for the demography. the only group of academics and

experts word the defense missile rocket scientist. they had all the resources and the bold thinking because they had been stamped on and criticize. they said we can do this and we can tackle this. this is how are going to do it. the unfortunate thing is they thought of it as a missile and women's for hillary who could be adjusted up and down like flipping a switch. >> their training told them they could tune this process is finally as you might want and that made them a mismatch for what they were trying to do. >> there wasn't any input in there from economists or sociologists. it might've shed some issues on how human behavior could shape such a grand plan. for them to think that a nation that is so in love with sons when they were restricted to one child are going to have more sons, at some point you're going to have more men than women.

it's not rocket science. >> have other countries tried anything like this? >> if you click the 60s and 70s, overpopulation was was a major concern for many countries. this is the time when zero population growth came in also the un were concerned with population planning. mit had some scenarios where at this time we would run out of resources and doomsday scenarios. china wasn't the only one by far, but china took the most drastic steps. india has a sterilization program and for that both india and china received gold medals from the un. >> what did the rest of the

world think, it sounds like the rest of the world didn't immediately recognize the negative consequences. >> i think a lot of the world still doesn't recognize the negative consequences. for a long time there was some support for the idea because people were worried we would overwhelm the planet. that's good for them. that means i can run my dryer and other things. china for a long time maintain that their population policy was being run without coercion. how could you possibly have something so unpopular and still have great result without coercion. for very long time that was the belief for a lot of people. either they didn't know or didn't want to know. you have a lot of people speaking out in fear of the one child policy. i talked to some who were

concerned about climate change, feminists and they still say we should have something like a universal one child policy. >> you write in one year loan, 1983, china sterilize 23 million people. that's more than the combined population of new york, los angeles and chicago. in addition to sterilization what else did they do to enforce the policy? >> this is such an unpopular policy for a lot of reasons. people might not have minded only having one child but they probably minded intrusiveness of the state into their bedroom. in order to make it work they need -- sterilization was one. they didn't trust that people would use contraception on their own so they insisted that if you've had your one child you had to be sterilized, like it or not. we don't trust. >> this was from the beginning. >> pretty much.

then they design these ied's that you couldn't easily remove yourself and then there's forced abortions and after six months forced abortions were illegal. it was still carried out as late as 2012. >> talk about the the woman and why did she become prominent. >> she was a woman from the countryside and they had a daughter first. she was pregnant with her second child and she had believed or hoped that the second child was permissible. they had been working in the cities and they were migrant workers. but they came to her door and said you can't have this child. if you're going to have a second child you have to pay a fine and it was like c6000 dollars. that. that was something they couldn't

afford. they tried negotiating. she was trying to of aid family planning officials until you carried the baby till full term because she ran the risk that they could take the baby from abortion. when she was seven months old they took her to the hospital. they covered her head and took her to a hospital and forster to have the baby. what happened in her case is that a relative came to visit her in the hospital and she was lying in the bed with the fully formed fetus right next to her and they snapped a picture and put it on a cell phone and this went viral and china. this brought forth the human face of the one child policy. >> that case felt like the intersection between the technological change in the economic changes going on in

china. you had somebody who had an iphone and was wired to the rest of the world and yet had found themselves captive of this policy that was and it's only way a relic. did that case actually have any impact on policy? do we not know? >> i think it had an impact in the sense of raising public awareness. for a long time there is a sense that the one policy child was not so significant anymore that yes there were some issues but these were part of her recent past and china was going to host the olympic and the economy was growing so well. it just wasn't that big of an issue anymore since a lot of people in private sector jobs can afford to pay the fine or get a ride it. migrants are moving around to different cities and it was

easier to avoid detection. some felt it didn't think it mattered anymore but this case brought forth the sense that yes these things are still happening. >> comedy people in china are subject to the one child policy? >> the one child policy is a basket of policies. i would say about one third of all chinese households are restricted to that strict one child policy. the rest have slightly more fluid restrictions. in cases of some rule areas you could have a second child if your first one was a girl. you just can't wholeheartedly have whatever you want. you could maybe have a second child if you were in a dangerous profession like a coal miner or fisherman, you could have a second child or if you're part of the minority tribes. >> there was some news in the headlines about a change in the policy. what was preserved in what was

discarded. >> china announced it was going to move to a nationwide to child policy. there still a restriction. you still have to get a birth permit. it was a bigger playpen. >> say loosen the rules but still intervened very closely in people's private lives. >> yes you're going to have to get a certificate and registration for your child. >> lets switch gears. i want to talk about you and how you got interested in the subject. if you can, you write in the book, i am the youngest of five daughters all conceived in hopes of a son that never was. where did you grow up? >> i lived in malaysia. i'm an overseas chinese. my grandparents migrated to malaysia.

we didn't have anything where the cultural revolution would shake out. in my family's case, with my father was the 16th out of 18. >> just one mother? >> no my ran father was a rich man and had three wives and he was the 16th sun from the third wife. >> china was always there in the part of our family tradition. also, because we are five daughters, every time we showed

up at a gathering, they were always disapproving and said you should be glad you're not in china. you'd never be bored or you would be given away. you wouldn't exist. >> my accountant father never ceased to remind his daughters that they were liabilities instead of assets. >> does he may not in financial terms? >> yes he did count that way. he was an auditor. when we were growing up, we were very aware that he wasn't going to spend a lot of money to send us to college or educate us beyond a certain level because we were girls. it would be very different if we were boys. >> did he do that in fact? did he pay for your college education? >> no, i went to college on my own and paid for it with scholarships. at. >> at that point did you know you wanted to be a writer? >> i sort of did. when i was 16 years old, i want

to minor competition of essay. >> it was the commonwealth essay and all british colonies submit their little essays and i wrote something boring that i can't even remember but the offshoot of that was that i was invited to meet the create queen of england. she happened to be in malaysia for some sort of reading. this is probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to me before. i was just this teenager in malaysia. my parents were also invited to see the queen. this is the first time my father looked at me like maybe i was an asset. >> venue decided to become a journalist at some point. you had already paid for your own college education and later on, you decided i want to go to

china and had you artie been working as a journalist and then you said now i want to figure out a way to get to china or what was the path that led you there? >> i started as a journalist and had a scholarship from a local paper company there. my first job was working at a tabloid as a crime reporter. they would send us to interview and i felt there was more to journalism than this. i wasn't sure, i didn't think that path was going to be in china. i thought maybe i would be in indonesian correspondent. china seem to be too close, it was too full of relatives that would be me in another setting if i were lucky enough to be born somewhere else. i had relatives that say don't go to china.

it wasn't glamorous or sexy enough but somehow my path let me there. >> then you are posted to mainland china in 2006. >> before that i was doing a lot of reporting, you lived in beijing for how many years? >> for about four years. >> during that period, imagine you are already getting interested in the subject of the one child policy. we will talk in a moment that really galvanize that. did you begin to see it around you? were you seeing the the policy at that point? >> i was really seeing it back in 2003 in hong kong.

i was going to all these factories and it was fascinating but a lot of our factory owners said we can't get workers. >> i said how could you have difficulty? this is the most populous nation. i talked to a lot of economists about their theories and even at the time there was a sense that may be the one child policy but than they thought it was too soon and this is us short-term economic problem but really that was the beginning. >> something happen in 2008 that made you focus on the policy. what happen? >> as i moved to beijing to write about the olympics and it

wasn't because i knew anything about sports, but it so wonderful way to view china as a rising nation and the big money that was going to the olympic sponsorships, the marketing the space issues, the change in sociology and infrastructure. it was wonderful. but something happened early that sort of derailed the whole story. at that time when the earthquake happened i was on the border. >> for people who don't remember, the earthquake killed tens of thousands of people. it was the largest bike that china had in the long time. you set at the time you happen to be covering. >> i tried to cover another natural disaster. i wish i do sneak look at what is happening. they didn't lead in any journalist. so i was frustrated. then i flew back to beijing unaware that china was having its own natural disaster.

when i landed in beijing and i turned on my blackberry i was like what happened. oh no, all my colleagues had all made a beeline. i felt like i missed the story. then i thought how can i do the story. there must be many ways to skin a cat. china's appellation is very poor and popular populace. a lot of people go to other parts to work. some of them must be trying to get back home. what if i follow a group of them. so i followed a group of construction workers back home and it took us about three days. we rode trains and bikes and boats and it was a very sad journey because at the end of it all, most of them discovered

that their family had been killed. >> for people who may not know, at the time, this earthquake was a very difficult place to do reporting. they had taken steps to try to manage the story to try to control the narrative that was going to get out to the rest of the world and so when you got there, 11 of the things you discovered was that there were a lot of families that had lost their one child. >> is that right. >> yes, the the thing i didn't realize until later on was that there wasn't area and that had given china's plan the heart and inspiration to take it nationwide.

of course consequently, the end result was very tragic for these families. they lost their only child in many cases. one one of the first and early stories that i did was about all these families who in a matter of weeks were run. >> there's parents who have lost their only child. it started from the earthquake. nobody knew to call it then back then. there were about 76000 joining them yearly. what makes them different is they have tried to lobby beijing for more benefit and more health. there argument is to lose an

only child is to lose economic security. they still have it developed a social safety net and family is very important. when you lose your only child, you lose your retirement plan. that's just an economic sense but of course there's also emotional issues and issues trying to get into an nursing home. there nursing homes that won't admit those with no children. we prefer not to help people without kids. >> soto people, generally speaking, do people rally around the parents who had lost their only child as a point of sympathy or did people say something else? >> people are sympathetic but there's also a stigma in some cases. when you lose your only child, especially in a rule context,

china despite the fact that there down to one child family situation, you're not an adult until your married and you're not have status until you have a child. >> when you talk to young people about the one child policy, sometimes you find that they say even though they know about these cases of coercion and everything else that they say well, look of it hadn't been for this one child policy, i wouldn't of gotten into college. it's already so competitive. what you make of that deal? it's always peerless to try to describe chinese attitudes so broadly but how do they regard the one child policy? >> there's a study by the pew center that was done in 2008

that showed support for the policy. i looked for that question iran was was down to one question that people asked. it was do you support the one child policy and it was a yes or no thing. i think it had more room for a variable response. but that's it. i think it's fair to say that a lot of people did support the idea of reducing population because if you've ever lived in china and had to get in the subway at rush hour or get to the right schools, it really was hard with too many people and you do support it. i think it's sad that the communist party squandered the goodwill that people had bite channeling into such a painful course because there wasn't a lot of support for people to reduce the population, there was, but i don't think they necessarily wanted to support

late-term abortions and sterilization. >> when you're writing about this, those of us who hold foreign passports and write about china feel like what is our praise as a foreign writer. do we have the right of the responsibility to criticize responsibilities in china? some feel they should govern themselves by their own rule, what you make yourself of that. >> we want to take a measured view, yes. certainly has has someone with family in china, i have enormous sympathy for the idea that yes china should grow economically and it's a wonderful idea that in one or two generations we've seen everybody gone to a bicycle aspiration to bmw. yes, good for them. so yes if it has helped, i would be all for it, but the problem was it didn't.

it didn't have that much to do with this economic growth that china had the last 30 years that's one of the crucial insights of this book. the question about the book will be published in china? >> three years ago when i signed the contract, i did receive in our offer for the chinese rights from a state own publication company per they wanted to buy the write and publish the book but they wanted to reserve the right to alter anything that they consider sensitive. i said wait till i finish the book. that offer is now off the table. i would like to see a chinese version of the book out there somewhere. >> perhaps hong kong or taiwan. when did the government into realize they need to change the one child policy? >> probably about 15 years ago. they had started working

together to create scientific evidence that shows that this policy was leaving them on a path to demographic disaster. they had all these numbers that rates had plunged faster than people thought and the gender imbalance. when the policy was conceived, it will wasn't meant to last forever. at that point they were lobbying to say let's do this and let's end this because you achieve whatever results you have and all these issues moving ahead, will be able to encourage people to have more kids. thirty-five or 36 years down the

road they say they're gonna make their change and people say it's too little too late. >> did they say that's not consistent with the kind of political language were using? how did they respond? >> i think it was more of an issue of structural, what we we need to do because the one child policy had created, in order to enforce it they created a huge system where they had a ministry that administered family-planning and this trickled all the way down to the small provinces. for something so complex, you had to have really intimate workings so there's this huge machinery that came up around it

and to dismantle this huge structure, to take away that massive source of revenue to all the states was something that was going to be painful. i don't take it was as much an argument about the demographic. >> you right in the book that china is now confronting a population that is too old, to mail and too few. which of these is the most serious problem do you think? >> i think too old because that's definitely happening. i think by 2015 if senior china were to form its own country, it would be the world's third-largest country. it would be china, india and senior china. that doesn't have anything to do with the one child policy, this has to do with population growth

and the fact that they're living longer. the problem the one child policy has is that they reduce the working population to support the aging population. these people are going to grow older. some of the other problems such as gender imbalance and what this could result in whether this results, some of the speculation we don't know for sure. we definitely know that this big group of elderly people will age and that will raise a lot of issues for china. >> today we are seeing china's economy beginning to slow after three decades of rapid growth. as any of that slowing related to the one child policy? >> it is because one of the biggest challenges of the economy is manufacturing.

that was fueled by cheap labor. now the abundance has gone down. there's just fewer workers. they want to get paid more. so china is trying to transition out of that into a more consumer-based economy but then you have a problem there as well because you have a huge aging aging population and aging consumers don't spend that much. they don't buy the latest cell phones are the latest cars. in china, we look at the seniors. china's attempt to transition and have a huge nation of retirees is going to be challenging. >> i've been to places in beijing over the years. i went to school that used to be a kindergarten and is now her retirement home because there

has been total emergent and the way the population is organized. there's just not enough small kilt kids. >> to get the sense, is there a way to predict what the economic offense will be down the line? >> when you have other countries with massive aging populations, the age demographic is changing. in china's case, it's --dash secondly, they will be much less richer then japan is when japan arrives at this juncture. that will be harder to. everything else is far less developed. they have about 50 years to transition to an aging transition.

china has done it in half the time. >> many people say chana got old before i got rich. another problem you discusses the gender imbalance. the world has never seen such a huge national collection of bachelors, men who will not be able to find mates unless china opens its doors to massive immigration, a highly unlikely scenario. how much of a gender unbalance is there and why should we care? >> there are 30 million more men than women of marriage age. that's about the size of canada. that's pretty significant. this is also not been a happy society with gender imbalance. in the case of the middle east we see the arab spring. in that case i remember demographers identified each group of men of the certain age,

they called it the male youth bulge. >> it's timing in cheek. so in china's case, we don't know for sure, there's been we don't know if they will be more aggressive militarily. i think china could be more aggressive and muscular and not necessarily because they have a gender imbalance. you can see in china areas where they have a much bigger gender imbalance. there's an uptick in the crime rate and economists have been able to work it out to arise in the crime rate deep due to general imbalance. >> is there anything they can do at this point? >> i think the move to the two child policy, they want to encourage people to have more children.

babies take time to grow. were not coined to be able to see any alleviation in 420 or 25 years. i. i read recently that they're trying to incorporate overseas chinese to come back. they're encouraging people to migrate back. i don't know that that will be a big success, i doubt it will be anything close to those kind of numbers. >> there is this mismatch in effect. you've got women in the city who are now getting more education but now there's men in the countryside known as bare branches. >> the women themselves are not in a better off position. the one child policy was very beneficial for some women.

the best time compared to any other time in history so that was good for a while. now you're living in a society where there many few women than men. that could suggest you have the upper hand or you have the power but china has more pressure to get married. we don't see many women getting more value. we see a rise in the mistress culture. you see hardly any women at the top level. i don't see that happening. >> why do you think that isn't happening.

you would think the rule of supply and demand would suggest the value of women is going out. what you think is happening? >> it's hard to uproot an age-old century. we can all name high achieving chinese women but the structure itself is still very male centric. for example, china has just recently passed their first domestic violence law. there still was issue that favor inheritance for mail line and the registration of property for men over women. it's until and when they change the glass ceiling or the bamboo ceiling. >> i what point do you think they're trying to undo some of the political effects of the one child policy. >> i think they're going to raise the retirement age. there's such a huge aging population and china has one of the earliest retirement ages. you can retire as early as 50

years old. of course that's unpopular on a personal level. a lot of people want to retire. they're definitely trying to build up their social service safety net as far as they can. it's still not enough. >> when you look at the legacy of the one child policy is there anything in there that makes you think this was a good thing. >> i think what was the good thing was what came before that. the problem is we tend to confuse that policy to the be all and all that it needed to be done and there was no other alternative. really it was more a graduated process. we should've made more contraceptives available and encourage more qualities. these are all good things along

the way, but somewhere along the path they decided they needed to juice it up economically and take this very extreme approach and that's when it all went apart. >> this has been a hallmark of the last 60 years or so, the idea that you take something that could be valuable but then if you turn it into a great leap policy. >> right let's do this great radical thing and we can the frog and get in front of everyone else. >> one thing that's really interesting is that they've begun to change the policy to a two child policy and yet people aren't rushing out the next day and having that second child. what's going on. how may people are in fact taking advantage of the policy?

>> china's been loosening the policy for a while and if one of the couples, then they could have another child. i think 15% of the couples took it up. i think the two child policy will be very similar. there was a lot of public opinion that shows we can't support a second child. so the one child policy has been successful in that regard. for so many people the concept is one child because we are going to give everything that is best to that one child. >> invest in that one child. >> yes the economic advantages is best for one child. >> ten or 15 years ago, people talked about the rise of the

little emperors. these were the one child who had been the object of all the attention from two parents and four grandparents. everybody wondered if we would have a generation of spoiled child. what happened to the little emperor? >> he and she all grew up. there are in their 30s. their grandparents are in the 80s and 90s. that little child is going to have to give back in sixfold to this for 21 structure. that sense of the little emperor becoming a little slave is happening more because china already has 25% of the world parkinson's sufferers. that will jump in their similar numbers across the board for dimension anything else that affects old age.

we owe the western world how to care for aging parents. in the emotional sense, the demands you have, imagine having to share that among two, three, four adults. >> i have a lot of chinese fence who talk about the burden of trying to support their parents and it's really extraordinary. >> it also affects the decision to have more children. they said don't want to have a second child because i don't know that i can take care of my parents. >> historically, chinese families were large. it was your grandfather who was one of 16 kids. you think china will go back in the direction of large families or will be there a cultural

overhang that will go on for a long time? >> i don't see how they can. so many people have moved to the city for the first time in history. where are all these large families going to live together? it was much different on the farm. where you going to do this with housing crisis? >> have countries tried to copy what china did when it comes to the population management policy ? >> there was a large amount of propaganda, nothing as extreme as the one child policy but propaganda saying you should be selfish or crazy to have more than one child. they also had propaganda campaigns.

i remember seeing pictures where you would have a loaf of bread and many hands reaching for it. stop it too was there campaign. many countries didn't do it but none of them want that extreme route. most of them now are in an issue with declining population. to help all tried to turn on the baby tap with no success. >> one interesting aspect is that you got pregnant in the course of working as a journalist in china. talk to me about that experience pretty how did that shape your sense of this issue? >> i had a syndrome that was the leading cause of in fertility. for a long time i wasn't sure if i wanted children or if i could have them. when the earthquake happen, i wasn't sure, i was still on the fence but i was also aware that time was running out and i didn't have the luxury of choice. when the earthquake happened and

i was helping parents and following them to the end of the journey, but i was myself pregnant. when i went back to beijing and i was getting really tired and depressed i thought it was because of the stories but then i went for this scan and suddenly i could see. i tried to be very restraint about it but it's hard when you see this scan and see the heart beating. this is a very strange feeling. then i had a miscarriage. this all happened before the olympics. again, i was very devastated by that. i tried to work my way through it. then later later on, i had ivs in beijing. it's a very strange pross