You could say she was lucky as the third girl born to a rural family

– lucky that her parents weren’t so desperate that they abandoned or

murdered her to save the family’s scarce resources. Every year in that

period thousands of baby girls died simply because of their sex; they

were poisoned, left exposed on the hillsides, suffocated or buried

alive, and some mothers even believed that the sacrifice of a daughter

guaranteed the birth of a son the following year. I can even imagine

that they convinced themselves that sentencing their female

offspring to death was better than condemning them to life as a

woman in China, though it’s hard to grasp the sheer wretchedness

that would lead someone to believe that.