only child : a person who never had a brother or sister独生子；独生女
I was an only child.
我是独生子。
As an only child, it was her duty to take care of her aging parents.
作为家里的独生女，她有义务赡养年迈的父母。
UNLIKE SOME of her friends, Kalinda Duan, a 28-year-old woman from Shanxi province, is not opposed to marriage. Having grown up without siblings, she thinks the companionship of matrimony wonderful. But she has one firm requirement of a future husband—he must also be an only child. No one can persuade her otherwise—“even if it’s the son of the party secretary of the State Council”.
In China’s cut-throat marriage market, cars, houses and savings are all topics for a first date. More offbeat is the number of siblings. In Shanghai Mr Yue (who does not want to share his full name), the organiser of a matchmaking group with thousands of members on WeChat, a messaging app, says that many will politely turn down someone who has a brother or sister. They are typical. A working paper by Fangqi Wen of Ohio State University finds that only children are more likely than others to marry only children. Their chances of such a match are about 18 percentage points higher than those of their peers with siblings, even after accounting for things such as education and family background.
Contrary to popular belief, only children are not even in the majority among young Chinese today, so they do have the choice. Though China had a one-child policy from 1979 to 2015, it was never uniformly enforced, especially in the countryside. From 1984 a “1.5-child policy” also allowed some rural couples to have a second child if the first was a girl. Only children make up little more than 40% of all university-age students, according to a nationally representative survey in 2019