Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love

Xinran

Mar 2011 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. Her searing stories of mothers who have been driven to abandon their daughters or give them up for adoption is a masterful and significant work of literary reportage and oral history.

Xinran has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who have given up their daughters. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, these women had to give up their daughters for adoption; others even had to watch as their baby daughters were taken away at birth and drowned. Xinran beautifully portrays the “extra-birth guerrillas” who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; naïve young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the “pebble mother” on the banks of the Yangzte River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can’t produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state.

For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.

Ratings and reviews

The topic is searing: stories of Chinese women forced to see their infant daughters killed or abandoned because of the one-baby rule. It is impossible to know the pain these Chinese women suffered during that bleak period in Chinese history when want of a son was so great, parents would kill their baby girls. But Xinran's writing made me want to scream. She is an author in need of a good editor. The subject is too profoundly disturbing to go on and on about matters that are too far afield. I'm not talking about using five shimmering adjectives in place of one razor-sharp verb (ie: beautiful prose writer like the late Pat Conroy). Xinran would do things such as become diverted by one of her subject's bicycle theft, and go on and on so much so you lose the flow and feel. I found it distracting. It should have been a powerful novel that shines a light on the heartbreak of those women and those times.

Excellent book! It was extremely heart wrenching. There were times when I had to put it down because I internalized the pain and suffering the women were going through - having to kill, abandon or give up pieces of their hearts and souls, their beautiful, beautiful daughters, because of customs and culture, was unfathomable. I kept wondering, when and how it all started, for them to think that baby boys’ lives are worth more than girls. Without females, how could there be males? Thus, both lives are equally important!!!

About the author

Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958 and was a successful journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London, where she began work on her seminal book about Chinese women’s lives, The Good Women of China. Since then she has written a regular column for the Guardian, appeared frequently on radio and television and published the acclaimed Sky Burial and a book of her Guardian columns called What the Chinese Don't Eat. She lives in London but travels regularly to China.