Culture

by Xinran

Publisher: Chatto and Windus.
(4.5/5)

In this beautiful and moving book, Xinran retells stories told to her by women in China when she worked as a radio journalist in the late 1980s and 1990s. This time is known by the Chinese government as the ‘Reform and Opening’ period, and Xinran’s radio programme, “Words on the Night Breeze,” was one of the earliest talkback programmes in China. It mainly dealt with women’s issues, with Xinran attempting to explore what it meant to be a woman in China during this time. This is a question that Xinran is still exploring today, and on which she has published several books including The Good Women of China and China Witness.
Her most recent book focuses upon the issue of the adoption of Chinese babies, predominately girls. The backbone of the book is the collection of very personal stories from Xinran’s sources, which she weaves together with her own experience of being a woman and a mother in China. This is a very real and raw book, exposing a part of China that few people outside of that world will ever glimpse. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother has a twofold purpose. First, Xinran aims to provide a context for those adopted girls as they get older, by attempting to explain to them the different conditions under which women lived in China, especially peasant women who have little rights or independence. The traditional compulsion for the production of boys in Chinese society, and the one-child policy introduced by the government to restrict population growth, means that girls born in China could be subject to death or abandonment. The stories in Xinran’s book are therefore intended to try to answer some of these daughters’ questions about why their mothers could not keep them. However, while pursuing this end, Xinran also provides an important historical narrative for the post-Cultural Revolution era of China. This is especially important for those peasant women who, without the endeavours of writers like Xinran, would never have their stories documented.
Totally absorbing, this book is highly recommended for anyone interested in China or women’s issues in general.