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Product Description
Product Description
An extraordinarily powerful follow-up to her bestselling The Good Women of China -- heartbreaking, shocking stories, including Xinran's own experience, of Chinese mothers who have lost or had to abandon their daughters and are still searching.
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is made up of the stories of Chinese mothers whose daughters have been wrenched from them, and also brings us the voices of some adoptive mothers from different parts of the world. These are stories which Xinran could not bring herself to tell previously -- because they were too painful and close to home. In the footsteps of Xinran's Good Women of China, this is personal, immediate, full of harrowing, tragic detail but also uplifting, tender moments.
Ten chapters, ten women and many stories of heartbreak, including her own: Xinran once again takes us right into the lives of Chinese women -- students, successful business women, midwives, peasants, all with memories which have stained their lives. 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 were forced to abandon them -- on city streets, outside hospitals, orphanages or on station platforms -- and others even had to watch their baby daughters being taken away at birth, and drowned. Here are the 'extra-birth guerrillas' who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold onto more than one baby; naive young student girls who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the 'pebble mother' on the banks of the Yangzte still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can't produce a male heir; and finally there is Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but 'confiscated' by the state.
The book sends a heartrending message from their birth mothers to all those Chinese girls who have been adopted overseas (at the end of 2006 there were over 120,000 registered adoptive families for Chinese orphans, almost all girls, in 27 countries), to show them how things really were for their mothers, and to tell them they were loved and will never be forgotten.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Born in Beijing in 1958, XINRAN was a journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London, where she wrote her bestselling book The Good Women of China. Since then she has written a regular column for the Guardian, appeared frequently on radio and TV and published Sky Burial, What the Chinese Don't Eat, a novel (Miss Chopsticks), and a groundbreaking work of oral history, China Witness. Her charity, The Mothers' Bridge of Love, was founded to help disadvantaged Chinese children and to build a bridge of understanding between the West and China.
From the Hardcover edition.
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I identified with each and every mother and wondered which story was the most similar to the true story of my daughter's history. While I will never know the circumstances of her birth and adoption, I now know for a certainty that her mother loved her desperately. I think of these women's stories almost daily. I am eternally grateful that a woman half way around the world loved my child first and sacrificed her love to give my daughter a chance for a better life.
Thank you, Xinran, for giving me the ability to assure my daughter that her birth mother loved her dearly and thinks of her every day with complete confidence. This knowledge will give strength and comfort to my child for the rest of her life.
Its melodramatic flaws aside, this book's most lasting impact on me will come on the day - if such a day ever comes - I head in for my wife's next ultrasound. Having already had a daughter, I had been hoping that any next child would be a boy. After having read this book, I couldn't care less if I have another ten girls, if only to demonstrate to my Chinese wife's extended family that such things shouldn't matter to any thinking, feeling human being.
I'm giving this four stars for the book's enduring impact on my mindset (definately not for the sensationalist way it sought to implant it) and for the clear and engaging style in which it was written.
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