Books
Monday, 25 January 2010 07:01
Written by JFK Miller
Xinran’s new book is her most personal yet
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, Xinran’s sixth and latest book, is the one she found most painful to write. So painful, in fact, that the London-based Chinese author put it off for over 20 years, although she has spent that long collecting material for it. The book, published this month by Random House, is made up of stories of Chinese mothers who gave up their daughters for adoption, or were forced to abandon them outside hospitals or orphanages. Xinran gives a voice to these ordinary women just as empathically as she did with her breakthrough first book, 2002’s The Good Woman of China, a memoir based on stories she heard while hosting a nightly radio show in Beijing back in the 80s when she was one of China’s top broadcast journalists.
“Actually this idea came to me when I was writing The Good Women of China,” Xinran told That's Shanghai. “But I was too scared to write it because it was too painful to tell people this story, so I tried to avoid it. Then, when I was in America in 2006 promoting The Good Women of China, over a hundred Chinese girls from the ages of five to 18, who were adopted by American families, came up to me and asked the same question, ‘Why didn’t my Chinese mum want me?’ Some of their thoughts were very negative like, ‘Because I’m ugly,’ or ‘Because my mum is a bad person.’ That really hurt me, even after 20 years in journalism. So I thought it was very crucial for these mothers to explain their reasons.”
Those reasons, Xinran discovered, ranged from destructive age-old traditions which favored boys over girls; giving up a second child because of China’s one-child policy; and harsh economic necessity. Xinran’s research, which lasted from 1988 until late 2009, took her right around China for interviews with over 40 women, all from different walks of life – street cleaners, successful business woman, midwives and peasants. Some of these women opened up to her immediately; others took 10 years to fully tell their story. Some stories were heartbreaking; others were truly harrowing. One mother in the countryside told of having to watch her baby daughter wrenched from her at birth and drowned like an unwanted kitten.
“I hope people can understand, and other mothers can understand, they’re [the mothers] not bad people for this, they’re not criminals for this. We understand their pain in giving up their child and understand what they did at that time. I just wanted to give those daughters, something from their own birth mothers, who they have never had a chance to meet. Every time I talk about this I just want to cry.”
As with her previous books, Xinran expects to face some Chinese critics. “A lot of Chinese say to me, ‘You make our country lose face.’ They say, ‘If you want to write something why don’t you write about our beauty, or write about the future?’”
“In 2002, when The Good Women of China was published lots of Chinese students stood up during my talk and said that I was a liar, they didn’t believe that the Cultural Revolution was real. But now I think that China is much more open than before because local media, like local magazines and newspapers, have a lot more historical stories. It’s completely different, even from a few years ago.”
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is out February 5
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