LESLEY DOWNER: April 1, 2011 Lesley Downer is a British journalist who writes on Asia. Her latest book is a novel, “The Courtesan and the Samurai.”
Jane Brown:
Jane Brown: In 1989, the Chinese writer and broadcaster Xinran was in a remote mountain village in Shandong Province having dinner with the headman when she heard cries from an adjoining room, where his daughter-in-law was giving birth. A while later, as the midwife collected her fee, Xinran noticed a movement in the slops bucket. “To my absolute horror,” she recalls, “I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail.” But she was the only one who was shocked. “It’s not a child,” the headman’s wife told her. “If it was, we’d be looking after it, wouldn’t we? It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it.”
The traditional Chinese belief that, as Xinran puts it, “you do not count as a human being unless you have a son” to carry on the family line has been severely intensified by the Communist government’s one-child policy, promulgated in 1979 in an effort to control the country’s population growth. Since having more than one child became illegal in many areas, families choose to get rid of girl after girl until the desired male child is born.
Xinran sees painful evidence of this on a train trip when she meets a husband traveling with his wife and their little daughter. As the train is leaving the station, she looks out the window and sees the child sitting alone on the platform. Later she discovers that these seemingly devoted parents have abandoned their daughter — the fourth to be jettisoned in this way — in hopes that the next child the mother bears will be a boy. The Chinese call such people “extra birth guerrillas,” since they are trying to start over in places where no one will know them or their family history.
The author of “The Good Women of China” and other books that have been translated into English, Xinran was a radio journalist in Nanjing until moving to Britain in 1997. Before her departure, her program for women, “Words on the Night Breeze,” had millions of listeners: at that time, few Chinese owned televisions and many were illiterate, so radio journalists reached far more people than their colleagues on television or at newspapers. Xinran received hundreds of letters and phone calls, and told some of her correspondents’ harrowing stories on air.
Her program — and now this book —gave a voice to some of the poorest women in Chinese society, whose stories would otherwise never be heard. Among them are women like Kumei, a dishwasher who twice tried to kill herself because she’d been forced to drown her baby daughters. When a child is born, Kumei explains, the midwife prepares a bowl of warm water — called Killing Trouble water, for drowning the child if it’s a girl, or Watering the Roots bath, for washing him if it’s a boy.
Xinran also investigates Chinese orphanages, for many of which the word “Dickensian” would be totally inadequate. The children abandoned there are almost always girls, and they regularly arrive with burns between their legs, marks made as the midwife holds the newborn under an oil lamp to check her sex. Mothers forced to abandon their babies often leave mementos in their clothing, hoping the children will be able to trace them later on, but the orphanages routinely throw these sad tokens away.
“Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother” is full of heart-rending tales. They are raw and shocking, simply told and augmented with passages that provide information about matters like the one-child policy, the history of orphanages and Chinese adoption laws.
Xinran (who has founded a charity called the Mothers’ Bridge of Love, for Western families who adopt Chinese children) is so clearly well intentioned that it seems churlish to snipe at her. Nevertheless, sometimes her repeated references to her own emotional reactions, like breaking down in tears because her own mother never hugged her, become a little hard to take. One can imagine her being very comfortable on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. She also reprints gushing letters sent to her by adoptive mothers. Then again, it’s quite possible that Xinran means for her book to be judged not as a piece of literature but as a polemic. And it is a very powerful polemic indeed.
The author of “The Good Women of China” and other books that have been translated into English, Xinran was a radio journalist in Nanjing until moving to Britain in 1997. Before her departure, her program for women, “Words on the Night Breeze,” had millions of listeners: at that time, few Chinese owned televisions and many were illiterate, so radio journalists reached far more people than their colleagues on television or at newspapers. Xinran received hundreds of letters and phone calls, and told some of her correspondents’ harrowing stories on air.
Her program — and now this book —gave a voice to some of the poorest women in Chinese society, whose stories would otherwise never be heard. Among them are women like Kumei, a dishwasher who twice tried to kill herself because she’d been forced to drown her baby daughters. When a child is born, Kumei explains, the midwife prepares a bowl of warm water — called Killing Trouble water, for drowning the child if it’s a girl, or Watering the Roots bath, for washing him if it’s a boy.
Xinran also investigates Chinese orphanages, for many of which the word “Dickensian” would be totally inadequate. The children abandoned there are almost always girls, and they regularly arrive with burns between their legs, marks made as the midwife holds the newborn under an oil lamp to check her sex. Mothers forced to abandon their babies often leave mementos in their clothing, hoping the children will be able to trace them later on, but the orphanages routinely throw these sad tokens away.
“Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother” is full of heart-rending tales. They are raw and shocking, simply told and augmented with passages that provide information about matters like the one-child policy, the history of orphanages and Chinese adoption laws.
Xinran (who has founded a charity called the Mothers’ Bridge of Love, for Western families who adopt Chinese children) is so clearly well intentioned that it seems churlish to snipe at her. Nevertheless, sometimes her repeated references to her own emotional reactions, like breaking down in tears because her own mother never hugged her, become a little hard to take. One can imagine her being very comfortable on Oprah Winfrey’s sofa. She also reprints gushing letters sent to her by adoptive mothers. Then again, it’s quite possible that Xinran means for her book to be judged not as a piece of literature but as a polemic. And it is a very powerful polemic indeed.
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