I had to put this book down several times due to process what I had read. Highly recommended reading!
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Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love Hardcover – March 8, 2011
by
Xinran
(Author)
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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.
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.
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateMarch 8, 2011
- Dimensions5 x 1 x 8 inches
- ISBN-101451610890
- ISBN-13978-1451610895
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Xinran (Good Women of China) collects the heartbreaking stories of Chinese women forced to give up their baby girls because of the one-child-only policy or feudal traditions that prefer boys, in an oral history written for those abandoned daughters. Speaking with midwives, students, businesswomen, adoption workers, peasants, and "extra-birth guerrilla troops" (people who live on the lam eluding the system so they can have more than one baby), Xinran is compassionate and remarkably adept at getting her interviewees to open up about their most painful memories: how some mothers were forced to put their babies up for adoption or abandon them at hospitals, orphanages, or on the street, and how they've seen newborns drowned or smothered at birth. She shows how outdated traditions, modern policies, and punishing poverty spur the abandonment of so many female infants, and an abnormally high suicide rate for women of childbearing age. This is a brutally honest book written for those relinquished children, so that they will know how much their birth mothers loved them and how--in the words of one mother who gave up her daughter--"they paid for that love with an endless stream of bitter tears." (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* The author of The Good Women of China (2002) now offers a gut-wrenching account of Chinese women forced to give up (or worse) their daughters in the 1980s and 1990s because of China�s one child policy. Implemented to control China�s booming population, the law led to the abandonment and murder of countless female babies, as many families stood to lose land if they didn�t have a son to inherit and manage it. Formerly a popular radio personality in Nanjing, Xinran sought out the sad stories of women whose daughters were taken from them after birth. And not all the families who gave up their daughters were peasants struggling to hold onto their land. Xinran was horrified to witness a father doting on his young daughter on a train, only to abandon her hours later. Xinran gives Chinese women who lost their daughters a voice in this powerful volume, laying bare their raw pain. This eye-opening work is made even more shocking by how recent most of these women�s stories are, even as Xinran counterbalances the heartbreak with letters from families outside China who have adopted Chinese babies. --Kristine Huntley
Review
“[Xinran’s] program – and now this book – gave a voice to some of the poorest women in Chinese society, whose stories would otherwise never be heard… MESSAGE FROM AN UNKNOWN CHINESE MOTHER is full of heart-rending tales. They are 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…A very powerful polemic.” --New York Times Book Review
"I'm a longtime admirer of Xinran's writing. She has a rare gift as both a compassionate listener and a mesmerizing storyteller. In reading her books, I always feel as if I am in a room, listening with Xinran, as strangers unveil the haunting details of their lives that grab my imagination and my heart. " -Amy Tan
“Xinran collects the heartbreaking stories of Chinese women forced to give up their baby girls….[she] is compassionate and remarkably adept at getting her interviewees to open up about their most painful memories.” –Publishers Weekly, Pick of the Week
"A heartbreaking examination of the reasons why Chinese women give up their girls for adoption." -Kirkus
“The core of Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is the individual stories of women who have lost their daughters. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by them.” –The Economist
“This is an extraordinary book told with generosity and warmth by a brilliant storyteller.” —Financial Times
"I'm a longtime admirer of Xinran's writing. She has a rare gift as both a compassionate listener and a mesmerizing storyteller. In reading her books, I always feel as if I am in a room, listening with Xinran, as strangers unveil the haunting details of their lives that grab my imagination and my heart. " -Amy Tan
“Xinran collects the heartbreaking stories of Chinese women forced to give up their baby girls….[she] is compassionate and remarkably adept at getting her interviewees to open up about their most painful memories.” –Publishers Weekly, Pick of the Week
"A heartbreaking examination of the reasons why Chinese women give up their girls for adoption." -Kirkus
“The core of Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is the individual stories of women who have lost their daughters. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by them.” –The Economist
“This is an extraordinary book told with generosity and warmth by a brilliant storyteller.” —Financial Times
About the Author
Xinran (born in Beijing, 1958) was a radio journalist in China before moving to London, where she wrote her bestselling book. The Good Women of China (2002), a collection of stories drawn from hundreds of interviews conducted during her time as a presenter on her groundbreaking program Words on the Night Breeze (1989-97). It has now been translated into over thirty languages. She is also the author of Sky Burial (2004); What the Chinese Don't Eat (2006), based on her columns in The Guardian; Miss Chopsticks (2007); and China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation (2008), a collection of stories from the grandparents of modern China. She often advises Western media (including BBC and Sky News) about Western relations with China and makes frequent television and radio appearances. She is a member of the advisory board of the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature. In 2004, Xinran set up the charity The Mothers' Bridge of Love (MBL), which reaches out to Chinese children in all corners of the world by creating a bridge of understanding between China and the West and between adoptive and birth cultures. Learn more at www.mothersbridge.org.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A BOOK WRITTEN
FOR ADOPTED DAUGHTERS
It took a long time for me to summon the courage to relive the personal memories and experiences of my life as a reporter in China. In The Good Women of China, my first book, published in 2002, I wrote about those brave women who had told me their stories when I worked as a radio presenter. But there were some stories I could not yet bring myself to tell. They were too painful and too close to home. I am not a particularly courageous woman; I am just a woman who longs to feel a mother’s embrace and that lifelong bond of love and dependence between mother and daughter. Little by little, that longing seeped through me until it began to dominate my thoughts night and day. Reawakening the memories threatened to reopen old wounds: I would miss my own mother more than ever and would feel even more bitterness that I would never have that kind of love.
At a talk I gave at the International Book Fair in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002, someone asked me, “Xinran, what is your dream?”
I didn’t even have to think about the answer. I said, “To be a daughter.”
There was uproar from the audience of several hundred people. “But you were born, so you must be someone’s daughter!”
“In a biological sense, yes,” I responded. “But I was born into a traditional culture, I experienced brutal political upheavals as a child, and my mother and I lived in times that did not consider bonds of family affection important. The result is there’s not a single occasion I can remember when my mother said she loved me, or even hugged me.”
After the meeting, I found a line of silver-haired women waiting for me by the car. They were there, they said, to give me a mother’s embrace. One by one they came up to me, put their arms around me, and kissed my forehead. …
I could not help myself, tears poured down my face. In my heart, I cried, “I’m grateful for their genuine affection, but how I wish my own mother could have held me like this. Every day, since I was a little girl, I have missed my mother’s love so much!”
In 1958, when I was just thirty days old, I was sent away to live with my grandmother. Like millions of Chinese women, my mother believed that anyone who put their family and children before their country and the Party was at best selfish and at worst criminal.
My earliest memory of my mother is of her walking toward me on a very quiet platform in the Nanjing railway station. She was a cloud of purple—her silk scarf draped over her shoulders waved in the breeze. She smiled sweetly and opened her arms to me like a dancer on the stage.
I was five years old and had never called anyone mother before. That day, at my grandmother’s urging, I called my mother “aunty”—what children call any female stranger in China—and as I whispered the word this beautiful woman stiffened and a solitary tear fell down her face.
In 1966, only two weeks after I had begun living with my mother, the Cultural Revolution began. My parents were both sent to a political jail within a month of each other. My younger brother, who was only two and a half, and I became orphans. Ten years later we were all back as one family but no one has ever spoken about how we survived the struggles during that turbulent time.
In 1989, after twelve years of studying and working at a military university, I became a radio presenter. The first time I went to a small village in the countryside, I was devastated by the poverty-stricken lives I witnessed. It was only a forty-minute drive from the city I worked in, but they were so poor that in the summer most children did not even wear trousers, they only had a pair to provide warmth in the winter. I was so shocked to hear from the people I interviewed, face-to-face, the real numbers on how many lives had been lost in the past one hundred years within China. I was so ashamed by my lack of knowledge of traditional Chinese culture and the real history of China.
Until then, I never realized how ignorant I was about the real China and how misguided I was in my education about my mother’s and grandmother’s generations, so I started to reeducate myself by learning the truth from people. I went on a journey to find out the answers to my bewildering questions from my country and my people. Over the next eight years, I traveled around and met more than two hundred Chinese women for my radio program. I listened to them, and their stories struck a chord deep within me. I found myself as one of them—as a daughter, our lives watered down by the tears from our past.
I moved to London in 1997. After eight years of digging, searching, and feeling for Chinese women, I felt empty and run-down. During my time as a radio presenter I had received about a hundred letters every day with personal secrets full of dreams and confusion, and I had witnessed my country jumping onto a rapidly moving express train toward the Western lights, but the people still lacked the necessary education to grasp the massive force of change that was sweeping across the country. Therefore, as a Chinese woman who had walked a long march to find out who I am, I chose to start afresh in London, where I could deepen my understanding of the world.
But once there, I was stunned and hurt by how little Westerners understood the Chinese people. And on my many trips back to China I discovered how little the younger Chinese understood about their parents’ generation. I found that our children have been cut off from the real history and even from their own family history. They have no idea about what kind of life their mothers and grandmothers have endured; they don’t even believe that they have love stories.
Then one day in 1998, while I was teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, an Italian student came to me with a book he had been reading and asked me, “Is it true that Chinese women physically lack emotional cells and are mentally short of love as described in this book?” I was flabbergasted. Finally, through gritted teeth, I told him, “I am going to write a book that will move this world to tears about the Chinese women I know, on their rich feeling, their deep love and unconditional giving.”
Since I began writing books about the lives of Chinese women, I have been fortunate enough to receive countless letters, photographs, and videos from adopted Chinese girls and the adopting families from all over the world. Their letters, like the two that follow (and the others on p. 187 and pp. 195–199), bring me comfort, and it is with their encouragement that I have finally managed to write down the stories of Chinese women who were forced to abandon their babies.
Dear Xinran,
I am the (adoptive) mother of two beautiful daughters of China. My daughters are now 11 and 9. They both are very happy in our family and much loved. They also will never forget they have a birth family in China. They love their birth mothers and both of them, like you, would very much like to see their birth mother’s face and hear her words. Please write your book. In this way they will know the heart of their birth mothers. Though we have told them we will look for their birth mothers if they desire to find them, we have also told them such a search may not be successful. The message you send from birth mothers may be all they ever have of their Chinese family.
One thing you can tell the Chinese birth mothers is that their daughters have not forgotten them. In our family their birth mothers are honored. My daughters and I study Pu Tong Hua. We have already returned to China 2 times with our daughters. They love the land of their birth, as their father and I do. We are proud to be an American Chinese family.
Please send our love, gratitude, and honor to their Chinese mothers.
Thank you,
The Macechko Family
(USA)
Dear Xinran,
So lovely to hear from you. I know just what you mean about how it takes days for your “head” to arrive back after your body. Flying around the world is such an odd experience in that way. Please, please, please do write Messages from Chinese Mums. You have to write it for all those girls. Mei and Xue even now ask why their “tummy mummy” couldn’t look after them. I have to say, I don’t know. Because I do not know. I can’t lie. I can only guess—maybe poverty, maybe postnatal depression, maybe rape, maybe the fact that they are girls, maybe she was a teenager?
I can only guess at the pain. I save all books and newspaper clippings of China, so that when the girls are big, they can read what life was like and try and understand—maybe understand what their birth mother experienced. But, if you wrote some stories of the Chinese mothers, it would be more clearly explained.
I couldn’t read The Good Women of China because I found it too painful. I cried and cried and cried. Each woman I thought of as Mei and Xue’s mother—and what she had to bear and what loss for her to leave her babies. Some day all those adopted girls have to understand that their mothers gave them up—(HOPEFULLY) not because she didn’t love them, but because life was too hard and too painful to bear. They must understand this fully. This is the only way to heal the pain for them of being rejected in that way.
Mei and Xue have brought such joy to our lives. Barry and I are complete with them and our family is a tight, beautiful bond. But I am aware that somewhere there is a mother (if she is alive) who has a deep pain about her girls. I want her to know that the girls are alive and happy and for her not to worry. But I also know that life is very complex and a well-intentioned Westerner can cause many problems easily.
I understand fully about MBL. It is very important. The link between all those girls and their mothers. The link between women of the world is very important. For some, your books are just stories, but for many of us, they are much more than that. Someday Mei and Xue will read your books and understand a little about their birth mum’s life and those of their birth grandmothers. We can only thank you for that.
…
With big hugs, Xinran (Mei and Xue send them also). They are fascinated by you—Xue is very literary and loves the idea that you write books. She had me read out your email (I read out bits). Both girls sense some link with you. It is very interesting. Do come back and see us and come and stay when you are next over.
With love, Ros
(New Zealand)
These letters pour in. They haunt me and make me wonder: if I were an adopted daughter, where would I find answers to my inevitable questions about my strange start in life? In truth, I have been asking similar questions my whole life. I have tried so hard to forge a connection with my mother: I wish I could have known what happened to her during the ten years that she was missing from my life. I have dreamed of asking her if she knows what happened to me and my brother when she wasn’t there. We had no right to play, to speak; we had no one to protect us from the Red Guards’ violence and abuse. Mum, do you know all of this? But I never dared ask her.
I have tried to heal, to make myself a woman with a happy smile each day, but I can’t control myself in the night—lonely fears wake me up again and again. I don’t want to recall missing my mother, but the ache never dulls. And that is why I was afraid to dredge up these things that have cost me so many tears and why I was afraid to write about the women who abandoned their daughters. But it is also why I must tell their stories.
In December 2009, after I had finished editing this book, I returned to China and tried once more to confront my mother. I wanted to unburden myself of long-buried memories; I wanted to tell her what had happened to me, her daughter, during the Cultural Revolution. I wanted her to understand the nightmarish torments I went through, and which still haunt me. For her to know how much I missed her and still long for her, my mother. But I could not get a word out. I just sat silently in front of her, in floods of tears.
Over the years I have begun to understand how those adopted daughters long to understand their birth mothers and to tell them how much they love them. I decided that, no matter how painful it was, I would write down the stories I had stored up for so long. This book was to be an honest record of mothers’ lives, a gift of mother-daughter love that I, a daughter, could share with other daughters, a message from an unknown Chinese mother to her daughter, wherever she may be.
I started writing this book on February 2, 2008, in a little house by the sea on Blues Point Road, Sydney, Australia. Strangely, my labors were accompanied by a fortnight of the violent storms that a southern hemisphere summer sometimes brings.
February 7, 2008, was the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, and the Australian media reported on the tens of thousands of Chinese who joined in the cultural festivities. Among them were more than a hundred families who had adopted Chinese children. As I watched these girls dressed in Chinese costumes asking their Australian parents in English what the Spring Festival was, I had mixed feelings. Were these girls really China’s daughters?
Yes, I think they were. As the ancients said: when oranges from the south were transplanted to the north, they were still oranges, even if they tasted a bit different. I believe that even though these girls have been brought up in a foreign land and a foreign culture, the blood of their Chinese mothers still runs in their veins.
But what do their birth mothers feel? Does the unknown Chinese mother feel joy or sorrow at knowing that her beloved daughter is now happy in another mother’s arms? I did not actually give birth to a daughter, nor am I the mother of an adopted daughter, but I weep every time I try to imagine how they feel. And once I lost a little girl who was like a daughter to me, so I know something of what they feel. There is an emptiness that can never be filled, there is an ache felt by the broken-hearted birth mother, by the adoptive family in the West, and by the daughter who will spend the rest of her life in a dual embrace—because the life she lives is a product of great joy but also of great sorrow.
By the end of 2010, the number of Chinese orphans adopted worldwide had reached more than 120,000. America has the largest number of adopted Chinese children from China, nearly 80,000.* These children have gone to twenty-seven countries—and almost all were girls. Most Chinese find the adoption figures almost incredible, just as they find it hard to believe that Chinese children have found mothers and homes in so many countries. Why does China have so many orphaned girls?
Most Chinese would say that it is because there is something inherently wrong with traditional culture; in other words, old customs are rooted in ignorance. Westerners, on the other hand, believe that the one-child policy is to blame. I began to gather information for myself when, in 1989, I started presenting Words on the Night Breeze, a program for women started in Henan, and then moved to Jiangsu Radio in Nanjing.† As this job took me all over China doing interviews, I came across women who had been forced to abandon their babies. I feel there are three main reasons why.
First, female babies have been abandoned in farming cultures of the East since ancient times; second, a combination of sexual ignorance, which remains rife, and the economic boom; and last, there is the one-child policy.
In developing countries, with their communities that rely on primitive methods of farming, or on hunting, gathering, and fishing, hard manual labor is survival; so a preference for boys is inevitable. Males have an indisputable physical advantage over females when it comes to laboring, carrying goods, hunting, and defense. Another factor that cannot be ignored in China is an ancient system of land distribution that still persists today. It began with the Xia dynasty (approximately 2070 BC to 1600 BC), and found its most complete form in the Well Field System of the Zhou dynasty (1045 BC to 256 BC), and the Equal Field System set up around AD 485 by the Northern Wei rulers. What these had in common with the present system is the principle of allocating fields based on the number of household members. Discrimination in favor of men became, therefore, an immutable law. In AD 485 a list was drawn up of households, and then land was allocated based on the number of permanent household members. Land was divided into two kinds: arable fields, for growing grain, and mulberry tree land, for feeding the silkworms. Every male aged fifteen years or more received 40 mu of arable land, while females received 20 mu, and slaves and servants could also be allocated land. This land reverted to the government on death. As for mulberry tree land, males received 20 mu, and this became their property—they could buy and sell it and it did not need to be handed back to the government. During the Tang dynasty, AD 618 to 907, it was clearly stipulated that females were not normally to be given their own land. And so dynasties have come and gone through Chinese history, but the ways in which land is apportioned have never really changed, and the basic inequality between men and women has became a deeply entrenched tradition. In the villages, boy children not only carried on the family line and inherited the clan name, they were the source of the family property and the creators of its wealth.
Article 22 of the Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China, promulgated on December 29, 2001, says: “Discrimination against and maltreatment of women who give birth to baby girls or who suffer from infertility are prohibited. Discrimination against, maltreatment, and abandonment of baby girls are prohibited.” However, a “good woman” must give birth to a boy—every married village woman knows this. It is both her god-given duty and her parents-in-law’s most fervent hope. So in some poorer villages, if the first child is a girl, the unfortunate child is abandoned or even smothered at birth. Where birth control is not properly understood, abandoning infants is just another law of nature that has operated from time immemorial. If the extra infant the family could not bring up was a boy, he would often be adopted by another family or sold. For a girl, death was almost inevitable.
China’s one-child-per-family policy was drawn up at the Second National Symposium on Population held in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan province, on December 11–14, 1979. The then vice premier Chen Muhua (who also happened to be the first woman premier in China’s history) convinced delegates in the closing debate that limiting couples to one child could slow the rapid rate of population growth in China. That was the start of the “population revolution,” which remains the subject of fierce debate to this day. The renowned Chinese specialist in population studies Professor Ma Yanchu* had warned in the early 1950s that the country’s population was growing too fast; at his suggestion, the government carried out China’s first population survey in the early part of 1953. The results were published on November 1 of that year: at midnight on June 1, 1953, the Chinese population stood at 600 million. In just four years since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the population had grown by 100 million. In his comparative study New Theory of Population (1957), Professor Ma wrote that in the years 1953–57 the population may actually have exceeded the 20 percent annual increase found in the 1953 survey. In his view, the slow growth of manufacturing technology together with a surge in population and its attendant social conflicts meant that as the global economy and civilization developed, China would lag behind. Ma’s ideas were diametrically opposed to Mao’s, which were that the population and the economy should grow in parallel. As a result, Ma was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. But history proved Ma right: the population continued to grow—from 700 million in 1966 to 1.2 billion in 1979—while education and the economy lagged far behind that of the developed world. Even today, most city dwellers over the age of forty-five will remember the treasured ration coupons for oil, meat, grain, and cloth. One year, I remember queuing from five o’clock in the morning until noon in the snow and freezing temperatures to buy half a pound of pork for my teacher. This was the ration for the entire family for their Chinese New Year dinner! In the countryside, the population continued to grow. The increasing narrowness of roads between the fields was mute proof of the struggles to wrest food from every tiny scrap of land. To put it bluntly, the economy was stagnating and the imposition of a population control policy offered a tiny respite in the daily struggle for survival for a people who had suffered a century of war and political upheavals and battled daily with poverty. Millions of families, however, continued to believe that it was their god-given duty to produce a male heir to carry on the family line; in fact, it was a sin not to do so. As the “family planning era” really got under way in the 1980s, these people paid a heavy price. Whole families were ruined, homes destroyed, and people died at the hands of village cadres who carried out family planning policies crudely and violently. It was illiterate peasant families who fought the local government most bitterly for the chance to have a baby boy. There is a Chinese saying I’ve quoted before that “the heavens are high and the emperor far away,” meaning that the farther one goes from the center of government, the more likely it is that local rules will prevail over edicts from the capital. With an area of 9,600,000 km,2 China is a vast country and there are areas where the one-child policy has never been effectively implemented. In the most remote mountain areas in the west of China only lip service is paid to it. In 2006, when I was doing interviews for my book China Witness in the region bounded by the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, I came across many families with five or more children in mountain villages in the west; even in the east of China, poor peasant families with three or more children were common. On my visit back to China in December 2009 I had four different taxi drivers in four different cities—Tianjing, Nanjing, Anhui, and Guangzhou—who all came from the countryside and each of them told me the same thing: that they have more than three children. They said that the one-child policy can be avoided by money and power in their hometown! Not all twenty somethings in China are only children; there are also many with hordes of brothers and sisters. In contrast, in eastern China’s urban areas, enforcement was and is draconian. Almost everyone lived within the state-planned economy up until the beginning of the 1990s. So having more than one child meant losing your job, your home (which was allocated by your employer), your entitlement to food and clothing rations, your child’s entitlement to schooling and medical care, and even your chance of finding other work, as no one would dare employ you. Just because you had had one “extra” child, you and your family would forfeit absolutely everything. Among educated people, there were very few indeed who were prepared to run the risk of ruining their prospects in this way. However, that did not stop them from employing every possible means, from modern medical technology to traditional Chinese herbal remedies, to ensure the birth of a boy. I think this goes some way to explaining the gender imbalance in some areas of China.
In the many years I have spent interviewing people in the course of my work, I have discovered yet another simple but very important reason why babies are abandoned: the combination of sexual ignorance and sexual freedom among young people. Looking back at the first decade of the economic reforms, it is clear that 1992 marked a turning point for China’s urban population. Up until that time, educated city dwellers had been onlookers. Many even dismissed the reforms as yet another political movement. They looked down on migrants from the countryside who labored furiously to lift themselves out of absolute poverty; and they positively despised those former jobless vagrants who now prospered as small stall holders in cities and towns. In the 1980s, a “10,000-yuan-a-year family” was just another name for uneducated people who had made money through speculating. The educated were more cautious. It took a decade for them to wake up to the fact that, if they wanted to keep up, they must take their courage in both hands and grab the opportunities offered by the reforms. A great wave of young people soon swamped colleges and universities. Business became fashionable, and so did everything Western. And as far as young students went, the reforms appeared to find their most dramatic expression in “Westernized” relations between the sexes—there was a sudden surge in the number of young people living together without getting married. A friend of mine in China once lamented to me in a phone call that she no longer knew what social rules operated and what morality meant. “In our day,” she said, “no one would dare even to have a private chat with a member of the opposite sex. Our parents would not kiss or embrace each other in front of the children! But now, my nineteen-year-old daughter changes her boyfriend every couple of months, and often stays out all night. She calls it sexual freedom and running her own life! I don’t know anymore, are there any social standards left?” I am not going to discuss here what social standards we ought to have (you can get my view from What Chinese Don’t Eat). Judging the whole world by the same set of standards is ignorant and authoritarian. What I do want to talk about is those young people, my friend’s daughter’s generation, who grew up in the 1990s. They went from living in a society where traditional moral standards still prevailed, straight to adopting Westernized sexual mores. The problem was that many of them had had virtually no sex education or guidance: they lived a “sexless” existence within the family, at school, and in society. A combination of factors—sexual ignorance, the absence of sexual health programs, and hypocritical attitudes to sexuality among the older generation meant that when the young were suddenly exposed to Westernized sexual liberation and the new hedonism, the consequences were disastrous. Many young women knew nothing of contraception, or even how babies were made. The abortion business became a great way to make quick money, and advertisements for such services were plastered all over the outskirts of cities. Almost none of those students who now found themselves pregnant kept their babies. Chinese families fought over the boys, but the girl babies inevitably ended up in orphanages. This is probably one of the reasons for the dramatic increase in numbers of girl babies in Chinese orphanages from 1990 onward, and also for the 1992 government policy permitting international adoption.*
Of course, there are also other reasons why newborn infants are abandoned, and they are even more distressing and horrific. For instance, a soothsayer might predict that “it will spare the family trouble in the future”; and there are also folk beliefs that killing an infant will “avert natural catastrophes.” Among many peoples, there are persistent beliefs that have been handed down by the elders of the community about abandoning babies.
In this book, you will read tragic stories of what has traditionally happened to abandoned girl babies, and what continues to happen. The tools for enforcing these traditions have been forged from a need to survive, and honed by mothers over centuries—and yet the victims are themselves women and girls. In 2004, I set up a charity in the United Kingdom called the Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL). It has three main aims: to provide cultural resources for Chinese children living all over the world; to help those children who had been adopted into Western families, and so had a dual cultural heritage; and, especially, to provide help for disabled children who languished forgotten in Chinese orphanages.
The names of people and places have all been changed in this book, in order to protect the privacy of the birth mothers. Their stories, however, are all true. They are about the message from those secret Chinese mothers to their unforgotten daughters—loved and lost …
*Only U.S. citizens numbered.
2009: 3,001
2008: 4,122
2007: 5,453
2006: 6,493
2005: 7,906
2004: 7,044
2003: 6,859
2002: 5,053
1992–2001: at least 30,000
(http://www.fwcc.org/;
http://www.adoptivefam.org/china_adoption.php;
http://international-adoption.suite101.com/article.cfm/an_overview_of_international_adoption_from_china;
http://adoption.state.gov/news/total_chart.html)
† I started being a radio presenter from Henan in 1989, then moved to Jiangsu Radio in Nanjing in 1992. Before 1988 the radio channel “Tong-zhan Pin-dao,” for which I worked in Henan, was controlled by the central government for sending out a disturbing signal to stop people from listening to BBC and ABC in Asia … I couldn’t point it out before 2003 as a part of national secrets. There were more than three thousand staff members at these two radio stations, it would be too difficult for Western readers to remember the names of those people and places. Therefore, I put my stories into one place, Nanjing, a city that I love and am proud of, full of history, culture, and food. Nanjing is the greenest city in China, with lots of trees, green fields, and lakes. It is very special to today’s China, where the cities are all made up of buildings and roads.
* The economist Ma Yanchu (1882–1982) entered Beiyang University in Tianjin in 1901 to study mining and metallurgy. After earning a master’s in economics at Yale University and a doctorate at Columbia University, he returned to China in 1915 and worked first in the Ministry of Finance of Yuan Shikai’s republican “Beiyang government” and later as a professor of economics at Peking University. In August 1949, he became head of Zhejiang University and held a number of government positions. He began to focus his research on the problem of the rapid expansion of China’s population growth in the early 1950s, publishing New Theory of Population. Ma stressed the need to accumulate capital; develop science and technology; improve labor productivity, standards of living, and educational levels; and increase supplies of industrial raw materials. Concluding that there was an urgent need to control population numbers, he made three main points: (1) Only if population numbers were controlled could consumption be brought down, allowing capital accumulation. (2) To build socialism, it was necessary to increase labor productivity, to develop heavy industry, and to electrify and mechanize agriculture. (3) There was a conflict between agriculture and industrial raw materials; population pressure on food resources meant that there was little land on which to cultivate cotton, silkworms, soya beans, peanuts, and other cash crops. “For food reasons alone, the population must be controlled,” he wrote, and this should be done without delay. Ma raised the population problem with Mao Zedong on many occasions. Mao Zedong disagreed. “Can we plan the production of people? Can we subject them to studies and experiments?” A nationwide campaign was launched to criticize “Ma Yanchu’s reactionary thinking.” But Ma stood firm, and although he was by then getting on in years, he declared publicly, “For the sake of my country and the truth, I will continue to uphold my population theory, no matter what. I do not fear being attacked or isolated, nor do I fear hardship, dismissal, imprisonment, even death itself.” On January 3, 1960, he was forced to resign from his position as head of Peking University, and soon afterward was relieved of his duties on the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress. He was forbidden to publish, speak publicly, give interviews to reporters, or receive overseas visitors even if they were friends. For his misdeeds, he was also placed under house arrest. After the demise of the Gang of Four, Ma Yanchu was reappointed head of Peking University. He died shortly before his one hundredth birthday, on May 14, 1982.
* In my work, as well as investigating what the cultural needs of Chinese adopted children were, I also learned about the adoption laws. The Adoption Law of the People’s Republic of China was passed at the 23rd Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People’s Congress on December 22, 1991, and came into force on April 1, 1992. It was amended at the 5th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People’s Congress on November 4, 1998. Then in 2005, China signed up to the Hague Convention of May 29, 1993, on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention). See Appendix B.
© 2011 The Good Woman of China Limited
FOR ADOPTED DAUGHTERS
It took a long time for me to summon the courage to relive the personal memories and experiences of my life as a reporter in China. In The Good Women of China, my first book, published in 2002, I wrote about those brave women who had told me their stories when I worked as a radio presenter. But there were some stories I could not yet bring myself to tell. They were too painful and too close to home. I am not a particularly courageous woman; I am just a woman who longs to feel a mother’s embrace and that lifelong bond of love and dependence between mother and daughter. Little by little, that longing seeped through me until it began to dominate my thoughts night and day. Reawakening the memories threatened to reopen old wounds: I would miss my own mother more than ever and would feel even more bitterness that I would never have that kind of love.
At a talk I gave at the International Book Fair in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002, someone asked me, “Xinran, what is your dream?”
I didn’t even have to think about the answer. I said, “To be a daughter.”
There was uproar from the audience of several hundred people. “But you were born, so you must be someone’s daughter!”
“In a biological sense, yes,” I responded. “But I was born into a traditional culture, I experienced brutal political upheavals as a child, and my mother and I lived in times that did not consider bonds of family affection important. The result is there’s not a single occasion I can remember when my mother said she loved me, or even hugged me.”
After the meeting, I found a line of silver-haired women waiting for me by the car. They were there, they said, to give me a mother’s embrace. One by one they came up to me, put their arms around me, and kissed my forehead. …
I could not help myself, tears poured down my face. In my heart, I cried, “I’m grateful for their genuine affection, but how I wish my own mother could have held me like this. Every day, since I was a little girl, I have missed my mother’s love so much!”
In 1958, when I was just thirty days old, I was sent away to live with my grandmother. Like millions of Chinese women, my mother believed that anyone who put their family and children before their country and the Party was at best selfish and at worst criminal.
My earliest memory of my mother is of her walking toward me on a very quiet platform in the Nanjing railway station. She was a cloud of purple—her silk scarf draped over her shoulders waved in the breeze. She smiled sweetly and opened her arms to me like a dancer on the stage.
I was five years old and had never called anyone mother before. That day, at my grandmother’s urging, I called my mother “aunty”—what children call any female stranger in China—and as I whispered the word this beautiful woman stiffened and a solitary tear fell down her face.
In 1966, only two weeks after I had begun living with my mother, the Cultural Revolution began. My parents were both sent to a political jail within a month of each other. My younger brother, who was only two and a half, and I became orphans. Ten years later we were all back as one family but no one has ever spoken about how we survived the struggles during that turbulent time.
In 1989, after twelve years of studying and working at a military university, I became a radio presenter. The first time I went to a small village in the countryside, I was devastated by the poverty-stricken lives I witnessed. It was only a forty-minute drive from the city I worked in, but they were so poor that in the summer most children did not even wear trousers, they only had a pair to provide warmth in the winter. I was so shocked to hear from the people I interviewed, face-to-face, the real numbers on how many lives had been lost in the past one hundred years within China. I was so ashamed by my lack of knowledge of traditional Chinese culture and the real history of China.
Until then, I never realized how ignorant I was about the real China and how misguided I was in my education about my mother’s and grandmother’s generations, so I started to reeducate myself by learning the truth from people. I went on a journey to find out the answers to my bewildering questions from my country and my people. Over the next eight years, I traveled around and met more than two hundred Chinese women for my radio program. I listened to them, and their stories struck a chord deep within me. I found myself as one of them—as a daughter, our lives watered down by the tears from our past.
I moved to London in 1997. After eight years of digging, searching, and feeling for Chinese women, I felt empty and run-down. During my time as a radio presenter I had received about a hundred letters every day with personal secrets full of dreams and confusion, and I had witnessed my country jumping onto a rapidly moving express train toward the Western lights, but the people still lacked the necessary education to grasp the massive force of change that was sweeping across the country. Therefore, as a Chinese woman who had walked a long march to find out who I am, I chose to start afresh in London, where I could deepen my understanding of the world.
But once there, I was stunned and hurt by how little Westerners understood the Chinese people. And on my many trips back to China I discovered how little the younger Chinese understood about their parents’ generation. I found that our children have been cut off from the real history and even from their own family history. They have no idea about what kind of life their mothers and grandmothers have endured; they don’t even believe that they have love stories.
Then one day in 1998, while I was teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, an Italian student came to me with a book he had been reading and asked me, “Is it true that Chinese women physically lack emotional cells and are mentally short of love as described in this book?” I was flabbergasted. Finally, through gritted teeth, I told him, “I am going to write a book that will move this world to tears about the Chinese women I know, on their rich feeling, their deep love and unconditional giving.”
Since I began writing books about the lives of Chinese women, I have been fortunate enough to receive countless letters, photographs, and videos from adopted Chinese girls and the adopting families from all over the world. Their letters, like the two that follow (and the others on p. 187 and pp. 195–199), bring me comfort, and it is with their encouragement that I have finally managed to write down the stories of Chinese women who were forced to abandon their babies.
Dear Xinran,
I am the (adoptive) mother of two beautiful daughters of China. My daughters are now 11 and 9. They both are very happy in our family and much loved. They also will never forget they have a birth family in China. They love their birth mothers and both of them, like you, would very much like to see their birth mother’s face and hear her words. Please write your book. In this way they will know the heart of their birth mothers. Though we have told them we will look for their birth mothers if they desire to find them, we have also told them such a search may not be successful. The message you send from birth mothers may be all they ever have of their Chinese family.
One thing you can tell the Chinese birth mothers is that their daughters have not forgotten them. In our family their birth mothers are honored. My daughters and I study Pu Tong Hua. We have already returned to China 2 times with our daughters. They love the land of their birth, as their father and I do. We are proud to be an American Chinese family.
Please send our love, gratitude, and honor to their Chinese mothers.
Thank you,
The Macechko Family
(USA)
Dear Xinran,
So lovely to hear from you. I know just what you mean about how it takes days for your “head” to arrive back after your body. Flying around the world is such an odd experience in that way. Please, please, please do write Messages from Chinese Mums. You have to write it for all those girls. Mei and Xue even now ask why their “tummy mummy” couldn’t look after them. I have to say, I don’t know. Because I do not know. I can’t lie. I can only guess—maybe poverty, maybe postnatal depression, maybe rape, maybe the fact that they are girls, maybe she was a teenager?
I can only guess at the pain. I save all books and newspaper clippings of China, so that when the girls are big, they can read what life was like and try and understand—maybe understand what their birth mother experienced. But, if you wrote some stories of the Chinese mothers, it would be more clearly explained.
I couldn’t read The Good Women of China because I found it too painful. I cried and cried and cried. Each woman I thought of as Mei and Xue’s mother—and what she had to bear and what loss for her to leave her babies. Some day all those adopted girls have to understand that their mothers gave them up—(HOPEFULLY) not because she didn’t love them, but because life was too hard and too painful to bear. They must understand this fully. This is the only way to heal the pain for them of being rejected in that way.
Mei and Xue have brought such joy to our lives. Barry and I are complete with them and our family is a tight, beautiful bond. But I am aware that somewhere there is a mother (if she is alive) who has a deep pain about her girls. I want her to know that the girls are alive and happy and for her not to worry. But I also know that life is very complex and a well-intentioned Westerner can cause many problems easily.
I understand fully about MBL. It is very important. The link between all those girls and their mothers. The link between women of the world is very important. For some, your books are just stories, but for many of us, they are much more than that. Someday Mei and Xue will read your books and understand a little about their birth mum’s life and those of their birth grandmothers. We can only thank you for that.
…
With big hugs, Xinran (Mei and Xue send them also). They are fascinated by you—Xue is very literary and loves the idea that you write books. She had me read out your email (I read out bits). Both girls sense some link with you. It is very interesting. Do come back and see us and come and stay when you are next over.
With love, Ros
(New Zealand)
These letters pour in. They haunt me and make me wonder: if I were an adopted daughter, where would I find answers to my inevitable questions about my strange start in life? In truth, I have been asking similar questions my whole life. I have tried so hard to forge a connection with my mother: I wish I could have known what happened to her during the ten years that she was missing from my life. I have dreamed of asking her if she knows what happened to me and my brother when she wasn’t there. We had no right to play, to speak; we had no one to protect us from the Red Guards’ violence and abuse. Mum, do you know all of this? But I never dared ask her.
I have tried to heal, to make myself a woman with a happy smile each day, but I can’t control myself in the night—lonely fears wake me up again and again. I don’t want to recall missing my mother, but the ache never dulls. And that is why I was afraid to dredge up these things that have cost me so many tears and why I was afraid to write about the women who abandoned their daughters. But it is also why I must tell their stories.
In December 2009, after I had finished editing this book, I returned to China and tried once more to confront my mother. I wanted to unburden myself of long-buried memories; I wanted to tell her what had happened to me, her daughter, during the Cultural Revolution. I wanted her to understand the nightmarish torments I went through, and which still haunt me. For her to know how much I missed her and still long for her, my mother. But I could not get a word out. I just sat silently in front of her, in floods of tears.
Over the years I have begun to understand how those adopted daughters long to understand their birth mothers and to tell them how much they love them. I decided that, no matter how painful it was, I would write down the stories I had stored up for so long. This book was to be an honest record of mothers’ lives, a gift of mother-daughter love that I, a daughter, could share with other daughters, a message from an unknown Chinese mother to her daughter, wherever she may be.
I started writing this book on February 2, 2008, in a little house by the sea on Blues Point Road, Sydney, Australia. Strangely, my labors were accompanied by a fortnight of the violent storms that a southern hemisphere summer sometimes brings.
February 7, 2008, was the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, and the Australian media reported on the tens of thousands of Chinese who joined in the cultural festivities. Among them were more than a hundred families who had adopted Chinese children. As I watched these girls dressed in Chinese costumes asking their Australian parents in English what the Spring Festival was, I had mixed feelings. Were these girls really China’s daughters?
Yes, I think they were. As the ancients said: when oranges from the south were transplanted to the north, they were still oranges, even if they tasted a bit different. I believe that even though these girls have been brought up in a foreign land and a foreign culture, the blood of their Chinese mothers still runs in their veins.
But what do their birth mothers feel? Does the unknown Chinese mother feel joy or sorrow at knowing that her beloved daughter is now happy in another mother’s arms? I did not actually give birth to a daughter, nor am I the mother of an adopted daughter, but I weep every time I try to imagine how they feel. And once I lost a little girl who was like a daughter to me, so I know something of what they feel. There is an emptiness that can never be filled, there is an ache felt by the broken-hearted birth mother, by the adoptive family in the West, and by the daughter who will spend the rest of her life in a dual embrace—because the life she lives is a product of great joy but also of great sorrow.
By the end of 2010, the number of Chinese orphans adopted worldwide had reached more than 120,000. America has the largest number of adopted Chinese children from China, nearly 80,000.* These children have gone to twenty-seven countries—and almost all were girls. Most Chinese find the adoption figures almost incredible, just as they find it hard to believe that Chinese children have found mothers and homes in so many countries. Why does China have so many orphaned girls?
Most Chinese would say that it is because there is something inherently wrong with traditional culture; in other words, old customs are rooted in ignorance. Westerners, on the other hand, believe that the one-child policy is to blame. I began to gather information for myself when, in 1989, I started presenting Words on the Night Breeze, a program for women started in Henan, and then moved to Jiangsu Radio in Nanjing.† As this job took me all over China doing interviews, I came across women who had been forced to abandon their babies. I feel there are three main reasons why.
First, female babies have been abandoned in farming cultures of the East since ancient times; second, a combination of sexual ignorance, which remains rife, and the economic boom; and last, there is the one-child policy.
In developing countries, with their communities that rely on primitive methods of farming, or on hunting, gathering, and fishing, hard manual labor is survival; so a preference for boys is inevitable. Males have an indisputable physical advantage over females when it comes to laboring, carrying goods, hunting, and defense. Another factor that cannot be ignored in China is an ancient system of land distribution that still persists today. It began with the Xia dynasty (approximately 2070 BC to 1600 BC), and found its most complete form in the Well Field System of the Zhou dynasty (1045 BC to 256 BC), and the Equal Field System set up around AD 485 by the Northern Wei rulers. What these had in common with the present system is the principle of allocating fields based on the number of household members. Discrimination in favor of men became, therefore, an immutable law. In AD 485 a list was drawn up of households, and then land was allocated based on the number of permanent household members. Land was divided into two kinds: arable fields, for growing grain, and mulberry tree land, for feeding the silkworms. Every male aged fifteen years or more received 40 mu of arable land, while females received 20 mu, and slaves and servants could also be allocated land. This land reverted to the government on death. As for mulberry tree land, males received 20 mu, and this became their property—they could buy and sell it and it did not need to be handed back to the government. During the Tang dynasty, AD 618 to 907, it was clearly stipulated that females were not normally to be given their own land. And so dynasties have come and gone through Chinese history, but the ways in which land is apportioned have never really changed, and the basic inequality between men and women has became a deeply entrenched tradition. In the villages, boy children not only carried on the family line and inherited the clan name, they were the source of the family property and the creators of its wealth.
Article 22 of the Population and Family Planning Law of the People’s Republic of China, promulgated on December 29, 2001, says: “Discrimination against and maltreatment of women who give birth to baby girls or who suffer from infertility are prohibited. Discrimination against, maltreatment, and abandonment of baby girls are prohibited.” However, a “good woman” must give birth to a boy—every married village woman knows this. It is both her god-given duty and her parents-in-law’s most fervent hope. So in some poorer villages, if the first child is a girl, the unfortunate child is abandoned or even smothered at birth. Where birth control is not properly understood, abandoning infants is just another law of nature that has operated from time immemorial. If the extra infant the family could not bring up was a boy, he would often be adopted by another family or sold. For a girl, death was almost inevitable.
China’s one-child-per-family policy was drawn up at the Second National Symposium on Population held in the city of Chengdu, Sichuan province, on December 11–14, 1979. The then vice premier Chen Muhua (who also happened to be the first woman premier in China’s history) convinced delegates in the closing debate that limiting couples to one child could slow the rapid rate of population growth in China. That was the start of the “population revolution,” which remains the subject of fierce debate to this day. The renowned Chinese specialist in population studies Professor Ma Yanchu* had warned in the early 1950s that the country’s population was growing too fast; at his suggestion, the government carried out China’s first population survey in the early part of 1953. The results were published on November 1 of that year: at midnight on June 1, 1953, the Chinese population stood at 600 million. In just four years since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the population had grown by 100 million. In his comparative study New Theory of Population (1957), Professor Ma wrote that in the years 1953–57 the population may actually have exceeded the 20 percent annual increase found in the 1953 survey. In his view, the slow growth of manufacturing technology together with a surge in population and its attendant social conflicts meant that as the global economy and civilization developed, China would lag behind. Ma’s ideas were diametrically opposed to Mao’s, which were that the population and the economy should grow in parallel. As a result, Ma was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. But history proved Ma right: the population continued to grow—from 700 million in 1966 to 1.2 billion in 1979—while education and the economy lagged far behind that of the developed world. Even today, most city dwellers over the age of forty-five will remember the treasured ration coupons for oil, meat, grain, and cloth. One year, I remember queuing from five o’clock in the morning until noon in the snow and freezing temperatures to buy half a pound of pork for my teacher. This was the ration for the entire family for their Chinese New Year dinner! In the countryside, the population continued to grow. The increasing narrowness of roads between the fields was mute proof of the struggles to wrest food from every tiny scrap of land. To put it bluntly, the economy was stagnating and the imposition of a population control policy offered a tiny respite in the daily struggle for survival for a people who had suffered a century of war and political upheavals and battled daily with poverty. Millions of families, however, continued to believe that it was their god-given duty to produce a male heir to carry on the family line; in fact, it was a sin not to do so. As the “family planning era” really got under way in the 1980s, these people paid a heavy price. Whole families were ruined, homes destroyed, and people died at the hands of village cadres who carried out family planning policies crudely and violently. It was illiterate peasant families who fought the local government most bitterly for the chance to have a baby boy. There is a Chinese saying I’ve quoted before that “the heavens are high and the emperor far away,” meaning that the farther one goes from the center of government, the more likely it is that local rules will prevail over edicts from the capital. With an area of 9,600,000 km,2 China is a vast country and there are areas where the one-child policy has never been effectively implemented. In the most remote mountain areas in the west of China only lip service is paid to it. In 2006, when I was doing interviews for my book China Witness in the region bounded by the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, I came across many families with five or more children in mountain villages in the west; even in the east of China, poor peasant families with three or more children were common. On my visit back to China in December 2009 I had four different taxi drivers in four different cities—Tianjing, Nanjing, Anhui, and Guangzhou—who all came from the countryside and each of them told me the same thing: that they have more than three children. They said that the one-child policy can be avoided by money and power in their hometown! Not all twenty somethings in China are only children; there are also many with hordes of brothers and sisters. In contrast, in eastern China’s urban areas, enforcement was and is draconian. Almost everyone lived within the state-planned economy up until the beginning of the 1990s. So having more than one child meant losing your job, your home (which was allocated by your employer), your entitlement to food and clothing rations, your child’s entitlement to schooling and medical care, and even your chance of finding other work, as no one would dare employ you. Just because you had had one “extra” child, you and your family would forfeit absolutely everything. Among educated people, there were very few indeed who were prepared to run the risk of ruining their prospects in this way. However, that did not stop them from employing every possible means, from modern medical technology to traditional Chinese herbal remedies, to ensure the birth of a boy. I think this goes some way to explaining the gender imbalance in some areas of China.
In the many years I have spent interviewing people in the course of my work, I have discovered yet another simple but very important reason why babies are abandoned: the combination of sexual ignorance and sexual freedom among young people. Looking back at the first decade of the economic reforms, it is clear that 1992 marked a turning point for China’s urban population. Up until that time, educated city dwellers had been onlookers. Many even dismissed the reforms as yet another political movement. They looked down on migrants from the countryside who labored furiously to lift themselves out of absolute poverty; and they positively despised those former jobless vagrants who now prospered as small stall holders in cities and towns. In the 1980s, a “10,000-yuan-a-year family” was just another name for uneducated people who had made money through speculating. The educated were more cautious. It took a decade for them to wake up to the fact that, if they wanted to keep up, they must take their courage in both hands and grab the opportunities offered by the reforms. A great wave of young people soon swamped colleges and universities. Business became fashionable, and so did everything Western. And as far as young students went, the reforms appeared to find their most dramatic expression in “Westernized” relations between the sexes—there was a sudden surge in the number of young people living together without getting married. A friend of mine in China once lamented to me in a phone call that she no longer knew what social rules operated and what morality meant. “In our day,” she said, “no one would dare even to have a private chat with a member of the opposite sex. Our parents would not kiss or embrace each other in front of the children! But now, my nineteen-year-old daughter changes her boyfriend every couple of months, and often stays out all night. She calls it sexual freedom and running her own life! I don’t know anymore, are there any social standards left?” I am not going to discuss here what social standards we ought to have (you can get my view from What Chinese Don’t Eat). Judging the whole world by the same set of standards is ignorant and authoritarian. What I do want to talk about is those young people, my friend’s daughter’s generation, who grew up in the 1990s. They went from living in a society where traditional moral standards still prevailed, straight to adopting Westernized sexual mores. The problem was that many of them had had virtually no sex education or guidance: they lived a “sexless” existence within the family, at school, and in society. A combination of factors—sexual ignorance, the absence of sexual health programs, and hypocritical attitudes to sexuality among the older generation meant that when the young were suddenly exposed to Westernized sexual liberation and the new hedonism, the consequences were disastrous. Many young women knew nothing of contraception, or even how babies were made. The abortion business became a great way to make quick money, and advertisements for such services were plastered all over the outskirts of cities. Almost none of those students who now found themselves pregnant kept their babies. Chinese families fought over the boys, but the girl babies inevitably ended up in orphanages. This is probably one of the reasons for the dramatic increase in numbers of girl babies in Chinese orphanages from 1990 onward, and also for the 1992 government policy permitting international adoption.*
Of course, there are also other reasons why newborn infants are abandoned, and they are even more distressing and horrific. For instance, a soothsayer might predict that “it will spare the family trouble in the future”; and there are also folk beliefs that killing an infant will “avert natural catastrophes.” Among many peoples, there are persistent beliefs that have been handed down by the elders of the community about abandoning babies.
In this book, you will read tragic stories of what has traditionally happened to abandoned girl babies, and what continues to happen. The tools for enforcing these traditions have been forged from a need to survive, and honed by mothers over centuries—and yet the victims are themselves women and girls. In 2004, I set up a charity in the United Kingdom called the Mothers’ Bridge of Love (MBL). It has three main aims: to provide cultural resources for Chinese children living all over the world; to help those children who had been adopted into Western families, and so had a dual cultural heritage; and, especially, to provide help for disabled children who languished forgotten in Chinese orphanages.
The names of people and places have all been changed in this book, in order to protect the privacy of the birth mothers. Their stories, however, are all true. They are about the message from those secret Chinese mothers to their unforgotten daughters—loved and lost …
*Only U.S. citizens numbered.
2009: 3,001
2008: 4,122
2007: 5,453
2006: 6,493
2005: 7,906
2004: 7,044
2003: 6,859
2002: 5,053
1992–2001: at least 30,000
(http://www.fwcc.org/;
http://www.adoptivefam.org/china_adoption.php;
http://international-adoption.suite101.com/article.cfm/an_overview_of_international_adoption_from_china;
http://adoption.state.gov/news/total_chart.html)
† I started being a radio presenter from Henan in 1989, then moved to Jiangsu Radio in Nanjing in 1992. Before 1988 the radio channel “Tong-zhan Pin-dao,” for which I worked in Henan, was controlled by the central government for sending out a disturbing signal to stop people from listening to BBC and ABC in Asia … I couldn’t point it out before 2003 as a part of national secrets. There were more than three thousand staff members at these two radio stations, it would be too difficult for Western readers to remember the names of those people and places. Therefore, I put my stories into one place, Nanjing, a city that I love and am proud of, full of history, culture, and food. Nanjing is the greenest city in China, with lots of trees, green fields, and lakes. It is very special to today’s China, where the cities are all made up of buildings and roads.
* The economist Ma Yanchu (1882–1982) entered Beiyang University in Tianjin in 1901 to study mining and metallurgy. After earning a master’s in economics at Yale University and a doctorate at Columbia University, he returned to China in 1915 and worked first in the Ministry of Finance of Yuan Shikai’s republican “Beiyang government” and later as a professor of economics at Peking University. In August 1949, he became head of Zhejiang University and held a number of government positions. He began to focus his research on the problem of the rapid expansion of China’s population growth in the early 1950s, publishing New Theory of Population. Ma stressed the need to accumulate capital; develop science and technology; improve labor productivity, standards of living, and educational levels; and increase supplies of industrial raw materials. Concluding that there was an urgent need to control population numbers, he made three main points: (1) Only if population numbers were controlled could consumption be brought down, allowing capital accumulation. (2) To build socialism, it was necessary to increase labor productivity, to develop heavy industry, and to electrify and mechanize agriculture. (3) There was a conflict between agriculture and industrial raw materials; population pressure on food resources meant that there was little land on which to cultivate cotton, silkworms, soya beans, peanuts, and other cash crops. “For food reasons alone, the population must be controlled,” he wrote, and this should be done without delay. Ma raised the population problem with Mao Zedong on many occasions. Mao Zedong disagreed. “Can we plan the production of people? Can we subject them to studies and experiments?” A nationwide campaign was launched to criticize “Ma Yanchu’s reactionary thinking.” But Ma stood firm, and although he was by then getting on in years, he declared publicly, “For the sake of my country and the truth, I will continue to uphold my population theory, no matter what. I do not fear being attacked or isolated, nor do I fear hardship, dismissal, imprisonment, even death itself.” On January 3, 1960, he was forced to resign from his position as head of Peking University, and soon afterward was relieved of his duties on the Standing Committee of the People’s Congress. He was forbidden to publish, speak publicly, give interviews to reporters, or receive overseas visitors even if they were friends. For his misdeeds, he was also placed under house arrest. After the demise of the Gang of Four, Ma Yanchu was reappointed head of Peking University. He died shortly before his one hundredth birthday, on May 14, 1982.
* In my work, as well as investigating what the cultural needs of Chinese adopted children were, I also learned about the adoption laws. The Adoption Law of the People’s Republic of China was passed at the 23rd Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People’s Congress on December 22, 1991, and came into force on April 1, 1992. It was amended at the 5th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Ninth National People’s Congress on November 4, 1998. Then in 2005, China signed up to the Hague Convention of May 29, 1993, on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention). See Appendix B.
© 2011 The Good Woman of China Limited
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner (March 8, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1451610890
- ISBN-13 : 978-1451610895
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5 x 1 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #237,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #28 in Historical China Biographies
- #240 in Chinese History (Books)
- #612 in Women in History
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
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I live in the UK and translate full-time from Chinese, focussing on fiction, literary non-fiction, and occasionally poetry. When not translating, I work on Paper-Republic.org, a non-profit website promoting Chinese literature in translation. I organize translation-focused events, mentor new translators, give regular talks and workshops on translation, and judge translation competitions. I blog on Asian Books Blog, and tweet, with Helen Wang, as China Fiction Book Club @cfbcuk.
Customer reviews
4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
283 global ratings
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Customers find the book heartwarming, meaningful, and joyful. They describe it as remarkable, excellent, and well worth their time. Readers also find the situations and scenarios shed light on that they'd never thought of. They appreciate the well-told stories from the mothers in China. Opinions are mixed on the writing quality, with some finding it beautiful and clear, while others say it's difficult to read.
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26 customers mention "Heartwarming"20 positive6 negative
Customers find the book heartwarming, meaningful, and touching. They say the translator did a wonderful job conveying the sentiment from Chinese to English. Readers mention the book helps them understand the hearts and minds of these mothers. They also say it's thought-provoking and a powerful message.
"As an adoptive China Mom, I found this book riveting and heart breaking...." Read more
"...mother of two Chinese daughters, I found this book both heartwarming in its mission and heartwrenching in its storytelling of the varied reasons..." Read more
"...It was heartbreaking at times and other times eye opening...." Read more
"This was a very touching book and though it is a series of stories about various mothers, I couldn't put the book down once I started...." Read more
22 customers mention "Value for money"22 positive0 negative
Customers find the book remarkable, interesting, and well worth their time. They say it's beautifully written and authentic.
"...Highly recommended reading!" Read more
"...bio mother to let her know that her daughter is doing great, is beautiful, intelligent and an outstanding athlete on top of it all...." Read more
"This is an extraordinary book, especially for anyone who adopts a child from China, as my husband and I did...." Read more
"...But the book was interesting - as long as I kept an open mind and kept all of this in perspective." Read more
18 customers mention "Enlightenedness"18 positive0 negative
Customers find the book enlightening, saying it sheds light on situations and scenarios they'd never thought of. They say the author is very knowledgeable and has done the research for all of her books. Readers also mention it's helpful to read the stories of mothers in China that gave up. They say it's an education in Chinese culture, well worth reading, and education is liberation.
"...This book did shed light on situations and scenarios that I'd never thought of, causing me to think about some things that I thought were true being..." Read more
"...to let her know that her daughter is doing great, is beautiful, intelligent and an outstanding athlete on top of it all...." Read more
"......" Read more
"...Xinran has written a tome filled with story, facts and a good amount of challenge to all who read this and care about children!" Read more
14 customers mention "Storytelling"12 positive2 negative
Customers find the stories in the book well-told and heartbreaking. They say the author does a great job of telling the mothers' stories with a personal perspective.
"...I found this book both heartwarming in its mission and heartwrenching in its storytelling of the varied reasons that Chinese mothers abandoned..." Read more
"...While the writing leaves something to be desired, the stories told are heart-breaking...." Read more
"This is the most heartbreaking book, so tragic, and so telling about what happens in China to the little girls...." Read more
"...It was informative and written as a narrative in respect of those mothers whose story is unheard or untold. True stories of birthmoms." Read more
14 customers mention "Writing quality"5 positive9 negative
Customers have mixed opinions about the writing quality of the book. Some mention it's beautifully written, clear, and engaging. Others say it's a very difficult read, with too much singular notation on the author.
"...I will admit, this was a hard read... hard in that I would read some, look at my children wisty eyes, a churning stomach and thank God for watching..." Read more
"...and for the clear and engaging style in which it was written." Read more
"...could hardly put the book down, I must say I was less than impressed with the writing and editing...." Read more
"...Everyone should read this book!!!!! While the writing leaves something to be desired, the stories told are heart-breaking...." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on May 17, 2024
Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2016
As an adoptive China Mom, I found this book riveting and heart breaking. I am glad that Xinran gave voice to the mothers in China who have relinquished their babies due to government policy and old family pressures. It broadens the general explanations many of us were given as we went through the adoption process. I've always told my daughter that her birth parents did not have the freedom of choice to keep her, and we've talked about the familial, economic and government pressures they faced. I've also sent mental and spiritual messages to her birth mother around what we think is her birthday, hoping she'll somehow feel the vibes reassuring her that "our" daughter is happy, healthy and safe. I have always given my daughter's birth parents the benefit of the doubt and thought of them as desperate, not cruel, and perhaps still yearning for her. Now that my daughter is about to graduate college and will be free of the pressures of study, thesis, and classes, I will offer her the choice to read Xinran's book if she wants to learn more about the many possibilities of her birth story. Thank you Xinran.
Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2019
As the adoptive mother of two Chinese daughters, I found this book both heartwarming in its mission and heartwrenching in its storytelling of the varied reasons that Chinese mothers abandoned their baby girls. I’ve always felt that my daughters were miracles and after reading this book, it only confirms my belief that their survival is miraculous and a blessing in our lives.
Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2011
Full disclosure here... I have been a fan of Xinran for several years now. Almost 6 years ago to the date my husband and I adopted our now 7 yo daughter from China, returning 2 years later to adopt our now 7 1/2 yo son. (Yes, I will blow this myth out of the water - you can get boys in China. Not all abandoned children are girls.) I love her story conveying, not telling because that implies that she is being subjective and imprinting her own perspective on what she learns from people. Her writing style doesn't leave room for that, she's too honest when she does share her perspective.
So why this book? Adopting from China, to an outsider, might seem like a "safe bet." No potential friction with birthparents with some sort of stipulation on how involved they want to be in the child's life, no fear of a birthparent changing their mind at some point down the road and wanting the child back, and in the end you get this adorable baby that just melts your heart. (While that last part is true, the adorable baby does grow up to be a moody tween, surly teenager and eventually a child who once again looks you in the eye and actually wants to spend time with you.) What does come with this child is memories buried so deep inside that they cannot be verbalized because the child doesn't understand them themselves. Questions... lots and lots of questions. "Why?" "What if?" "Did they?" Statements. "I wish." "I wonder." Actually, those are questions asked by both adoptees and their parents... their real parents, the ones who are left trying to find answers to their questions, wipe their tears when they are sad, cheer for them, advocate for them and try to help them understand by asking questions. I know of a few people who received tiny tidbits of information when they took custody of their child... perhaps a note that was left with sophisticated and well-educated characters used could provide a clue as to the background of the birth family. For most of our children there was nothing beyond the basics of the circumstances on how they were found and brief details on their life since then. Many perspectives are floating around the adoption community on what to tell the kids ranging from painting a rosy picture of someone truly wanting a better life for them to a more cold,"it is what it is, here are the facts and lets move on." In the middle you have the "I don't know. Based on what we do know this could be what happened." Xinran's new book provides information and shared experiences that lead to some sort of understanding, some possibility that is just something that Mom and Dad are making up. I will admit, this was a hard read... hard in that I would read some, look at my children wisty eyes, a churning stomach and thank God for watching over them. It's one thing to have a general idea of some of the horrific acts that have been taken against baby girls. It's an entirely different thing to learn someone else's experience and heartbreak that resulted from that heinous act. This book did shed light on situations and scenarios that I'd never thought of, causing me to think about some things that I thought were true being possibly not. While I finished the books with more questions swirling about in my head, I was also thankful that Xinran cares about the children who have been adopted from China and are living in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. This book is truly a gift and in a way part of our childrens' story.
So why this book? Adopting from China, to an outsider, might seem like a "safe bet." No potential friction with birthparents with some sort of stipulation on how involved they want to be in the child's life, no fear of a birthparent changing their mind at some point down the road and wanting the child back, and in the end you get this adorable baby that just melts your heart. (While that last part is true, the adorable baby does grow up to be a moody tween, surly teenager and eventually a child who once again looks you in the eye and actually wants to spend time with you.) What does come with this child is memories buried so deep inside that they cannot be verbalized because the child doesn't understand them themselves. Questions... lots and lots of questions. "Why?" "What if?" "Did they?" Statements. "I wish." "I wonder." Actually, those are questions asked by both adoptees and their parents... their real parents, the ones who are left trying to find answers to their questions, wipe their tears when they are sad, cheer for them, advocate for them and try to help them understand by asking questions. I know of a few people who received tiny tidbits of information when they took custody of their child... perhaps a note that was left with sophisticated and well-educated characters used could provide a clue as to the background of the birth family. For most of our children there was nothing beyond the basics of the circumstances on how they were found and brief details on their life since then. Many perspectives are floating around the adoption community on what to tell the kids ranging from painting a rosy picture of someone truly wanting a better life for them to a more cold,"it is what it is, here are the facts and lets move on." In the middle you have the "I don't know. Based on what we do know this could be what happened." Xinran's new book provides information and shared experiences that lead to some sort of understanding, some possibility that is just something that Mom and Dad are making up. I will admit, this was a hard read... hard in that I would read some, look at my children wisty eyes, a churning stomach and thank God for watching over them. It's one thing to have a general idea of some of the horrific acts that have been taken against baby girls. It's an entirely different thing to learn someone else's experience and heartbreak that resulted from that heinous act. This book did shed light on situations and scenarios that I'd never thought of, causing me to think about some things that I thought were true being possibly not. While I finished the books with more questions swirling about in my head, I was also thankful that Xinran cares about the children who have been adopted from China and are living in Europe, Canada, Australia and the US. This book is truly a gift and in a way part of our childrens' story.
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2012
This is the 3rd book I have read written by Xinran and one that truly opens the eyes to adopting parents. My wife read it and she could not believe how many reasons there were for giving up your daughter. And it truly answered the question I had when an owner of a local Chinese restaurant in seeing my daughter said how "lucky she is". I took it to mean how lucky she was to be adopted. He knew how "lucky" she was to be alive. He knew what it meant to "do a girl". It made me know how much love the biological mothers have for their daughters to make sure they were not killed and would have a chance at life. And for those mothers who lost their daughters, the pain they are in every day from the loss of their daughter or in some cases daughters. This is a book that you will not be able to put down but you will have to in order to finish the book as each story tugs at your heart. I wish I could speak to my daughters bio mother to let her know that her daughter is doing great, is beautiful, intelligent and an outstanding athlete on top of it all. I would love to send pictures so she can see how her decision to let this girl live was so important and how this one life will make a difference in this world because of her unselfish act. Read and hug your little girl a little tighter and know just how special she is.
Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2010
This is an extraordinary book, especially for anyone who adopts a child from China, as my husband and I did. I'm incredibly grateful to Xinran for giving us a window into the hearts and minds of Chinese women who, in one way or another, gave up their daughters. I thought I understood, at least in basic terms, the cultural, social, familial, political and financial reasons why so many Chinese girls have been abandoned (or worse). But my intellectual, abstract understanding -- crafted by works of non-fiction -- has now been replaced by a deeper, much more emotional understanding because of the painful stories shared by Xinran in this glorious book. I've always thought about my daughter's birth family, but never more so than when reading "Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother." Thanks, Xinran, for lifting the veil of secrecy at least somewhat for those of us whose daughters' earliest days remain a mystery. It's hard to find the words to fully capture the power of this book.
Top reviews from other countries
Lottie
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful Read
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2023
Xinran’s books never disappoint: heavy subjects that are accessible and compassionately written.
After reading Buy Me the Sky last year, which touched upon this book as part of the one child policy discussion, I knew it would be my next stop in Xinran’s work (once I felt ready!). As you’d expect from the topic, this was an incredibly powerful, informative and emotional read.
Much like with Good Women of China, it’s one that will stay with you.
After reading Buy Me the Sky last year, which touched upon this book as part of the one child policy discussion, I knew it would be my next stop in Xinran’s work (once I felt ready!). As you’d expect from the topic, this was an incredibly powerful, informative and emotional read.
Much like with Good Women of China, it’s one that will stay with you.
C. Dulong
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing book. It helped me understand my daughters feelings ...
Reviewed in Canada on February 19, 2016
Amazing book. It helped me understand my daughters feelings about being adopted, and helped me become more understanding and compassionate towards the women of China. I am so very grateful for this book. I hope to share this information when the right time and opportunity presents itself so it will be an effective tool to ease any inner turmoil my daughter may be experiencing. I hope to write to the author... Thank you...
Chrissy
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant
Reviewed in Australia on May 3, 2016
Great book! I love her writing. The subject matter is confronting but is handled very sensitively. I could never judge these women after reading their heart wrenching stories.
TOSHIYA
5.0 out of 5 stars
本当の中国を知るのにいい本です。
Reviewed in Japan on May 3, 2013
中国で大変な話題になっている著者の本で、シリーズで読んでいます。
Xinranの著書のなかでも特にこの本は、考えさせられる面が多々あります。
一人っ子政策の問題がこれからどんどん浮上してきます。タイムリーないい本です。明石書店から日本語訳が出たようなので、そちらを読むといいかもしれません（『中国、引き裂かれる母娘』明石書店）。
Xinranの著書のなかでも特にこの本は、考えさせられる面が多々あります。
一人っ子政策の問題がこれからどんどん浮上してきます。タイムリーないい本です。明石書店から日本語訳が出たようなので、そちらを読むといいかもしれません（『中国、引き裂かれる母娘』明石書店）。
C
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tragic but Moving
Reviewed in Canada on March 22, 2013
These stories are surreal but real at the same time, learning more behind the one child policy based on people affected by it and the way it has shaped adoption around the world and the rich feelings behind these things is very moving. Don't expect to feel the same about the one child policy again...
