Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love - Softcover

Xinran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1451610947 ISBN 13: 9781451610949

Verlag: Scribner, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Now in paperback one of the most stirring accounts of the lives of Chinese women since Wild Swans “full of heart-rending tales….shocking, simply told…a very powerful polemic” (The New York Times Book Review).

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. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who, whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, have given up their daughters. 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 Yangtze 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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Xinran was born in Beijing in 1958 and was a successful journalist and radio presenter in China. In 1997 she moved to London, where she began work on her seminal book about Chinese women’s lives, The Good Women of China. Since then she has written a regular column for the Guardian, appeared frequently on radio and television and published the acclaimed Sky Burial and a book of her Guardian columns called What the Chinese Don't Eat. She lives in London but travels regularly to China.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1451610947
• ISBN 13: 9781451610949
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar