Author reveals suffering of Chinese

In the past couple of decades many stories of the sufferings of the Chinese people have been published in the West. Xinran, who will be talking in Dunedin on Thursday, is one of the more prolific writers of this genre.

Her latest book, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother (Chatto and Windus, pbk, $38), follows The Good Women of China, China Witness, What the Chinese don't eat, a collection of her columns in the Guardian, and novels Sky Burial and Miss Chopsticks.

During her radio broadcasts in China from 1989, she read letters from people telling their stories, stories of hardship and anguish that had not been told in public before, "lifting the veil" of Chinese women.

Her books follow the same theme.

The latest deals with the problem of unwanted girl babies and their birth mothers.

Chinese cultural traditions devalue females, and often girl babies are aborted, killed at birth, abandoned or given up for adoption.

The one-child policy, although often ignored in rural areas, exacerbates the problem as families want their one child to be a boy.

Other reasons for abandoning unwanted girl babies stems from the combination of sexual ignorance and sexual freedom among young people, especially in cities, which leads to unplanned pregnancies.

If the baby is a boy, it may be adopted by a family member, but girls end up in orphanages or worse.

The result is a large number of Chinese girls adopted overseas, many of whom wonder why their birth mother abandoned them.

This book attempts to show some of the reasons, and make us feel the despair, pain and remorse of the women of many different classes Xinran has interviewed.

She also wants Chinese girls adopted overseas to realise their mothers loved them but were forced by circumstances to give them up.

She tells the story of one uneducated country woman working in a city washing dishes in a small restaurant.

She had been bought by a family as a wife for their son and had given birth to two girls, both of whom had been killed at birth, something she accepted as normal because it was the custom in that village to kill the first baby if it was a girl.

However, when the restaurant where she worked hosted a birthday party for a little girl and she realised that a girl could be loved and valued, the pain of the loss of her babies and guilt overwhelmed her and she tried to kill herself.

"You can see how much society has been dominated by our hardship, and women are at the bottom of society," Xinran said in a phone interview from London, where she now lives.

The tradition of devaluing women stems from Confucius two and a-half thousand years ago, who taught the subservience of women to men was natural and proper, and the Chinese agricultural system.

For almost 2000 years families would be allocated land for each son but not for daughters, so if a family had all girls it could not support itself, she said.

At the beginning of the 20th century things started to change as women challenged tradition - female foot-binding was phased out and women were able to go out into society and to school.

Mao also helped liberate women - "Women hold up half the sky" was one of his slogans.

However, although things have changed in the more modern cities in China, the countryside is decades behind, and 78% of Chinese people live in the countryside and have little or no education, according to Xinran.

"You can still see girls working for their parents or family.

"You don't see many boys because they are at school but when you ask a girl why she isn't in school, she says 'I'm a girl'.

"At such a young age to believe she is no-one and has no importance!" she said.

Now there is a gender imbalance, with about 20 males to every female.

Some men have to marry uneducated women from the countryside, and this may affect the quality of the family, the children and the population, she says.

She would like to see "mother colleges" where women from the countryside could be given a basic education including mother-craft.

Xinran has set up The Mothers' Bridge of Love, a charity to help disadvantaged Chinese children and build a bridge of understanding between the West and China, and speak to mothers and adopted daughters.

Now she is working on setting up libraries for poor Chinese children.

• See her
Xinran will be talking at the Hutton Theatre at Otago Museum, on March 4 at 6pm.
She will be joined by Dr Haixin Jiang, co-ordinator for the Chinese Studies programme at the University of Otago, who has a particular interest in both Chinese culture and women's issues.
Tickets are $5 and are available at the University Book Shop.