[SPHBHT: BT-NEWS-PAGES <BTS-032-EL> [FIRST -32 ] ...
26/02/10]
32 BOOKS
Where the
girls are
Xinran’s stirring book on abandoned female babies in China
was spurred by the author’s own quest to get closer to her
mother and a lost foster daughter, reports CLARISSA TAN
O
NCE in a while, a
book, along with
its author, comes
along that is not
so much a sub-
ject to be re-
viewed or dis-
cussed, but a life
to be felt. The writer lays bare her
own vulnerability, as well as
those of the people who have
shared their stories with her, and
to pry seems like trespassing into
a sacred space.
Yet not to ask would be to miss
out perhaps on a truth, a glimpse
of the many chambers of the hu-
man heart, an insight into what
separates the people who nurture
from the people who discard.
Heartbreaking reports
Best-selling author Xinran’s lat-
est book, Message from an Un-
known Chinese Mother, docu-
ments 10 different stories of aban-
doned female children in China.
From the university dorm to bour-
geois households, from the banks
of the Yellow River to crowded
railway stations, the reports are
heartbreaking and terrifying.
Many incite pity, still more, an-
ger.
The Beijing-born Xinran,
whose other books include China
Witness and The Good Women of
China, held off writing the book
for years because of her own ex-
periences as a child. At the age of
one month, her parents had left
her with her grandmother to dedi-
cate themselves to the Revolu-
tion. At seven, she and her
Published and printed by Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Co. Regn. No. 198402868E.
Author:KATMAN
two-and-a-half-year-old brother
were rounded up during the Cul-
tural Revolution.
“There were 14 of us children,
lying on the floor, near the Great
Wall. Every night we lay in the
dark, and the shadows would
come over us, big, huge. Some-
one would come and pick up a
child and beat up him or her next
door. I was so scared. My little
brother didn’t understand any-
thing. He came to each girl for
milk. And none of us knew either,
how things worked. We tried to
get milk for him.
“I want my mother to tell me:
does she know what happened to
me during the Cultural Revolu-
tion? She wasn’t there.”
Xinran’s mother is still alive,
but according to the author,
“there are secret things in my fam-
ily that we never talk about.”
“I am just desperate that my
mother feels my feelings. I am 52,
and I have never had a birthday
with my mum. In some ways, I’m
like an adopted girl.”
Chinese Mother was written
for the many Chinese girls who
don’t know their birth mothers.
Many of these children were tak-
en in by Western parents when
China permitted international
adoption in the early 1990s.
“I want to give these girls the
possible reasons why their moth-
er might have left them,” says Xin-
ran, who now lives in London.
“When they become mothers
themselves, they will have a story
for their own children.
“I also hope this will be a
Date:01/03/10
wake-up call. We have so much
hidden in the past. If we don’t
catch up, how can we say of our
generation, that it’s educated,
that it’s civilised?”
Stomach-lurching accounts
Xinran’s book contains stom-
ach-lurching accounts of female
babies abandoned or killed at
birth. But through her years of re-
search, the author seems to have
kept a remarkable hold of her
own sanity and compassion. As a
radio presenter in Nanjing for
many years, she tapped into a
seam of grief and emotion among
her listeners. In the 1980s, Xin-
ran picked up an abandoned,
nearly frozen baby at a public toi-
let.
In 1990, she fostered an or-
phaned newborn girl for three
months, before the weight of the
authorities – Xinran already had
one child – forced her to give up
the girl to an orphanage. One day
she visited the orphanage to find
it empty – all the children had
been transferred, no one knew
where.
Xinran’s foster child was
called Little Snow, because of a
mark on her forehead resembling
a snowflake. Chances are, the
child was adopted by Americans.
When asked if she is still looking
for Little Snow, the question
proves too overwhelming for Xin-
ran. She can no longer speak and
her eyes brim over.
Xinran believes the best way
forward for women in China is ed-
ucation, especially among the
Time:15:06
Xinran: Believes the best way forward for women in China is
education, especially among the peasantry
peasantry. Once, while trying to
help a village woman who was be-
ing abused by her husband, Xin-
ran’s soup was laced with rat poi-
son by the woman’s mother, who
felt Xinran was meddling. On the
other hand, sometimes a peasant
family will slaughter a chicken –
half the family’s possessions – to
celebrate her arrival.
“We cannot understand what
life is like for them. They come
from a culture where women are
at the bottom. After years and
years, they get used to it. Also, if
you’ve never felt warmth from
your own mother, how can you
be warm to others?
“When you tell these mothers
who have given up their daugh-
ters for adoption to Western fami-
lies, that their girls won’t have to
work until they graduate from uni-
versity, they don’t believe you.
A member of Audit Bureau of Circulations Singapore. Customer Service (Circulation): 6388-3838, circs@sph.com.sg, Fax 6746-1925.
CLARISSA TAN
They just can’t understand it.
They always say: ‘Please tell the
“big-nosed” mother not to put my
daughter to work before she is
five years old.’
“This is their life, you know.
Still, there is love.”
Xinran’s charity,
the Mothers’ Bridge of Love
(www.mothersbridge.org), aims
to foster understanding between
China and the West, and
between adopted children’s
adoptive and birth cultures.
The author also supports
Children’s Libraries in China.
Please send picture books from
around the world to: Mrs. ZhuLi,
Room 605, Building 71, Rui-Jin
North-village, Baixia district,
Nanjing, PR China 210016
(Telephone: Julie +86 139 0515
0047)
The Business Times, Friday, February 26, 2010
Cold comfort
Message from an Unknown
Chinese Mother
By Xinran
(Translator: Nicky Harman)
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Pages: 212
Price: $27.99 before GST
Rating: B
Reviewed by CLARISSA TAN
A FATHER in a train bounces his
toddler girl on his knee, chatting
with fellow passengers, among
whom is the author Xinran. Later,
the writer discovers as her train whizzes past and she gaz-
es out at a station, that he has left his daughter – forever –
on the railway platform. This is the fourth daughter he is
abandoning: he and his wife, from the countryside, are
still hoping for a son to “carry on the family line”.
Xinran’s Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother,
which contains accounts of abandoned female Chinese ba-
bies, is all the more harrowing when we realise the 10 cas-
es cited do not depict the exceptional, but something quite
commonplace. Driven by ancient prejudice, a tradition
that deems that public farming land only be passed to
males, and extreme poverty – all complicated by China’s
one-child policy – many couples see it fit to abandon their
daughters.
There are tales from midwives on how they are paid to
“do” – that is, murder – female newborns, by dunking
them in the slop pail or suffocating them with a sheet.
There are mothers who do the killing themselves. Perhaps
most shocking is the story of a relatively well-off woman,
an adoption worker herself, who decides with her hus-
band to give up their daughter to an American couple.
They feel they are too busy, and that their child will have a
better life in the US.
One reads these stories with both a sense of tragedy
and disbelief. It is one thing to watch your baby die, or
even to give him or her away, because of extreme hard-
ship. It is another thing to do so primarily to save face.
In the countryside, especially, the first-born of a family
must be a son, to carry on the ancestral “root” and to
avoid shame. One would think that, if one’s dead ances-
tors are so persnickety about having males, then some-
how they would also help arrange it so that one’s wife
does not get four girls in a row. How could it not have oc-
curred to anyone along the line that this long-held belief
is, if not cruel, then at least absurd?
Xinran’s book is a necessary document of China’s lost
girls. Often, by digging deeper, she captures the extreme
remorse of the parents, especially of the mothers. Still, it
is hard to shake off the feeling that many of the catastro-
phes could have been avoided (as they are, surely, by the
many Chinese families, rich and poor, who don’t kill their
daughters). At the end of the book, which the author dedi-
cates to adoptees, Xinran says she hopes she has provided
insights as to the many reasons why their parents may
have left them. For a poor peasant woman, she points out,
often just defending the right of her daughter to live rather
than be drowned is a supreme act of bravery.
This is the saddest truth of all in the book – those adop-
tee girls should be thankful just to be alive. It is very cold
comfort indeed but, for now at least, comfort ourselves
with it we must.