Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother
Stories of Loss and Love
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Ten chapters, ten women and many stories of heartbreak, including her own: Xinran once again takes us right into the lives of Chinese women and their lost 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 were forced to abandon them - on city streets, outside hospitals, orphanages or on station platforms - and others even had to watch their baby daughters being taken away at birth, and drowned.
Personal, immediate, full of sorrow but also full of hope, this books sends a heart-rending message to Chinese girls who have been adopted to show them how things really were for their mothers, and to tell them they were loved and will never be forgotten.
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 She shows how outdated traditions, modern policies, and punishing poverty spur the abandonment of so many female infants, and an abnormally high suicide rate for women of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."
