I knew when I picked up Xinran’s latest book Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother that it was not going to be an easy read, but oh how my heart ached over these stories of China’s baby girls and the often cruel fates that await them, simply by virtue of not being born a boy.
Fates such as being smothered or drowned at birth, without ever knowing the embrace of their mother, as often happens in poor Chinese peasant villages – a practise so common place it is referred to as “doing a baby girl.” For such villagers, boys mean an extra pair of hands to help work and more land allocated to the family for farming and survival in the most harshest parts of the country. Girls on the other hand mean nothing but an extra mouth to feed for no reward. It was a startling and immensely sad truth when Xinran wrote “…most women wished for only two things – not to give birth to daughters in this life, and not be reborn as a woman in the next.”
Other baby girl’s fates lay in abandonment in the cities – outside hospitals, public toilets, street corners, train stations - anywhere public where they might be picked up and cared for by a kindly stranger or taken to an orphanage. But the orphanages were often substandard; overcrowded and poorly equipped with equally poorly trained staff to raise their charges. Girls could, and would, languish for years without being adopted until international adoption was allowed with Western countries.
But often in these abandonment cases Xinran explains, it was not poor peasants disposing of their newborn girls, but educated, intelligent and successful women, something that seems so very hard to fathom. However sexual emancipation, particularly in 1990s China, meant naïve young women were experiencing relationships with men with little or no understanding of basic sex education with catastrophic results for mother and child.
Still other mothers discarded their daughters due to the rigid imposition of the one child policy. Some of these mothers become “extra birth guerrilla troops” as they were nicknamed, travelling the country with their husbands, staying one step ahead of the authorities, and abandoning daughters along the way until they had the longed for male to continue the family line.
All these stories and more, of unimaginable anguish and pain, have been told first hand to Xinran through her years compiling her radio show Words on the Night Breeze. But only now with the passage of time has she been able to share them as this is a topic close to her own heart; she too has a story of an adopted daughter whom she lost in tragic circumstances.
Xinran has explored this extremely emotional and often taboo subject with delicacy and real warmth and it is a great testament to her character that mothers, midwives and orphanage officials, from all works of life opened up and talked to her about one of China’s most shameful secrets.
At times I found myself putting the book down and taking some breathing space, such was the intensity of feeling and sorrow the stories generated in me – even from the more uplifting messages from adoptive Western mothers. But I am sure the book will achieve Xinran’s aim of reaching out to China’s adopted baby girls and letting them know that, while their birth mothers could not keep them, they were always wanted and loved.
- Kelly
Hannah’s Dream
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