Xinran. The good women of China; hidden voices - Book Review

Kliatt, March, 2004 by Janet Julian

Tr. by Esther Tyldesley. Random House, Anchor. 243p. c2002. 1-4000-3080-3. $13.00. SA

In 1983 Deng Xiaoping decided on a policy of opening up China. As a result, Xinran, a journalist, was able (under strict government supervision) to begin a nightly radio program aimed at women, who sent letters and left phone messages on the station's answering machine. Their stories are at once inspiring and heartbreaking. The program Words on the Night Breeze brought calls for help Xinran tried to answer.

One such problem concerned a 12-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and sold to a 60-year-old peasant. The girl was finally rescued and returned to her distraught parents. Other calls concerned intimate sexual matters. For many decades unmarried men and women were not allowed physical contact; and until she was 22 years old, Xinran herself believed a woman could become pregnant by holding hands with a man. One sad tale related the fate of a young girl repeatedly raped by her father. When her mother learned of it, she advised her daughter to acquiesce quietly because they needed his salary to live on. The girl suffered a breakdown and eventually died. Another girl committed suicide after her boyfriend was seen kissing her on the forehead. She died to save her parents from embarrassment.

Mao's Cultural Revolution also led to personal tragedies. One woman waited 45 years for a man who was separated from her by politics. When she finally found him, he was married with children. The Red Guards had told him that she had died in a car crash. The author suffered at the hands of the Red Guards as the "daughter of a capitalist household." Her parents were thrown into prison and she and her brother were placed in a political study class where the politically correct children regularly abused them. Fortunately a kindly teacher shared his secret library with her, giving her a lifelong love of learning.

The stories of ordinary Chinese women who contacted Xinran's call-in radio show are agonizing. Their honesty makes them all the more amazing coming from a tightly controlled society. A remarkable book. Janet Julian, Grafton, MA