CHINESE NEW YEAR - China's forgotten - Author Xue Xinran on how her work chronicles stories of Chinese women whose rights – and children – were taken away

Published: 19 February 2010

OF all the impoverished people of China in the “old society” before the Communist takeover in 1949, women had the roughest deal of all.

Then China was reckoned to be the second poorest country in the world. And women – especially in the villages – were at the bottom of the pile. In villages girls often had their feet bound in the belief that small feet exemplified a woman’s beauty.   

This barbaric practice was banned in 1949 but it was still possible a few years ago to see old women, their feet bound by swathes of covering, hobbling painfully in the streets of Beijing. 

Once I met an old woman, probably in her 70s, sightseeing in the Emperor’s Winter Palace in the centre of the capital – still managing a smile as she walked slowly around the inner courtyards.

In the 1950s and 1960s women became more liberated, achieving equality in education and the professions. But today, despite the rise and rise of the new-look China, women can still have a rough time – and the lower the social scale the rougher it can be for them.

In some of the poorer villages – and about two in three of the population live in villages – the birth of a baby girl is frequently met with a sigh. 

To poor farmers the birth of a boy promises financial security. A baby girl, however, can bring heartbreak.

Tradition and superstition of more than 3,000 years still rule – and that means a boy is regarded as the heir of the family’s fortune. In the first years of a girl’s life the question is: Who can she marry?

When China adopted a one child per couple policy in the 1980s to control population growth, it brought in its wake a tsunami of tragedies.

In cities the policy of one baby per family is rigorously policed.

What does a couple do with an unplanned birth? In some cases the unwanted baby is killed and secretly buried. In a city the screw of fear is tightened – where can a couple hide the unwanted baby? Often, a heartbroken couple would haunt the streets until they plucked up the courage to do what they dreaded having to do – leaving the baby in a back alley or a shop doorway or in a bundle propped up against a wall.

State control over villages, especially those in remote areas, is looser.  

And it is known that many peasant families have more than one child. But even there, couples have to be careful to avoid running foul of officials.

Another way to dispose of an unwanted baby is to have a better off couple adopt him or her. Either in China – or illegally abroad.

When I was in Beijing a few years ago I couldn’t quite work out what was happening in the foyer of my hotel when I saw a group of men and women, probably Americans, talking animatedly to two Chinese men until I heard them talking about babies – and realised I was witnessing a baby sale.

JOHN GULLIVER

 

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THE story of loss and love of unwanted babies is told hauntingly by Xue Xinran in her latest book Message from an Unknown Mother.

Xinran, who lives in Queensway, told the West End Extra: “I set out to explain why so many Chinese mothers have had to abandon their daughters. China has no freedom of speech so these voices aren’t heard.”

She tells some of the stories of subjugation, loss and heartbreak from the many women she spoke with during her time as a broadcaster in Beijing. Among them were women who were forced to give up children (inevitably daughters) because of China’s one child policy.

Xinran, 52, who lives with her 21-year-old son, says she hopes the book will give women a voice.

“The internet helps, but there are generations of women after the Second World War who were never given the chance to tell their stories,” she said.

“This is about giving the losers and the victims a voice. China has developed so fast recently, and as a country it needs to work out what it needs to hold on to from our traditions and what it needs to improve on in the future.”

While it undoubtedly resonates with mothers, examining what happens when the instinctive bond between mother and daughter is violently severed, Xinran’s book is also a form of reconciliation. 

At the end of 2006 there were more than 120,000 registered adoptive families for Chinese orphans, almost all girls in 27 different countries. 

In a way the book is a way of reconnecting, of saying sorry and reaffirming love, after the battering the concept takes when a relationship is violently dislocated. 

Was it difficult to tease this out of mothers who had perhaps had to deny the truth to live with the consequences? 

“People thought they didn’t have feelings for their daughters but that’s not true,” says Xinran. “It is a painful, and deep loss, and they will never be forgotten.”

While Xinran has not personally experienced the alienating effects of adoption, she does know what it’s like to be an outsider. 

Arriving in London just over 13 years ago she felt like a “nowhere person”. Despite the sizeable Chinese community in the capital, she still remembers being bamboozled ordering a takeaway.

“When I was in China, by the end I was quite successful and people treated me as a well educated person, like a professor,” said Xinran. 

“When I came here, in people’s eyes, I was like an uneducated refugee. I couldn’t speak English, I had no money and I was trying to start a new life. I got a job as a cleaner. It was unbelievably difficult.”

Things have certainly moved on a little. Since the success of her first book, The Good Women of China, which was translated into no less than 30 languages, Xinran has written four more, and has carved out a role as a respected commentator on her motherland, writing for the Guardian and advising the BBC and Sky on West-East relations. 

In 2004, Xinran founded the Mothers Bridge of Love (MBL), a charity that reaches out to Chinese children around the world, to ease the understanding between birth culture and adoptive culture.

JAMIE WELHAM

• Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother. By Xue Xinran. Chatto & Windus, £16