The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices - Softcover

Xinran

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1400030803 ISBN 13: 9781400030804

Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group, 2003

Synopsis

When Deng Xiaoping s efforts to open up China took root in the late 1980s, Xinran recognized an invaluable opportunity. As an employee for the state radio system, she had long wanted to help improve the lives of Chinese women. But when she was given clearance to host a radio call-in show, she barely anticipated the enthusiasm it would quickly generate. Operating within the constraints imposed by government censors, Words on the Night Breeze sparked a tremendous outpouring, and the hours of tape on her answering machines were soon filled every night. Whether angry or muted, posing questions or simply relating experiences, these anonymous women bore witness to decades of civil strife, and of halting attempts at self-understanding in a painfully restrictive society. In this collection, by turns heartrending and inspiring, Xinran brings us the stories that affected her most, and offers a graphically detailed, altogether unprecedented work of oral history."

About this title

Review

Xinran's The Good Women of China continues the tradition of Chinese women writing in recent years. Jung Chang, in Wild Swans, and Aiping Mu, in Vermilion Gate, for example, have written of the effect of recent Chinese history on themselves and their families. However, both of these books, and others like them, have been by women from the upper echelons of Chinese society. What of ordinary Chinese women? How are their voices to be heard?

Xinran worked for eight years as a well-known presenter at a Chinese radio station. As a public figure, she received many letters. Most of them were from women. Moved by the stories she was hearing in the letters, she decided to go in search of more of the truths about Chinese women's lives. What she found was terrible suffering; women who had endured lengthy sexual abuse during the Cultural Revolution, women whose wretched poverty was made more miserable by the dictates of a male-centred society, women who had had their children taken from them or who had lost them in earthquakes and other natural disasters. And, amid all the suffering, she found their capacity to endure and somehow survive.

Xinran is not a diffident or modest journalist. The reader gets to hear quite a lot of people in the course of her book, telling her how honest and humane and famous she is. This is, unsurprisingly, exasperating. However, someone more modest, and with a less robust sense of her own importance and the importance of what she was doing, would not have gathered the material that she has done. She would not have gone to those places she needed to go in order to record the stories in her book. The voices of the many women to whom she listened would not have been heard. --Nick Rennision

Review

"Groundbreaking.... This intimate record reads like an act of defiance, and the unvarnished prose allows each story to stand as testimony." --The New Yorker

"A rare collection of testimonies that show the scale of our humanity, both good and bad, wondrous and horrific." --Amy Tan

"An important document that records with intelligent sympathy lives warped or destroyed by political revolutions." --Kirkus Reviews

"Bursting with details that make each account haunting. These stories have all the force of good fiction." --The Washington Post

"Astonishing."--Glamour

"Remarkable. . . . Rather than educating readers through facts and statistics, the author takes readers into the world of these Chinese women, printing their testimonies, which are beautiful, simple, honest, but sometimes horrific. Collectively, they are a raw and explosive social history." -Rocky Mountain News

"An amazing glimpse into [China's] culture. . .Xinran leaves us wanting to know more about ordinary Chinese women-women like herself." -The Deseret News

"Strangely poetic as well as disturbing. . .Readers familiar with Wild Swans will know about the endless political campaigns and their malign effect on domestic life. . .the author is at her best when talking to women of that era." -The Economist

"The power of [Xinran's] book stems from its simplicity. . . . The often appalling and always moving narratives are based on real scenes. . . . An honest book."-The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

"Moving . . . horrific. . . . Nothing short of heartbreaking. . . . There's no denying The Good Women of China is an important book." -Time Asia

"An enlightening, moving, and sometimes horrifying account." -The Sunday Morning Post (UK)

"Leads the reader on an anguishing journey of discovery and catharsis. What emerges from the tragedies that have lain silent all these years is awe for those women who survived the horrors of their past, grief for those who couldn't, and are-examination of one's own place, identity, and emotional life." -International Examiner

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1400030803
• ISBN 13: 9781400030804
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 243