Good Women of China (original 2002; edition 2003)

Xinran was the presenter of a radio show in China, during which she would ask women to call her and tell her about themselves. Over the years, she gathered many stories of Chinese women, and this book contains fifteen of them, including her own. It's a diverse collection of stories, including the stories of a lesbian woman, of loveless forced marriages, of hopeless love stories, of women who were raped as children...

They're eye-opening, saddening, horrifying. Xinran's matter of fact tone -- though no doubt partly due to the translation -- doesn't do anything to hide that. I wouldn't say that any story in here is actually a happy one.

Worth reading, though, yes. If you want to learn about Chinese women through the eyes of a Chinese woman, The Good Women of China will definitely help, while at the same time it doesn't dump information on you in big blobs -- the idea is to give these women of China a voice, really, not to educate the West. Xinran doesn't just speak of other women, and her own story runs through it all, with her own thoughts and reactions contextualising the stories. ( )

A collection of women's stories as told to Xinran, whose radio show aired in China in the 90's. Parts of Xinran's own story is interspersed with those of the women who called or wrote her. ( )

As a radio presenter, the author uses her position and influence to highlight the plight of women. Callers to her show are given the opportunity to air their stories of anguish, suppression and mistreatment by men who valued them as mere objects. It is very depressing. While I think these stories need to be told, I hope more could be done, such as educating women about sex education, self-defence, women's rights and gender equality; all these fundamental issues should be incorporated into the basic education.

(i) "Men are like mountains; they only know the ground beneath their feet, and the trees on their slopes. But women are like water...the source of life and it adapts itself to the environment. Like water, women also gives of itself wherever it goes to nurture life". (ii) "The sun is giving; women love - their experience is the same." (iii) "Heaven and earth seemed to have merged. The sun had not yet risen, but its light already spilled from a great distance across the immense canvas, touching the stones on the hills, and gilding the yellow-grey earth gold." ( )

I'm very glad that I wasn't born a Chinese woman during the 20th century, since the women Xinran interviewed for her radio show seemed to have uniformly harrowing lives. My favourite chapter was about the children's home run by women who lost had their own children in the 1976 earthquake, with the story of the girl who died fourteen days after the earthquake being particularly traumatic. When I read the last chapter of the book, I was stunned that the villagers of Shouting Hill lived in such primitive conditions as late as 1996, but according to Xinran, they were the only women she spoke to who were actually happy. ( )

Just finished this book, as a revealing insight into Chinese women, and into women in general. As a radio journalist, Xinran started to field calls from women about women and this is a collection of some of their stories. Sad in many places, tragic even, these are the untold stories of the underside of an ancient culture told to a woman trying to understand her own sex in modern China.

I have also read Sky Burial, which I would also thoroughly recommend. ( )