Ruth Institute Blog

This is a book review of true stories from women affected by China’s one-child policy. As a soon-to-be mother of three girls, this stuff just breaks my heart. I’m posting the review because I think more people should be aware of this huge problem.

by Jonathan Mirsky

I know a British couple with a Chinese daughter, pretty and fluent in English. Of course the little girl was adopted. It is necessary to steel one’s self against three agonising thoughts: how did such children come to be here, why does one never meet an adopted Chinese boy, and what does one reply when the adopted Chinese child asks, ‘Why did my real mother let me go?’

There is already substantial information on this subject, including television documentaries, none of it mentioned by Xinran. No one has exposed the scandal of Chinese orphanages, the starting point for the traffic in babies to foreigners — there are now well over 120,000 such children living abroad — better than the Scottish academic and journalist Robin Munro and it would make this troubling book even better had his exposés been noted by Xinran.

But never mind. No bleaker picture exists of the fate of Chinese female infants, whether murdered at birth or abandoned, than Messages from an Unknown Chinese Mother. One woman’s story reveals this black mark in Chinese culture, both traditional and contemporary. She had lived and worked almost her entire life in orphanages, and told Xinran that little girls sometimes arrived there with scars between their legs. Oil lamps or candles had burned them.

The first thing the village midwives did when the baby was born was not to clear its airway but to check [by the light of the lamp or candle] whether it was a boy or girl, because that was what the family wanted to hear. Some of the burns were on the baby’s private parts …

Before she came to the UK in 1997 Xinran was famous for her radio talk show Words on the Night Breeze, where for eight years she listened to anonymous women telling her about their miserable lives. In 2002 she turned this experience into The Good Women of China, the most disturbing stories of Chinese women I had ever read.

Find the article here.