Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother

Stories of Loss and Love

Xinran

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781451610949
• eBook ISBN:
  9781451610956
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. Her searing stories of mothers who have been driven to abandon their daughters or give them up for adoption is a masterful and significant work of literary reportage and oral history.

Xinran has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who have given up their daughters. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, these women had to give up their daughters for adoption; others even had to watch as their baby daughters were taken away at birth and drowned. Xinran beautifully portrays the “extra-birth guerrillas” who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; naïve young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the “pebble mother” on the banks of the Yangzte River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can’t produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state.

For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Author Bio
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• A Book Written for Adopted Daughters
• Chapter 1: The First Mother I Met Who Had Lost Her Daughter
• Chapter 2: “The Mothers of Girls are All Heartsick”
• Chapter 3: The Midwife’s Story
• Chapter 4: The Dishwasher Who Twice Tried to Kill Herself
• Chapter 5: Extra-Birth Guerrilla Troops: A Father on the Run
• Chapter 6: Red Mary of the Orphanage
• Chapter 7: The Mother Who Still Waits in the Usa
• Chapter 8: A Morality Tale for our Times
• Chapter 9: Bonds of Love: Stones and Leaves
• Chapter 10: Little Snow, Where are You?
• Afterword: Two Letters From the Heart
• Appendix A: More Letters From Adoptive Mothers
• Appendix B: Chinese Adoption Laws
• Appendix C: Suicide Among Women
• Appendix D: The 18 Wonders of Chengdu
• Translator’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Support the Mothers’ Bridge of Love for Chinese Children
• About the Author
• Footnotes