Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother

Stories of Loss and Love

Xinran

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781451610956
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

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.

1
THE FIRST MOTHER I MET WHO HAD LOST HER DAUGHTER

“My name is Waiter—not ‘waiter’ in the sense of someone who waits at tables in a restaurant, but meaning someone who waits for a future which will never come.”

When I said farewell to China and made my way to England in the summer of 1997, I traveled with the emotional baggage of forty difficult years in China—and all my material possessions stuffed into a single suitcase. I was going to a country I knew nothing about, and I was bringing almost nothing into my new life. I could pick and choose only a few bits of “home” to take with me, and these could not exceed the permitted 25 kilos.

Apart from day-to-day necessities, of which I never had many, I had other possessions I was particularly attached to and which I had accumulated over the twenty adult years before my departure: especially books, stones, and music tapes. All of these things had made me what I am, both as a woman and a mother; and the story of “the first mother” has to start with my own journey. …

My love of books began when the flames of the Cultural Revolution destroyed a hitherto happy childhood. I was being reduced to tears by bullies on a daily basis, and so one of my language teachers took pity on me and hid me in a back room filled with books which he had saved from the Red Guards’ bonfires. In this cubbyhole (as I have described in The Good Women of China), its window pasted over with newspaper, I began to read by the light let in through a small hole. The first great work of literature which was to offer me an escape from my misery was a Chinese translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables; I was surprised, as I glanced down the first page, and read about the humiliations suffered by little Cosette as she slaved away in that sordid bar, to realize that there were people in the world very much worse off than I.

The battles in Les Misérables, and the hardships and bloody struggles that filled the lives of its protagonists, restored a sense of balance to me in those dark days. I was not the only lonely, suffering child; I was living in the real world, and it was not all bad. At least I was not living hand-to-mouth, with a war raging around me, as they were. At least I had enough to eat, and I had books.

I began to spend most of my money on history books, biographies, books on world culture, and translations of classics, until they filled my house. Every new volume would give me a supreme sense of satisfaction, as well as new knowledge, and I read until far into the night. When I emigrated, I not only had to strike root in a strange country and “grow up” all over again. I also had to go through the excruciating process of parting with my beloved book collection, which by then totaled several thousand volumes. More than 2,000 went to the Baixia Children’s Palace in Nanjing, where I set up a little library for the parents who brought their children every weekend to study art and other skills. Another 2,000 or so I gave to the wives of volunteer soldiers from poor areas, many of whom could not read or write, so that they could set up an Adult Education Library. Nearly 2,000 illustrated books, on China, history, and life in other countries, as well as quantities of children’s books, went to migrant worker women who lived clustered on the city outskirts; their children were first-generation city folk but had never taken part in any cultural activities. I hoped that my books could help to educate the parents of the future.

That left 200 books which I definitely could not take to my new home. I deposited them in a good friend’s office, where they told the world how cultured she was. Finally, a dozen or more books with which I really could not bear to part occupied one-third of my small suitcase.

My love of stones, and a curious collection which grew from a hobby into something much more important for me, came from a trip I made at the end of the 1980s. I had gone to a small mountain village near Yulin, in Shaanxi province, to interview a woman who was something of a local legend. She had a deeply lined face and rough hands with misshapen fingers, her skin was engrained with decades of dirt, and she reeked of smoke. Every now and then, she wiped the snot that ran from her nose, rubbing her fingers clean on her clothes. Looking at her, I found it almost impossible to believe her extraordinary tale. In the 1950s, when she was a girl, her parents returned from America to help with “national reconstruction,” but were arrested as spies when the government discovered a plot by overseas Chinese and the Taiwan-based enemy Guomindang. She was a teenager at the time, and the night before their arrest she was taken by a family friend into hiding in the poorest part of the Shanxi mountains.

At the start of the Cultural Revolution, it was arranged that she should marry one of the poorest of the local men—this protected her by putting her into the “Red” camp. She had kept three photographs as a testament to her story: one showed a happy girl in a dress hugging her parents; in another she was playing the piano, dressed in a white evening dress; and the third was of her parents, dressed in Western clothes and standing in front of their American home. The woman I was interviewing looked like any other peasant—there was no trace of her former wealthy, elegant life—although I could see a physical resemblance to her parents.

“However did you … did you …?” I really did not know how to put my question.

“How did I cope? Is that what you’re asking?” She wiped her nose again, and pointed unsmilingly to a stream which ran through a crack in the rock near her feet. She said: “Choose a pebble and break it open. That will tell you!”

I picked out a pebble and cracked it open with a bigger stone, but could see no answer to my question inside.

“Why is a pebble round?” She was obviously annoyed that I was being so obtuse.

“It’s been worn smooth by time and the water, hasn’t it?” I answered hesitantly.

“What about inside? Does the water get inside it? That’s where the woman is.” She threw this last comment at me, and walked off.

And then I understood: a woman was like a pebble worn smooth and round by water and time. Our outward appearance was changed by the fate meted out to us in our lives, but no water could alter the heart of the woman and her maternal instincts.

After that, I fell in love with pebbles; they seemed to symbolize my desire to fathom the true nature of Chinese women.

In my travels around the world, I could not carry heavy stones with me. After much agonizing, I gave my beloved pebbles, collected during reporting trips, to friends. I do not know if they understood my feelings about the stories behind each one, and about the “pebble” that I was becoming as I grew older. You have to understand why they are valuable to appreciate them. I did not know how far my journey would take me, or for how long. I just felt reassured that the pebbles I had left in my friends’ hands would not wear away during our lifetime, and that no disasters would destroy them. I took only one pebble with me. It was one which had accompanied me for years in spirit and in my actual journeys around China; I had picked it up on the banks of the Yangtze River when some strange fate ordained that I should meet first a mother, then a daughter, whose stories you can read in Chapter 9 of this book.

The only “fashionable” items which I had among my belongings were a few hundred music CDs and about a hundred old-style tape recordings. DVDs were only just then becoming popular in China, and I could not afford them.

(I did not have many VCDs either, for what to me seemed a good reason, though no doubt others thought me ridiculous: watching VCDs was mainly associated in my mind with corrupt officials who groped the office secretaries by day, spent their evenings in the arms of escort girls in karaoke bars, slept with their lovers on weekends, and then went home to shout abuse at the wife for being dull. Whenever I thought about getting some VCDs, I felt a rush of loathing for those drunken creeps. Years of presenting radio shows for women, listening to tearful accusations from fatherless children and frank confessions of husbands stolen away by other women, had taught me that one reason why these men callously deserted their families was the irresistible draw of karaoke. That dreamlike setting, that unforgettable smile, those heart-stopping lyrics, that whiff of fragrance from the singer standing next to them …)

But the music tapes were different and I found it really hard to part with them. They had been with me from the moment at the end of the 1980s when the mainstream media started to use popular music or Western classical music to accompany its broadcasts, through to the late 1990s, when China, rushing headlong into economic development, fell in love with Western culture. Deng Xiaoping forced open the creaking door which had sealed China off from the outside world for thousands of years and, as I saw it, the music that flooded in fed the parched souls of young Chinese people. At that time, no one had computers, and most people did not have televisions or telephones either. Long-distance communication was limited to the monotonous tones of government propaganda broadcasts. In 1980s China, the most “advanced” culture was represented by Chinese songs and plays that dated back to the 1950s. Every Chinese man or woman over forty has a favorite song that never fails to move them. These rousing rhythms nourished their battered, repressed, and impoverished spirits, and the lyrics promised love and affection to flesh which craved the forbidden fruit of sexual love.

When I read my listeners’ letters, I found that a popular tune or the evocative lines of a song often replayed themselves in my head, and my response was to put on a song or some bars of a melody. Those old-style tapes for me became a repository of the spirit of those times.

I steeled myself to make my intrepid dash toward a totally unknown future in the West by taking with me only the music that I knew and loved and could not imagine life without: a Chinese CD of Paradiesvogel and two tapes, of Enya Brennan and Schumann.

Robert Schumann’s Träumerei was the introductory music to the first program I hosted on Nanjing Radio, Words on the Night Breeze. I never imagined that my words and the soft, dreamlike notes of Schumann’s piece would attract over a hundred letters every day, but I knew as the music began to play that I was going to be a plain-speaking presenter on a program which I would make very much my own.

The Chinese CD of Paradiesvogel is a selection of the best of James Last’s panpipe music,^* and modern classics both Western and Chinese. I particularly like “Edelweiss” and “Moscow Suburbs Night,” as well as others that the women who listened to my program sometimes mentioned.

Enya^† was first heard in China at the end of the 1980s, at a time when the Chinese media had just started live broadcasting for its main program. When I heard her voice during my routine work of listening to newly issued recordings, I remember how struck I was by those languorous sounds. The truth is that her singing not only brought tears to my eyes, but stirred up in my heart indescribable emotions—fleeting, dreamlike, yet frenzied and with the power to awaken me. And her glorious music took me on a voyage of exploration to every corner of the world which continues to this day.

When I first played Enya in my program, I chose “Evening Falls,” “Orinoco Flow,” and “Na Laetha Geal M’Óige” from her Watermark album as background music in response to listeners’ letters, one of which came from a young woman who called herself “Waiter.”

This all happened so many years ago, but it remains fresh in my memory, and comes back to me again every time I hear Enya’s “Evening Falls.”

“Dear Xinran …” She was the first of my listeners to address me like this, in fact the first in all my forty years in China. Although I had studied English too, I was still surprised by her bold use of this Westernized form of address. You have to understand that apart from a tiny number of foreign-language students in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, no one would dare to call—or even think of calling—someone outside their family, or even within it, “Dear,” because the term had been condemned as “bourgeois sentimentalism” at the start of the Cultural Revolution! Anyway, when I began hosting Words on the Night Breeze, none of the people who wrote to me every day addressed me as “Dear.” Mostly it was “Comrade Xinran” or some other respectful Soviet-style form of address.

There followed a long outpouring of twenty pages or more, in which she told her story, which went like this:

Dear Xinran,

First of all, thank you for your program Words on the Night Breeze. Every day I wait for it, and every evening it fills my head with thoughts.

How many times, in how many different ways, have you exhorted your listeners not to suffer agonies because of something that happened in the past! You say that we should find in every day the seeds of opportunity for the future, that we should find a quiet space in our minds to fill with plans for our future, because our lives should not be stuck in a past which is dead and gone, and we should use our capacity for living in order to make a better future.

I know you mean well—you don’t want good people to throw away their lives today because of pain or remorse they suffered, or mistakes they made, in the past. But even though you used the expression “suffering agonies,” I don’t know if you really know what it means to suffer agony. Do you really think people can pick and choose from their past, just the way they move house?

Let me tell you a true story, of someone who has really suffered agonies.

This is the story of a generation of young Chinese women university students, and of a youth lost before it was really enjoyed. Its bitter taste will stay with you for a long time.

“Waiter” is twenty-five, and she has been going out with her boyfriend for two years. He has proposed marriage, but she doesn’t dare accept him. She’s too scared to face the premarriage gynecological examination,^* or even to be honest with her boyfriend about her past. She hardly dares to hope that one day she may be a mother, let alone a grandmother, and is even frightened that the man she loves will hear her crying in her sleep. Because this woman has not just lost her virginity, she’s had a baby.

Five years ago, Waiter was accepted for a course in Western culture and languages in the Department of Foreign Languages of a telecommunications college. The college was in the provincial capital far from her hometown, so Waiter left home to study. Her parents had brought her up strictly, but now she could come and go as she wanted. She read the romantic stories in her textbooks, and talked and joked with male students as well as with the girls. In a few short months, these freedoms had gone to her head like wine. Her parents wrote often, the college rules were posted up everywhere and “worker and peasant cadres” monitored the students’ behavior, but she quickly grew fed up with them. She rejected socially accepted norms of behavior, especially after she made the shocking discovery that, in order to become Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, each of her parents had dropped the people that they truly loved; instead, they had obeyed their leaders and married each other, and subsequently aborted a baby, all for the sake of the revolution. She simply could not believe that the parents she had idolized had been so cynical and cowardly. She vowed that she would be like Zhu Yingtai in the old tale “Butterfly Lovers” and find love for herself. Then she would, like Jane Eyre, sacrifice everything to defend her love, and would become a girl who lived for love.

Then an enthusiastic young man in his final year began to help her with her English pronunciation and talked to her about great literary masterpieces of the world. Being with him made her pulse race with excitement. Just hearing him breathe felt intoxicating. She was overcome by uncontrollable longings she had never felt before. It was not long before she felt his hand on her shoulder and turned her face up to his. They kissed passionately, over and over, in the corner of the library.

She was awake most of that night in her dormitory bed. As day broke, she fell into an exhausted sleep, and dreamed that a deep voice boomed from the sky: “You are a bad woman, stealing forbidden fruit.” She woke up but smiled to herself. What was wrong with being a “bad woman” if she was as lucky as this?

Any Chinese born in the mid-twentie...

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