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A review by sidharthvardhan
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xinran
4.0
Have you ever seen a stranger or on a bus and wondered what kind of past they have had? This is a book voicing the fates of faces that are lost in crowds.
Xinran hosted a radio call-in show on feminist issues, “Words on the Night Breeze” from 1989 to 1997 which was hugely popular in China. and which brought forth the stories of women from different sections of society, bringing the ugly face of communist China. Almost all stories contain elements of horrible violence, sexual assault, and social suppression and are greatly depressing. Moreover, many of incidences of violence are met out to them when they were children. The problems faced by the women take many forms - rape cases, kidnapping of girls for forced marriage because village lacks daughter due to female foeticide, bullying of children because their parents are Japanese or use foreign goods - sometimes to extent of turning them mentally unstable, people so poor that all sisters of a family shared a single dress which they wore in turns, since all the little clothing the family went to sons.
The stories themselves are worth reading as they draw a kind of social history of Maoist China - with its government control on media, denial of fundamental rights, poverty etc besides doing the service to victims of a ridiculous patriarchy. The patriarchy and poverty creates such ugly forms everywhere in East, but the problems arising out of communism are of unique form,
The trouble is they need a better writer to present them. Xinran keeps on using the phrase 'Chinese women' repeatedly to the point that you would believe that they were some sort of exotic animal species or that she herself wasn't one of them. I mean I know it is your buzzword, but come on, Initially when she kept talking about wanting to know Chinese women, I thought she might have done her studies outside China and so knew little about her country, but no, she had always lived in China. The repeated use of national adjective 'Chinese' instead of using something like 'our women' or 'women in our country' or simply 'women' leaves one with the feeling that the book is written for a foreign audience. And in the last chapter, Xinran confirms it. I think if you want to write about problems of a country. you should assume your primary audience to be people of that country. I am no fan of this foreign reporting thing. And so it is four stars, instead of five stars. There are some other issues too.
Some of the stories would have left a more powerful impact on the reader if Xinran had let the victims finish their story without frequently breaking in to remind how emotional she is as listens to them - most journalists do let people speak for themselves.
It is a translation so, may be, the ridiculously simple language can be forgiven.
There are too many coincidences in these stories which take away their credibility - to take an example, Xinran is told by her father about a couple from his college who were separated by revolution, and she is then told about an unknown woman staying at a hotel who later turns out to be the woman her father talked about.
A woman falls in love for Xinran and later thinks that she is homosexual since she was raised like a man or since she had come to hate men, an observation which she generalises to all homosexual women. Maybe excusable in a country where even married women do not understand sex properly.
Also, it is part biography so she writes about her own childhood sufferings and that of her parents - okay but she must also tell you about office politics, how everyone envies her and so on.
Some of these are minor annoyances but they take the focus away from wothwhile things. Definitly worth reading if you are after knowledge rather than mere reading experience.
Xinran hosted a radio call-in show on feminist issues, “Words on the Night Breeze” from 1989 to 1997 which was hugely popular in China. and which brought forth the stories of women from different sections of society, bringing the ugly face of communist China. Almost all stories contain elements of horrible violence, sexual assault, and social suppression and are greatly depressing. Moreover, many of incidences of violence are met out to them when they were children. The problems faced by the women take many forms - rape cases, kidnapping of girls for forced marriage because village lacks daughter due to female foeticide, bullying of children because their parents are Japanese or use foreign goods - sometimes to extent of turning them mentally unstable, people so poor that all sisters of a family shared a single dress which they wore in turns, since all the little clothing the family went to sons.
The stories themselves are worth reading as they draw a kind of social history of Maoist China - with its government control on media, denial of fundamental rights, poverty etc besides doing the service to victims of a ridiculous patriarchy. The patriarchy and poverty creates such ugly forms everywhere in East, but the problems arising out of communism are of unique form,
The trouble is they need a better writer to present them. Xinran keeps on using the phrase 'Chinese women' repeatedly to the point that you would believe that they were some sort of exotic animal species or that she herself wasn't one of them. I mean I know it is your buzzword, but come on, Initially when she kept talking about wanting to know Chinese women, I thought she might have done her studies outside China and so knew little about her country, but no, she had always lived in China. The repeated use of national adjective 'Chinese' instead of using something like 'our women' or 'women in our country' or simply 'women' leaves one with the feeling that the book is written for a foreign audience. And in the last chapter, Xinran confirms it. I think if you want to write about problems of a country. you should assume your primary audience to be people of that country. I am no fan of this foreign reporting thing. And so it is four stars, instead of five stars. There are some other issues too.
Some of the stories would have left a more powerful impact on the reader if Xinran had let the victims finish their story without frequently breaking in to remind how emotional she is as listens to them - most journalists do let people speak for themselves.
It is a translation so, may be, the ridiculously simple language can be forgiven.
There are too many coincidences in these stories which take away their credibility - to take an example, Xinran is told by her father about a couple from his college who were separated by revolution, and she is then told about an unknown woman staying at a hotel who later turns out to be the woman her father talked about.
A woman falls in love for Xinran and later thinks that she is homosexual since she was raised like a man or since she had come to hate men, an observation which she generalises to all homosexual women. Maybe excusable in a country where even married women do not understand sex properly.
Also, it is part biography so she writes about her own childhood sufferings and that of her parents - okay but she must also tell you about office politics, how everyone envies her and so on.
Some of these are minor annoyances but they take the focus away from wothwhile things. Definitly worth reading if you are after knowledge rather than mere reading experience.