It is true, nonetheless, that such tragedies — an inadequate word — usually occur among the poor. A girl, rural people believe, will not be able to burn incense for the ancestors, who will starve without it, her family will not be accorded the little morsel of extra land which is the right of a boy, and if she is lucky enough to marry, she will ‘disappear’ into her husband’s family. The mother’s neighbours will pity her. Better to kill the useless creature.
Hence this deadly statistic, not mentioned by Xinran: while the natural male-female gender ratio should be 103 or 104 males for every 100 females, in China, depending on the region, this varies from 110 to at least 130 males for every 100 females. One catastrophic result is a shortage of wives and the kidnapping of girls to be sold as wives in other parts of China. Chinese women also have the highest suicide rate in the world.
After Robin Munro and others made public what they had seen and filmed in orphanages (some of them rightly termed ‘dying houses’), Beijing cracked down on those who had allowed such shameful practices to be discovered by foreigners. A furious official burst out to Xinran:
All these foreigners think about is making a ‘historical record’. They never consider Chinese people’s feelings. If I were a girl adopted abroad, I wouldn’t want people to know I had been picked up from some shambolic, godforsaken mountain village. It would be so humiliating.
The young woman, a university graduate, wasn’t finished:
Mother love is supposed to be such a great thing, but so many babies are abandoned, and it’s their mothers who do it. They’re ignorant. They feel differently about emotions from the way you do. Where I come from, people talk about smothering a baby girl or just throwing it[!]into a stream … to be eaten by dogs, as if it were a joke. How much do you think these women loved their babies?
Another woman offered Xinran an equally tough judgment, but one that explains things less brutally:
You’ve seen what pitiful lives village girls live. They only survive at all by good luck! If these girls can go to Western families and live happy, healthy lives … that’s so much better than them suffering the same sad fate that their mothers did. But it leaves a black hole in the mother’s heart and unanswered questions in the daughter’s.
Same sad fate indeed. One mother whose baby girl survived to be sent to an orphanage, made this plea: ‘Cradle her in your left arm, so the sound of your heartbeat will make her sleep better’.
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.