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.
Until now. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother lays before us the testimonies of the wretched mothers recorded by Xinran with sympathy and horror. She reveals that years ago in China she herself, well able to bear the cost, and the mother of a son, tried to foster a little girl orphan who was taken away from her after a few weeks; keeping her, Xinran was warned, would violate the one-child policy. Had she refused, not only she but her senior colleagues would have been punished. The little girl soon vanished; the orphanage to which she had been sent was demolished to make way for a new highway. As usual in China there were no records.
Until I read this book, even after many years reporting from China, I had imagined that the adopted Chinese children I met here and there abroad — who were lucky not to have been drowned at birth by midwives — were from poor peasant families. Another illusion about China shattered!
One of the testimonies here is by Na, a young woman engineer, now a US citizen. She had seduced one of her Shanghai university lecturers because she was curious about sex. After a week of passion the relationship ended, but she was pregnant. Na’s parents, both university teachers, entreated her to get rid of her baby, either by abortion or adoption. Her mother said:
If our only child lives as a single mother, how can your father and I go home to Shanghai? Never mind about passing our last years in peace and comfort, we simply couldn’t face our friends and family …We haven’t got longer to live, please give us a peaceful old age.
The mother added that if the baby went to America, some day Na might find her. Na agreed, learning only after she had moved to America that there were already 30,000 adopted Chinese children there. She had sent her baby to the orphanage with some keepsakes, so that some day ‘we’d always have this means of identifying each other’. Many mothers did this, and in every case the orphanage got rid of the pathetic clothes and objects.
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’.
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