Xinran - Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love

A touching book... [Xinran] gives voice to the silent heartbreak of tens of thousands of Chinese women.

NEW YORK POST

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. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothersstudents, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasantswho, whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, have given up their daughters. 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; nave young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes; the pebble mother on the banks of the Yangtze River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they cant 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.

A heartbreaking examination of the reasons why Chinese women give up their girls for adoption.

KIRKUS REVIEWS

The core of Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is the individual stories of women who have lost their daughters. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by them.

THE ECONOMIST

Born in Beijing in 1958, XINRAN was a radio journalist in China before moving to London. Her books include The Good Women of China, Sky Burial, and What the Chinese Dont Eat. She is a member of the advisory board of the Asia House Festival of Asian Literature and founder of The Mothers Bridge of Love (MBL) charity, which reaches out to Chinese children in all corners of the world by creating a bridge of understanding between China and the West and between adoptive and birth cultures. Learn more at www.mothersbridge.org.

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Praise for
Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother

People often ask me how women in China can give up their babies for adoption. Xinranin her usual amazing wayhas not only found women to tell her exactly why and how they gave up their babies, but she has taken it a step further to ask those mothers what message they would like to send the daughters they will never see or touch again. This collection is powerful and heartbreaking. Its a must-read for families who have adopted children from China, as well as for anyone who has an interest in what womens lives are like in the economic powerhouse China has become.

Lisa See

This eye-opening work is made even more shocking by how recent most of these womens stories are, even as Xinran counterbalances the heartbreak with letters from families outside China who have adopted Chinese babies.

Booklist (starred review)

Xinran is compassionate and remarkably adept at getting her interviewees to open up about their most painful memories: how some mothers were forced to put their babies up for adoption or abandon them at hospitals, orphanages, or on the street, and how theyve seen newborns drowned or smothered at birth. She shows how outdated traditions, modern policies, and punishing poverty spur the abandonment of so many female infants, and an abnormally high suicide rate for women of childbearing age. This is a brutally honest book written for those relinquished children, so that they will know how much their birth mothers loved them and howin the words of one mother who gave up her daughterthey paid for that love with an endless stream of bitter tears.

Publishers Weekly (pick of the week)

Xinrans book is a caustic account of what the numbers fail to explain.

The Daily, the iPad review

A heartbreaking examination of the reasons why Chinese women give up their girls for adoption.

Kirkus Reviews

Im a longtime admirer of Xinrans writing. She has a rare gift as both a compassionate listener and a mesmerizing storyteller. In reading her books, I always feel as if I am in a room, listening with Xinran, as strangers unveil the haunting details of their lives that grab my imagination and my heart.

Amy Tan

The core of Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is the individual stories of women who have lost their daughters. One would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by them.

The Economist

This is an extraordinary book told with generosity and warmth by a brilliant storyteller.

Hilary Spurling, Financial Times (UK)

Xinran has devoted her life to listening to voiceless, often sexually ignorant women, brutalized into silence by a culture that refuses to acknowledge the female interior life; here she exposes the barbaric underbelly of a harsh economic reality in which to give birth to a girl is to bring shame on an entire household.

Metro (UK)

Harrowing and heartbreaking yet important tales.

She magazine (UK)

ALSO BY XINRAN

The Good Women of China
Sky Burial
What the Chinese Dont Eat
Miss Chopsticks
China Witness

SCRIBNER
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Copyright 2010 by The Good Woman of China Limited
Translation copyright 2010 by Nicky Harman

Originally published in Great Britain in 2010 by Chatto & Windus

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Scibner trade paperback edition March 2012

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