The Good Women of China

Xinran's The Good Women of China continues the tradition of Chinese women writing in recent years. Jung Chang, in Wild Swans, and Aiping Mu, in Vermilion Gate, for example, have written of the effect of recent Chinese history on themselves and their families. However, both of these books, and others like them, have been by women from the upper echelons of Chinese society. What of ordinary Chinese women? How are their voices to be heard?

Xinran worked for eight years as a well-known presenter at a Chinese radio station. As a public figure, she received many letters. Most of them were from women. Moved by the stories she was hearing in the letters, she decided to go in search of more of the truths about Chinese women's lives. What she found was terrible suffering; women who had endured lengthy sexual abuse during the Cultural Revolution, women whose wretched poverty was made more miserable by the dictates of a male-centred society, women who had had their children taken from them or who had lost them in earthquakes and other natural disasters. And, amid all the suffering, she found their capacity to endure and somehow survive.

Xinran is not a diffident or modest journalist. The reader gets to hear quite a lot of people in the course of her book, telling her how honest and humane and famous she is. This is, unsurprisingly, exasperating. However, someone more modest, and with a less robust sense of her own importance and the importance of what she was doing, would not have gathered the material that she has done. She would not have gone to those places she needed to go in order to record the stories in her book. The voices of the many women to whom she listened would not have been heard. --Nick Rennision

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Something different.... - Rated
Have read a couple of Xinran's other offerings recently (Chopsticks and Sky Burial - both recommended), and have enjoyed this as much as I did the others (although I am hesitant to use the expression 'enjoy' - the accounts here can be quite dark, and rather upsetting - I almost dropped the book in shock on one occasion).
This book has some interesting auto-biographical content which has not been obvious in the other offerings I have read, so if you are wanting to learn more about Xinran the person (in addition to the expected cultural insights), this will do it for you.

Utterly absorbing! - Rated
Well, I started this book with the intention of reading a few chapters however 5 hours later I have finished it and loved it!

This book offers glimpses into the lives of Chinese women which are all too fascinating albiet dark, distressing (I cried!) and very touching. It talks about really sensitive topics like rape, abuse, incest but also about love. The love these women have for their children, for their partners and for other women. I alternated between absolute rage, crying and feel such empathy for people who for so long have felt unable to tell their stories.

Their stories are interspersed with the author's own experiences which are also gripping and adds more depth to the book.

I suppose my only criticism would be that it is too brief; I would dearly have loved to hear more as culturally it presents such differing views/attitudes/culture from my own (western) and gives a little more insight into the myriad picture that is and was China.

Learn about China from a woman's perspective - Rated
What I didn't know about China I know now. Xinran is showing what the cultural revolution and communism have done to the people - and specifically the women of China.

For years Xinran was a popular and respected radio journalist in China. She interviewed hundreds of women and received even more letters and phone calls. In this book Xinran has gathered some of these womens' stories. We get to know the young and the old, the poor and the rich.

Most of the stories are so terrifying that I want to forget them after having read them, but that's also what makes the book important. It's a way of understanding women in China today and what they've been through. Even the young generation grew up with mothers and grandmother's who have suffered deeply. Separation from their families, rapes by the Red Guards, re-education and torture. In many cases there's also a real lack of information. Girls get hurt because they don't know how or why they get pregnant. One girl's only experience of tenderness is the touch of a fly, so she keeps it as a pet. The saddest story of them all though is the last one - "The Women of Shouting hill". It's got to be read and I won't spoil the reading by telling anymore.

Unforgettable - Rated
The Good Women of China begins with a prologue that ends with this phrase: "When you walk into your memories, you are opening a door to the past; the road within has many branches, and the route is different every time."

The plot of the novel contains a series of real stories told to the author by Chinese women she interviewed while working as a journalist in China. From the young woman who kills herself because her lover is taken away from her to the Japanese national whose family is broken apart by the Cultural Revolution, to the mothers and wives who lost their families in the 1976's earthquake, to Xinran's own history, the book is a gold mine of female experiences and female struggles. It touches on too many subjects to count, from women's role in society to the importance of literacy for women and homosexuality. I wept, I giggled and I can easily say that this is the most powerful book I've read in a long time.

touching - Rated
I've never had a problem getting into Xinrans' books, i first read this when i was quite young, some parts horrified me and made me cry but only because i was abused too and yet their stories were more horrific than my own. I love this book, it opened my eyes to things i'd never heard of and would have thought "nah, it wouldnt happen" in such a blankly dismissive way. this is the first book i'd read of chinese origin but as soon as i started to read i had no doubts about whther i'd be able to get into it OR after that, when i hadn;t any doubts as to whther i should buy Sky Burial or not. Now i feel i simply HAVE to read Miss Chopsticks. So far Xinran' stories havent done me wrong and i enjoy them as muh i pobbisly could, though what would be even better would be is all women and girls everwhere were safe and happy.