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Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories Of Loss And Love (2010)

by Xinran(Favorite Author)

4.05 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0701184027 (ISBN13: 9780701184025)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Chatto & Windus

review 1: Järkyttäviä tositarinoita siitä, kuinka Kiinassa tyttölapsia kohdellaan. Samalla teos on myös äitien (no ehkä vähän isienkin, mutta he eivät ole pääosassa) puolella: kirjailija valottaa niitä syitä, joiden vuoksi kiinalaisäidit luopuvat lapsistaan, ja kuvaa äitien tunteita. Kerronnassa turhaa (amerikkalaishenkistä) sentimentaalisuutta, paisuttelua ja oman egon esiin tuomista, mutta tarinat sinänsä ovat vaikuttavia, ehdottomasti lukemisen arvoisia.
review 2: Xinran is that rare, rare non-fiction writer that puts you completely into her interview conversations, as if you were standing next to her or sitting beside sucking up the bowl of noodles one at a time, just as she is. And listening.Not only with accurate dialog but with each figment of ... moreemotional or locational context to that exact interview. And in doing so she imbeds you within the cultural and societal diameters of all consequence and onus. She is a gifted writer with an incredible background, perfectly fitted to relate this book's report from the place where it occurs.The book itself and the women's stories! You read heart-wrenching and sob experience reports on GR's all the time. For me, this one was the first this year that actually was. I had to leave it and return because it was so heavy, too heavy, for me to take it in within a day or two. It is not long, nor is it difficult English- it is just the factor of "that's the way it is" which is stomach turning. Not that there are lack of such slop buckets on other continents. But that little girl making the orchid hand movement in the train station; it is just such a terrible and ignorant waste. Which also continues to foster such voids of sorrow within Mother's hearts for their lost and destroyed daughters until their own deaths.Coming from a culture that is also patriarchal and undervalues female births, and not only because of the agrarian strengths needed by males(Sicilian), some experiences of my early life could parallel Xinran's of not feeling "of a piece" to her peers or generation in the U.S.A. That also touched me, because that is the first time I've felt that parody outside of immigrants I have meet in Chicago that are my age.The girls who have found adopted parents are far luckier, even in searching and wondering, than their used and forgotten mothers are. These biological parental stories (Dads too, some of them) are worthy to be heard. less

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