The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices
Xinran, 2000
256 pages
Read in 2008
Check the synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Summary and quick note 🔽
✔ Radio personality collected stories of women, what it means to live as women in Communist China
✔ Record of horrible and humiliating stories, told by the victim's point of view
★★★★★ 80s in China, once the radio became more "liberated" the author was running a late night program hearing stories of women. This book is a collection of the victims' stories - rape, forced marriage, shame, tortures. Stories of what it meant to be women in China back then, told by themselves.
🔽 Book review 🔽
After China decided to "open up", the author Xinran was a radio personality who ran a late night program in the 80s hearing voices of women.
For this book she collected these women's stories, and went to meet them in person, to show what it meant to live as a woman in China back then.
A girl whose mother let her own father rape her, a woman who was made to marry the Cultural Revolution, a homosexual woman whose father felt shame he had a daughter, a woman who was raped and mentally destroyed, a group of women lived in a cave to be used by men as tools.
For those who "don't agree with feminism", it's like agreeing that it's ok that women are not treated as human with dignity.
Indeed, lives of these women are same level as farm animals.
The group of women whom the author went to meet with, those who lived in a cave, were swapped with women from other villages in the name of marriage, and they were also "recycled" by her husband's brothers.
There may still be some communities on this planet where similar practice is happening, the big question is, where do you draw a line saying "it's not my problem" or "it's their culture".
Just like Jung Chiang, the author of "Wild Swans" that I'd just read before this book, Xinran teaches at SOAS in London, and she says that there are still some Chinese girls who have no notion of pregnancy.
The lives of these women are distressing and tragic, but what really hit me was the fact that these women still lived through it, they are resisted it and with their strong will they came to the other side enduring it, with no help.
Something we must know as a part of history, our history.
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🔽 Where to buy / Summary and more info 🔽
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The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices
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