Short description
Talks about love, about how, despite cruelty, despite politics, the female urge to nurture and cherish remains. This work features women who are strong, strikingly resourceful characters and who offer unforgettable insights into Chinese women's lives.
Long description
For seven years, Xinran Xue hosted a daily radio phone-in programme for Radio Nanjing during which she discussed women's lives, and invited women to call in and talk about themselves. Broadcast between 10 and 12 at night, Words on the Night Breeze soon became famous all over China for its powerful, honest discussion of what it means to be a woman in today's China. It started in 1990, a time when China seemed to be opening up, both for the Chinese and for the world. Xinran's programme revealed aspects of women's lives that had never been talked about in public before. She felt as if she was opening a tiny window into a huge fortress whose inhabitants had never before communicated with the outside world. Soon she was receiving over 200 letters a day from women telling their stories. She realised that she knew far less than she had thought about what it means to be a Chinese woman and embarked on a journey of discovery to collect their stories. The stories presented in this collection tell of almost inconceivable suffering: rape, sexual abuse, the separation of parents from their children, the suppression of human emotion in order to survive the Communist regime. And yet this book i
Review
One morning, Xinran Xue, the presenter and producer of a women's radio programme in Communist China, received a letter reading: 'I'm sorry, I can't go on living. You shouldn't have saved me.... Remembering is too painful. I'm leaving.' The letter was written by a 16-year-old girl to her parents. She had been raped by soldiers and left in a ditch. Later she killed herself in hospital and her father died of a heart attack from the shock. This is just one of many stories and letters sent to Xinran for her radio show, 'Words on a Night Breeze', which she had set up to help the abused girls and women of China. The show was instantly and enormously popular; Xinran had many followers among the women of China. However, even though she was aware of the suffering caused by the oppressive regime, she was unprepared for what she heard and read. This book is an account of her experiences. For many of the women who contacted her, the programme was a lifeline - their only opportunity to communicate with someone who understood their problems. Women were unable to speak freely about their feelings - or indeed to express themselves at all - as they had for so long been dominated by their fathers, husbands and sons, who punished them when they 'transgressed'. This misogyny was reinforced by a tyrannical government that regarded women as people of no importance. Despite the horrors of their lives, the love, compassion and fighting spirit of the women shine through. This is an unforgettable book with many distressing stories and some heartwarming ones. Xinran risked censure, even prison, for telling their stories. They changed her view of China and now they will change ours. (Kirkus UK)