New book on China’s suffering mothers — and daughters

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D. | April 4, 2011

Let us brace ourselves for even more heart wrenching stories about China’s brutal one-child policy. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love is the latest book from Xinran, former radio host in Nanjing and author of “The Good Women of China.” Here is just one story from this week’s New York Times review:

Xinran sees painful evidence of this on a train trip when she meets a husband traveling with his wife and their little daughter. As the train is leaving the station, she looks out the window and sees the child sitting alone on the platform. Later she discovers that these seemingly devoted parents have abandoned their daughter — the fourth to be jettisoned in this way — in hopes that the next child the mother bears will be a boy. The Chinese call such people “extra birth guerrillas,” since they are trying to start over in places where no one will know them or their family history.