A radio presenter in China until her move to London in 1997, Xinran (China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, 2009,...
A heartbreaking examination of the reasons why Chinese women give up their girls for adoption.
A radio presenter in China until her move to London in 1997, Xinran (China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, 2009, etc.) was stunned by the ignorance of Westerners regarding the Chinese, especially Chinese women. Separated from her parents during the Cultural Revolution, the author hardly knew her mother, and these stories of mothers who abandoned their girls form an especially personal journey for her. By the end of 2010, there will have been more than 120,000 Chinese orphans (mostly girls) adopted worldwide, nearly 80,000 in America. The rate of adoption has steadily increased largely since the economic reforms began to kick in by 1992, though by 2006 the Chinese government had put the brakes on its adoption policy. In traditional farming communities, girls have been abandoned since ancient times, as a girl’s work is worth less in terms of farm labor and she cannot inherit the family line. The one-child-per-family policy, drawn up in 1979, was also carried out crudely, mostly in eastern China’s more urban areas, and everybody wanted a boy. Moreover, Xinran found, sex education was so inadequate at the same time that Western mores exploded in the 1990s that children of unwed mothers were routinely abandoned. These are horrific stories, involving panic-stricken young mothers abandoning newborns wherever they can; grief-stricken mothers who try to kill themselves by swallowing pesticides; the routine act of “doing” an infant girl in peasant communities by throwing her in a slop pail; infanticide that is systematically carried out under the full knowledge of police and hospitals; and the desperate straits of the orphanages. Xinran’s personal attempt to adopt a girl only to have her vanish into the Chinese bureaucracy makes for a poignant ending.Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1089-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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