Number Crunching: APAs and the 2000 Census (Feature) Community Mourns Sudden Death of APA Actress (in National News) Chang-Lin Tien, UC Berkeley Chancellor and Scientist Dies (in Bay Area News) Ultimate Diversions: Inside the Twilight Zone (in Business) Tuaolo Emerges from the NFL Closet (in Sports) Xinran: The Voice of the Good Women of China (in A&E) Emil Amok: Bleeding Orange and Black (in Opinion)

Xinran: The Voice of the Good Women of China

The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices is one of those books you just can’t put down. Part memoir, part history, part tragedy, part social documentary, Good Women is the first book by Xinran Xue, a journalist who hosted a nightly radio show in China called “Words on the Night Breeze.” The show debuted in 1989 and lasted for seven years. As the first show in China to give voice to Chinese women, “Words” had millions of faithful listeners. Xinran received hundreds of calls and letters every day, in which women from all walks of life poured out their stories. Xinran often wept.

These women’s stories make up Good Women. So important were these women’s lives to Xinran that she actually risked her life for the sake of the book. When she first moved to London from China in 1999, she was mugged on her way home from London University, where she was teaching at the time. She struggled desperately with the assailant, refusing to give up her bag, which contained her only copy of the book’s original manuscript. While she admits today that, “Of course, life is more important than a book,” she insists that in many ways, this book was not only her own life, but also a testimony to the lives of all the women in China who had been silent for far too long.

In the book, Xinran bears witness to incest, rape, kidnapping, brutality, suffering, torture and neglect. She writes of a young girl whose only escape from her father’s torturous incestuous demands was to slowly die in a hospital. She writes of mothers who lost their entire families to a violent earthquake, who recreated a large make-shift family filled with surviving earthquake orphans. She writes of the women in a far-off village who have lives filled with suffering — they work all day from sun-up to sundown, then must ‘service’ the men, sometimes as a shared wife to numerous men, and bear children endlessly year after year, whose only joy is receiving an egg mixed with water and sugar upon the birth of a son — and yet, ironically, they are the only women who claim they are “happy.”

Xinran also offers glimpses of her own life, a brutal experience as a much-abused victim of the Cultural Revolution. Somehow, Xinran, like the women she represents in this memorable book, not only survives, but thrives.

Xinran: After secondary school, I received further education in a military university, where I studied English and international relations. After my studies, I worked in the military as a civilian.

I published my first poem at 15, and then after that I published quite a lot — short stories, poems — and I think that is why they put me in that station [which broadcast “Words”]. Now with this book, I’ve been published in 50 countries in 22 languages. I can’t believe it!

AW: Once you arrived in London, what did you do? How did you become a writer?

Xinran: I did many different things. I worked as a cleaner in a store, I taught Chinese classes, I was a freelance journalist, I did voiceovers for a Chinese television production company. I just wanted to learn, to practice the English language in different ways. If you want to be part of a new country, you have to learn about it at different levels, from different people, so I tried a little bit of everything. I was also very interested in learning about lives of Chinese women living overseas. I wanted to try all the different kinds of jobs they were doing while living in a foreign country.

AW: And what did you discover about these overseas Chinese women?

Xinran: This is one of the reasons I have written this book. Chinese women have the reputation of having no feelings, no emotions, no color, no taste — I was so sad to hear comments like these about Chinese women’s lives. Between 1989 and 1997, I interviewed face-to-face over 200 women, from the countryside, from the city, from small villages where life is as it was 500 years ago. I know Chinese women have colorful feelings, they know emotional things, but they have to try and live their lives in different ways, because our culture is a hiding, negative culture.

This is why I chose this name for book. When we women come into this world, we want to be good — a good daughter, good mother, good friend, good lover, good wife. But because of our [Chinese] culture, many women feel they’re no good. In 1995, I opened four telephone lines to ask men two questions: How many good women in your lives have you met?; and what’s the standard of a good woman? I received over a thousand letters, but only a few letters said that they had ever met a good woman in their lives. Most of the men said no, they had not met a good woman. I was so shocked. If these men could write to me, then obviously, they were educated and this is the way educated men felt.

To be a good woman, according to the men, required five standards: 1. A good woman is quiet, never goes out, is never open, especially to other men; 2. A good woman must give the family a son; 3. A good woman is always soft and never loses her temper; 4. A good woman never makes mistakes in doing the housework, she never mixes the colors when doing the wash, she never burns the food when cooking; and 5. A good woman is good in bed and retains her beautiful figure.

AW: Are you a “good woman”?

Xinran: In my eyes, the standard of good woman is completely different from these standards. If we don’t look down on ourselves, we are good. If we know how to love, how to give love, how to feel toward other people, then we are good.

But under this Chinese standard, we are not good. I’m a freelance television producer, I’m a writer, I do consulting for companies in foreign countries, but when I come home and find my husband cooking dinner, I think I should be cooking. I’m the woman, I’m the wife. I’m educated, and still it’s difficult for me to break out of this kind of thinking.

Xinran will be at Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, on Saturday, Nov. 2 at 7:30 p.m., and at the Mechanics Institute Library, 57 Post Street, San Francisco, on Monday, Nov. 4 at 6 p.m.