I found this book that I had purchased some time ago from a used bookstore and recently started reading it. It's funny because a lady at church (who has 3 adopted granddaughters from China) recommended it to me a while ago and I didn't even realize that I owned it. That tells you how MANY books I own. :) I'm not quite finished, but I thought I'd recommend it especially to those of you adopting from China. It has really opened up my eyes to the secret lives of many women in China. The pain and sorrow so they have had to endure is incomprehensible. If anyone would like to borrow it, please just let me know and I'll send it your way when I'm finished. Below, I've added what the New Yorker says about it.
From The New Yorker
In 1989, Xinran, a Beijing journalist, began broadcasting a nightly program on state radio that was devoted entirely to personal affairs—a radical concept in Communist China. In response, she received thousands of letters from women, many with questions about sexuality; one woman wondered "why her heart beat faster when she accidentally bumped into a man on the bus." Eventually, Xinran persuaded her superiors to let her share some of these letters on the air, and in this groundbreaking book, written after she moved to London, in 1997, she has also included stories that didn't make it past government censors. A teen-ager commits suicide after learning that a neighbor has seen her boyfriend kiss her forehead; a university student speaks casually of becoming a "personal secretary," or mistress, to a rich man; a Kuomintang general's daughter goes mad after witnessing the torture of the family that sheltered her. This intimate record reads like an act of defiance, and the unvarnished prose allows each story to stand as testimony.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
I did find on
chinaconnectiononline.com a great list of books of special interest to China-adoptive families. I'll have to check off what I already own and see what else I can add to my collection!
http://www.chinaconnectiononline.com/books.htm
