An Afternoon Read on Chinese Women

The Good Women of China. Hidden Voces is a book written by Xinran, a Chinese radio host whose program for women, Words on the Night Breeze, aired nightly from a Communist Party controlled radio station in Nanjing from 1989 to 1997. During her time as the Chinese Oprah Winfrey, as she has been called by some (Western) reviewers, Xinran received an impressive amount of cards and letters from women all over China telling her of their lives, of hardships and misery. This book is a collection of the testimonials she gathered.

The stories that Xinran collected aim to lift the heavy veil of silence that has covered the suffering of generations of women during and after the bloody upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, a time in which the population was struck by poverty, and when abuse against anyone deemed counter-revolutionary was extremely common. While she champions to give voice to women who have been sexually and emotionally abused at the hands of the Red Guards, or by their own fathers and husbands, and to challenge the discourse of gender equality professed by the Party ideology, Xinran fails at some fundamental level to really criticize the deeply ingrained misogyny and heavily oppressive system that she describes. The narratives, with their first-person confessional and highly melodramatic mode, function in that they trigger immediate emotional response. There is the tween girl repeatedly raped by her own father, and whose only friend in the world is a 'baby fly'; little girls gangbanged by soldiers because their parents are declared foreign secret agents; women who get married off by Party officials to unfeeling, cruel men, in order to have them prove their dedication to the communist mission; peasant women being traded like cattle in the mountains, with bodies deformed by countless births and never-ending hard work in the fields. And Xinran tries to address taboo topics like female sexuality, homosexuality, and female infanticide...But the oral histories and confessions that she gathers fail to deliver on their feminist promise.

I couldn't help sensing a touch of self-righteousness in the way she portrays her 'informants'... Xinran speaks from within a rigid heteronormative framework, in which women are defined by their relationship to a man, by motherhood, by conforming to conventional norms of beauty. None of the women in her book are ugly, in fact, the descriptions she provides betray the objectifying male gaze with which she obviously identifies. Describing a university student who shares her experience as an escort to well-off businessmen to her, she writes: "She wore a well-cut navy suit that showed her figure to an advantage, an elegant suit, and seductively high leather boots" (p.39). And there are plenty more instances of that.

There were many points where I kept wondering what is this book really about. It is definitely not a feminist project, since its politcal goal escapes me. Xinran is vaguely disapproving of the abuses committed against women by the communists, but what she offers up instead of a solid critique of the way womanhood is constructed and imposed as an impossible ideal in Chinese society, she takes refuge in nostalgia of the good old days before the Cultural Revolution. Instead of looking towards possible political action, she annihilates that potential by resorting to an idealized image of the past as a counter-narrative. And in so doing, she defeats the very (declared) purpose of the book.