The second ever Medulla Corp book review...

I’ve just finished reading Xinran’s “The Good Women of China – Hidden Voices”.



Regular readers will know from my last ‘book review’ that I don’t really read, but since I spend 3 hours a day on a train – book are beginning to enter my life.

Xinran is a Chinese journalist, now living in London, who is famous in her home country for the radio show ‘Words on the Night Breeze’. This show was broadcast every evening and discussed what it is to be a ordinary woman in China.

I’m somewhat of an asian-o-phile, I’m also somewhat of a feminist (as much as a man can be) so even though I knew very little about the book when I picked it up – I felt I may well find the subject matter interesting.

The book holds 15 true stories about women from various backgrounds and the experiences they encountered, mainly during China’s cultural revolution.

The balance in this book is amazing. The stories are nearly always tragic, re-telling experiences that beg belief. The suffering and total degradation re-counted in the book had me in tears on the train on a number of occasions.

It seems impossible to think that some of these events happened as recent as the 1970’s growing up in so many miles away in the UK.

I really don’t want to go into detail about the books content, because if you are at all interested I implore you to pick up a copy and read for yourself. Once you have read ‘The Girl Who Kept a Fly as a Pet’, those little daily annoyances of life seem to wither into insignificance

Throughout, Xinran’s writing keeps you captivated. The stories are told in a direct fashion - not peppered with additional, unnecessary emotion. This writing style makes the stories simply hit home that much more.

It’s hard to say I ‘enjoyed’ “The Good Women of China” – it’s stories are simply too traumatic to be ‘enjoyed’. However I feel this is a book that you should seek out, simply to throw a little perspective on your life.

As I closed the book for the last time, the train passed a piece of graffiti that simply said ‘Fuck this shit’. It really encapsulated the triviality of life in the politically stable, safe, equality driven UK. I’m sure the graffiti author wasn’t being serially molested, abused, and raped by their father.

Nic.

posted by Nic @ 10:27 PM 0 comments