Of Daughters And Sons

I read Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother by Xinran quite a long while back and the stories of loss and love have stuck in my mind. Some very traditional Chinese believe that, as Xinran puts it, “you do not count as a human being unless you have a son” to carry on the family line. This was severely intensified by the Communist government’s one-child policy, promulgated in 1979 in an effort to control the country’s population growth. Since having more than one child became illegal in many areas, families choose to get rid of girl after girl until the desired male child is born.

Message From An Unknown Chinese Mother by Xinran

The reason that I suddenly decided to write about the book only now is because of my recent observations about the status of daughters in some Chinese families here in Sarawak. Despite living in the technology age, these Chinese parents still subscribe to the belief that daughters are a liability, resulting in daughters being relegated to second class members in their families. It is heartbreaking to see these daughters living lives filled with sorrow, unhappiness and doubts about their self worth. They wonder why they were born in the first place and they can’t help feeling resentment for their plight. The unflinching “son preference” results in sons being placed on some pedestals like princes. Many of such sons end up becoming pampered and spoiled brats. What a sad state of affairs!

In 1989, the Chinese writer and broadcaster Xinran was in a remote mountain village in Shandong Province having dinner with the headman when she heard cries from an adjoining room, where his daughter-in-law was giving birth. A while later, as the midwife collected her fee, Xinran noticed a movement in the slops bucket. “To my absolute horror,” she recalls, “I saw a tiny foot poking out of the pail.” But she was the only one who was shocked. “It’s not a child,” the headman’s wife told her. “If it was, we’d be looking after it, wouldn’t we? It’s a girl baby, and we can’t keep it.”

Xinran sees painful evidence of this on a train trip when she meets a husband traveling with his wife and their little daughter. As the train is leaving the station, she looks out the window and sees the child sitting alone on the platform. Later she discovers that these seemingly devoted parents have abandoned their daughter — the fourth to be jettisoned in this way — in hopes that the next child the mother bears will be a boy. The Chinese call such people “extra birth guerrillas,” since they are trying to start over in places where no one will know them or their family history.

Her book gave a voice to some of the poorest women in Chinese society, whose stories would otherwise never be heard. Among them are women like Kumei, a dishwasher who twice tried to kill herself because she’d been forced to drown her baby daughters. When a child is born, Kumei explains, the midwife prepares a bowl of warm water — called Killing Trouble water, for drowning the child if it’s a girl, or Watering the Roots bath, for washing him if it’s a boy.

Xinran also investigates Chinese orphanages where children abandoned there are almost always girls. Mothers forced to abandon their babies often leave mementos in their clothing, hoping the children will be able to trace them later on, but the orphanages routinely throw these sad tokens away.

Though abortion is illegal in China, they are widely practised. Infanticide is also illegal but they happen to unwanted daughters. Girls don’t qualify for the regular grain ration allotted to other family members, nor for the official grant of land reserved for their brothers. Their weddings cost money and, once married, a woman works for her parents-in-law – not her own parents.

Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is not for the faint of heart as it is filled with heart-rending tales that are often raw and shocking.  It is a recounting of the “tragic stories of what traditionally happened to abandoned girl babies and what continues to happen.” Each of these stories tugs at your heartstrings as you come face to face with the harsh realities of infanticide and child abandonment.

I just wish to ask parents who have severe “son preferences” a few simple questions: Are your daughters not human being? Are your daughters really a liability? Don’t your daughters deserve to be loved as much as your sons?

There is this thing called karma. Whether you believe in karma or not is not important. Just don’t regret when karma hits you like a boomerang!