Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love

US: Scribner, 2012. Paperback. Very Good. A copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Now in paperback one of the most stirring accounts of the lives of Chinese women since Wild Swans "full of heart-rending tales....shocking, simply tol d...a very powerful polemic" (The New York Times Book Review). Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xin ran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese w omen. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the he arts of Chinese mothers-students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasa nts-who, whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive a ge-old traditions, or hideous economic necessity, have given up their daugh ters. Xinran beautifully portrays the "extra-birth guerrillas" who travel t he roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more th an one baby; naïve young girl students who have made life-wrecking mistakes ; the "pebble mother" on the banks of the Yangtze River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their familie s because they can't produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned bab y fostered by Xinran but confiscated by the state. For parents of adopted Chinese children and for the children themselves, this is an indispensable, powerful, and intensely moving book. Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother is powered by love and by heartbreak and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.