I spent most of this Sunday past cloistered with The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices, a non-fiction expose on women's lives in modern China penned by a radio presenter called Xinran. Not out of personal preference I should add, but because it was chosen for the last meeting of the York Lesbian Book Group. The group is small and select, run by Read Write York and meets monthly at our local library. Ostensibly the purpose is to discuss 'quality lesbian paperbacks' but, since these are rarer than they should be, the remit has been extended to cover mostly anything. Last month I chose Patrick Suskind's wonderful Perfume, and this month a fellow group member chose Xinran.
Ugh. The resultant comparison is hardly favourable.
Esther read it first - with a persistant scowl, groans and the occasional yelp - and I really, really didn't want to pick it up. I had it pegged as a syrupy litany of womens' victimhood, written to appeal to that peculiar UK market for misery memoir and compounded by the exoticism of its Chinese subject matter. In the end I was forced: Est was determined that I should suffer too. And suffer I did: The Good Women of China was everything I dreaded, but worse, much worse than I imagined. I hadn't factored the author into my calculations.
The prologue introduces us to the book's fearless and saintly heroine Xinran - who also happens to be our author - a Chinese radio presenter who moved to the UK in 1997. She recalls how, exiting a tube station in London, a thief attempted to steal her bag; and how she resolutely refused to let it go and subsequently wrestled him to the ground in defense of her property. When questioned later by the police and chastised for taking such a risk, she stated that she had to 'save her book': the only copy of The Good Women of China was in her purse. And she could not countenance loosing it for, verily, it was her life's work and the vehicle by which she could present herself to the world. Oh, and highlight the plight of Chinese women too.
What follows is a series of vignettes - 'true' stories from women of different walks of life whom she met during her stint as a presenter of 'Tales on a Night Breeze', a radio show highlighting womens' issues in China. Many of them prove devastating and moving: here are women who have lost their whole families in earthquakes; and here a woman who has been reduced to scavenging in dumpsters for food; and here a woman who has suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father; and here a woman with mental health issues being raped with a stick. But some read as pure stereotype - the obsessive, suicidal lesbian and the tribal women who (*shock*) don't wear make-up - and others seem downright unlikely. One thing remains constant thoughout however: Xinran is the centre of every piece. Each one is prefaced and rounded off with little anecdotes about how caring and daring she is, how radical and how generous. She particularly likes quoting other people - colleagues, friends, fans, perfect strangers - saying how caring, daring, radical and generous she is. She also enjoys: explaining ad nauseum that her radio show is unbelievably popular; fulminating on the number of letters she receives from adoring listeners each week; blushing over her incredible power and popularity. All, you understand, because of her insights into the female psyche.
What saddens me is that there surely are insights to be had from her experiences; and women's lives are worth exploring. But Xinran sits so squarely in the way, moralising and editorialising, that it's impossible to get to the real women behind the window-dressing. And there is a lot of window-dressing. It seems quite clear to me that Xinran has fictionalised parts of her 'true' stories. The number of coincidences is uncanny: she is always at the right party or conference, or randomly meeting the right person, or staying in the right hotel. She is forever *intruding* into her narratives. She has to be there, taking part - holding the hand of a grieving woman, being offered sex toys by a lesbian or sitting up in silence all night with a doomed lover. She doesn't seem to understand that these are not her stories; that they belong to someone else. Colonising them is a terrible act of violence on her part and robs them of their immediacy and impact. The realness, the horror, is muted by it. Even her most unpleasant stories, chock full of rape and death, are in some way romanticised, concerned with endless endurance and womens' purity of heart. And she seems to think that her own endurance in gathering the stories, and remaining strong through the pain of listening to them, is particularly worth noting.
I wish I could have gotten past her, I really do. I wish that The Good Women of China had been a meaningful book about Chinese women, with context and proper research and balanced case studies. I wish that it had even half the impact of Yiyun Li's short fiction collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayer which contained several stories concerned with the lives women live in China. It had immediacy and wealth of emotion; and, despite being fiction, an objectivity that Xinran's writing lacks. I direct you to Li posthaste, while Xinran has now been returned to the library, never to be seen again.
~~Victoria~~