stories of chinesewomen told by chinese radio journalist

[sandiebeth]

calling all AB'ers...HELP
i am trying to find out the title and author of a book i was given about 5 years ago , and subsequencely lost!
written by a chinese radio version of trisha it tells the stories of women she has met and helped through her time as a kind of radio agony aunt, from old women stuck in the traditions of chinas past to young women struggling to use their qualifications in a glass ceiling workplace.
i am confident someone will rise to my cgallange
thanks

[shaneystar2]

Could it be
The Good Women Of China by Xinran

[sandiebeth]

you star!
thank you so much!
i've been ranting about this book for ages , now i know what it is i can get a copy!

[shaneystar2]

Well worth reading sandiebeth....shocking too .Makes you realise how easy we have it these days as women in the west.
I have a chinese sister in law ..she is in 71 now and she can tell some tales although she has been in this country since she married my brother in the fifties .She was treated very badly as a young girl.I remember as a child when my brother came home with her (he was in the army )and her little tiny feet which of course had been bound to prevent them growing too big.

[LeMarchand]

From the sounds of it you may enjoy Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club", a fiction book that covers similar ground. (Have to confess to only having seen the film though!)

[Aschenbach]

shaneystar2. Foot binding was banned by the Chinese government in 1911 and also by the Communist Party when the came to power.

Your sister in law (born 1935/6) probably just had small feet.

[shaneystar2]

I can assure you they had been bound ...it might have been banned but it was still practiced and still is today .
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?* ******=8966942

[shaneystar2]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?* ******=8966942

Link didn't work ..sorry

[shaneystar2]

Still doesn't work for some reason ...just Google
Painful Memories for China's Footbinding Survivors

[Aschenbach]

Regarding this question, I would also recommend Jung Chang's book Wild Swans and Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves.

Thank you for the article shaneystar2. I apologise for arrogantly doubting that your relative indeed has her feet bound. The wording you used 'of course her feet were bound' hinted at a innocent child's-eye view of Chinese people based on 19th century stereotypes.

It still seems extremely odd that a Chinese girl would have her feet bound as late as the 1940s and then marry a foreigner (which itself indicates she was no Yunnan village girl).

With respect, the suggestion that Chinese children are still having their feet bound today is unconvincing.

[sandiebeth]

thank you all so much.
as for foot binding and it not happening any more ... we only have to read our newspapers for horror stories of all forms of abuse which are illegal or banned in the west but are still happing with shocking frequency, why should anywhere else in the world be different.
we should all take the blinkers off and be aware of what goes on in the world .
Owh! sorry for the rant, i will step down from my soap box now! :-)