Book review – The Good Women of China

I would like to write today a journal about one interesting book that I am reading right now. This book was recommended to us by our teacher. I have read just forty pages; however, I can recommend the book too.

This book is called The Good Women of China and was written by Xinran. She is a British – Chinese journalist and broadcaster, born in Beijing in 1958. She worked in Chinese radio and became one of China`s most successful journalists. Later she moved to London, where she started to work on her book. The stories from the book she heard while she had her own radio show in China, “Words on the Night Beeze.”

The book was published in 2002 and has been translated into over thirty languages. The book is full of interviews from her radio show. However, she also used her own experiences as a woman in China. The stories are about women`s rights, roles and suffering. This book shows us key issues in China such as son-preference, rapes, suppression of sexuality, homosexuality etc.

The first story is called “The girl who kept a fly as a pet.” It is about a young girl who was raped for many years, since she was 11 years old, by her own father. He told his daughter that she couldn`t tell anybody, especially not her mother. So the girl kept this terrible secret about a relationship with her own father. She started to hate her father and one day her mother discovered the terrible secret. The poor girl expected that her mum would rescue her and started to hate him too. BUT her mum just told her not to tell anybody. The poor girl found only one way how to escape from her home. She started to injure herself. Most of the days she spent in the hospital, where she kept a fly as a pet because she was so alone and had been in that place for such a long time. There were flies everywhere and the staff in the hospital tried to kill them because they transfer illnesses. When a doctor told our poor girl that she looked healthier, she found out a new way how to be ill again. Because of putting her baby fly in some open injury she started to be ill again and more than she was before. The poor girl died because she didn`t want to return home. This is a really sad story and the most horrible part is that it is true.

by Lucie Petrasova