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

Xinran has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers - students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants - who have given up their daughters. Whether as a consequence of the single-child policy, destructive age-old traditions, or economic necessity, these women had to give up their daughters for adoption; others even had to watch as their baby daughters were taken away at birth and drowned.

Xinran beautifully portrays the "extra-birth guerrillas" who travel the roads and the railways, evading the system, trying to hold on to more than one baby; the "pebble mother" on the banks of the Yangzte River still looking into the depths for her stolen daughter; peasant women rejected by their families because they can't produce a male heir; and Little Snow, the orphaned baby 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. These searing stories of mothers who have been driven to abandon their daughters or give them up for adoption is a masterful and significant work of literary reportage and oral history and will stay with readers long after they have turned the final page.