Books
In London, she began work on her seminal book about Chinese women's lives The Good Women of China, a memoir relating many of the stories she heard while hosting her radio show ("Words on the Night Breeze") in China. The book is a candid revelation of many Chinese women's thoughts and experiences that took place both during and after the Cultural Revolution when Chairman Mao and Communism ruled the land. The book was published in 2002 and has been translated into over thirty languages.
Sky Burial, her second book, was published in 2004. This is the story of Shu Wen, whose husband, only a few months after their marriage in the 1950s, joined the Chinese army and was sent to Tibet for the purpose of unification of the two cultures.
A collection of Xinran’s Guardian columns from 2003 to 2005, What the Chinese Don't Eat, was published in 2006. It covers a vast range of topics from food to sex education, and from the experiences of British mothers who have adopted Chinese daughters, to whether Chinese people do Christmas shopping or have swimming pools.
Xinran‘s first novel Miss Chopsticks was published in July 2007. It explores the uneasy relationship between Chinese "migrant workers" and the cities they flock to. China's economic reform is changing the role of its chopstick girls. Once a disposable burden, they can now take city jobs as waitresses, masseuses, factory line workers and cleaners, They bring bundles of cash home, earning them unprecedented respect in patriarchal villages, as well as winning the respect and hearts of city dwellers.
Xinran’s fifth book, China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation was published in the UK in October 2008. It is based on twenty years worth of interviews conducted by Xinran with the last two generations in China. She hopes it will, ‘restore a real modern history of China, from real people after most historical evidence was destroyed in the Culture Revolution’ . She followed this in February 2010, with the publication of Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother, a collection of heartbreaking stories from Chinese mothers who have lost or had to abandon children.
Read more about this topic: Xue Xinran
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. There may be nothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. Some have this merit only.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)