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David Wilson

Writers from China's diaspora

Xinran Xue is just touching base  at her radiant flat in central London's Queensway district. In the past year, promoting her non-fiction study of mainland misogyny, The Good Women Of China (Vintage), has taken her to 29 countries, including France, Australia, Norway, America, Italy and Spain. Next stop, Iceland, she says, smiling.

But she is emphatic that her heart lies with the People's Republic. 'China is my home country, no question about that.  I am too Chinese to be English,'  Xue says.

Born in Beijing in 1958, the year of Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, she lived a privileged life  with her affluent grandparents, snacking on chocolate, while most people's daily diet consisted of  soy beans.

At the age of seven,  Xue went to live with her parents on a military base.   When the Cultural Revolution started the Red Guards arrested her father - one of the country's top engineers - and then her mother.

Virtually an orphan, Xue proved a tenacious student. During her 20s, under the tutelage of the military, she earned two degrees - one in English and international relations, the other in computer theory.

She then studied international law in the army's political department just as China began loosening up, creating a need for a new generation of broadcasters.

She wound up working for Radio Nanjing, presenting a show that aired nightly between 10pm and midnight from 1989 until 1997. Words On The Night Breeze became famous across the nation for its candid discussion of how it felt to be a woman in China.

The programme lured millions of listeners and  Xue received hundreds of calls and letters every day. Women from a variety of backgrounds unburdened the grief they experienced as second-class citizens. Documenting their testimony mattered to  Xue so much that, when she first moved to London from China in 1997, she risked her life. On her way home from London University, where she was teaching, someone tried to rob her. She struggled with the attacker, refusing to release the bag containing her sole copy of the book's manuscript.

The Good Women Of China opens with an account of the incident, then presents a series  of stories shot through with suffering.

In one, a 'scavenger woman' subsists through collecting and selling rubbish from a dump near Xue's radio station. The daughter of a general who served the nationalist Kuomintang cracks up after witnessing the torture of the family that sheltered her. Raped repeatedly from age 11 by her father, another woman deliberately injures and fatally poisons herself by pressing a fly into a wound in her arm. Other women experience repeated incestuous sexual abuse and rape, often by a gang.

Despite the book's harrowing content, critics responded enthusiastically. In the Literary Review, Jonathan Mirsky wrote: 'These are the most eloquent  and painful stories of Chinese women I have read [and the literature is large].'

In London's Daily Mail newspaper, Peter Lewis said the stories read 'like gripping fiction', and that the 19th-century French short story writer Guy de Maupassant 'would be envious of such material'.

Xue ranks as one of the brightest stars in Anglo-Chinese literature and she looks to be prospering. Her flat has three bathrooms - one for her, one for her husband, the British literary agent Toby Eady, and one for  her son by a previous marriage, Pan Pan.

But she dresses simply  and is appealingly free from pretentious flashes of psychobabble. Xue, who taught print journalism and modern Chinese economic policy at London's School of Oriental and African Studies between 1997 and 2001,  comes across  as an academic ... and sometimes a diplomat.

Asked what her book says about modern China - which, by any reckoning, comes across badly -  Xue says simply that it sheds light on the love,  hate,  sadness and even  happiness its female citizens experience.

But have conditions  improved for women in China? Over the past few years they have, 'quite a lot', she says. The mood on the street these days is supposedly  more relaxed and the younger generation, in particular, looks much happier.

'You can see the girls arm in arm and standing in queues with men without any worries. Before, I never saw that.'

She attributes the progress to a 'more relaxed' political climate and access to the internet. Another factor is increased travel, which she calls an 'education for the Chinese'.

The developments have increased her desire to return to China. She says she is 'very tempted' to buy a flat in Shanghai. 'I love that city very much. It is full of lovely lakes and mountains.'

China is her homeland,  Xue repeats. But she will stay in London because that is where  she has set up her family, which she talks about glowingly - a surprisingly cheerful agony aunt.



Xinran Xue