Not convinced I’m going to stick to the NaBloPoMo theme for this August of “Green”, but it might prompt the odd thought here and there, and I do find the challenge helps me to keep up the regular blogging.
Anyhow…
18. The Good Women of China by Xinran
Yep, read this this one before too. Its episodic nature (each chapter is pretty much a story in itself, although they do tie together) would appear to make this a good book for dipping into, and yet I pretty much always seem to read the whole thing together. It’s relatively short, of course, and very well written, as well as generally being enthralling, so I suppose that’d do it. I read a couple of the chapters aloud to my DH as I went, this time (talking about the book to him is what made me think to reread it) and that made the emotional pull of these true stories (especially the deep sadness in many) even stronger.
From my recollection, these stories were gathered mostly in the early 1990s, although many of them relate back several decades, and it really becomes apparent how fast Chinese society and governance has changed over those decades, with younger and older women having had completely different lives. (I first read about that phenomenon many years ago in Jung Chang‘s Wild Swans, which I really should reread – and which has a green cover! 
) I have to wonder what a new version of this book, compiled a decade or two later, would be like.
Tags: biographies, books, China, history, The Good Women of China, Xinran
