What the Chinese Don't Eat Read Online Free Page B

husband hadn’t found another job. ‘He’d rather die than do all those low jobs. You know men, always thinking about their face. Still, life is hard enough already, if you don’t iron out your own frown lines, nobody else will do it for you.’
    I told her I was sorry. ‘Not to worry. We’re different. You live for the pleasant things in life, I live because I’ve no choice. Goodbye.’
    This one sentence really gave me food for thought. Walking in the streets of London, watching women enjoy their shopping trips, I often thought of those women in China living ‘because they must’. My only comfort was that in China, many women know how to ‘iron away’ the ‘frown lines’ of life.
    If we say that my cup of tea was a day’s wages for a woman worker, then how many days’ wages are spent by the big businessmen and high-ranking officials who sit every day at the restaurant eating expensive mountain delicacies and seafood, with a new menu every day? What explanation can there be for this in a system whose slogan is to ‘level out the differences between the rich and the poor’?
    Translated by Esther Tyldesley

19th September 2003
    Do the foreigners who adopt our girls know how to feed and love them in their arms and hearts?
    Recently I received an email. Had I ever interviewed any women who were forced to give up children because of the ‘one child’ law, which China started in 1981? Yes, many.
    One particularly painful memory stands out. On a cold winter morning in 1990, I passed a public toilet in Zhangzhou. A noisy crowd had formed around a little bag of clothes lying in the windy entrance. People were pointing and shouting: ‘Look, look, she is still alive!’
    ‘Alive? Was this another abandoned baby girl?’ I pushed through the crowd and picked up that little bundle: it was a baby girl, barely a few days’ old. She was frozen blue, but her tiny nose was twitching. I begged for help: ‘We should save her, she is alive!’
    ‘Stupid woman, do you know what you are doing? How could you manage this poor thing?’
    I couldn’t wait for help. I took the baby to the nearest hospital. I paid for first aid for her, but no one in the hospital seemed to be in a hurry to save this dying baby. I took a tape recorder from my backpack and started reporting what I saw. It worked: a doctor stopped and took the baby to the emergency room.
    As I waited outside, a nurse said: ‘Please forgive our cold minds. There are too many abandoned baby girls for us to handle. We have helped more than 10, but afterwards, no one has wanted to take responsibility for their future.’
    I broadcast this girl’s story on my radio show that night. The phone lines were filled with both angry and sympathetic callers.
    Ten days later, I got a letter from a childless couple; they wanted to adopt the baby girl. That same day on my answer machine, I heard a crying voice: ‘Xinran, I am the mother of the baby girl. She was born just four days before you saved her. Thank you so much for taking my daughter to hospital. I watched in the crowd with my heart broken. I followed you and sat outside your radio station all day. Many, many times I almost shouted out to you: “That is my baby!”
    ‘I know many people hate me; I hate myself even more. But you don’t know how hard life is for a girl in the countryside as the first child of a poor family. When I saw their little bodies bullied by hard work and cruel men, I promised I wouldn’t let my girl have such a hopeless life. Her father is a good man, but we can’t go against our family and the village. We have to have a boy for the family tree.
    ‘Oh, my money is running out, only two minutes left, it is so expensive.
    ‘We can’t read or write. But, if you can, please tell my girl in the future to remember that, no matter how her life turns out, my love will live in her blood and my voice in her heart. [I could hear her crying at this point.] Please beg her new family to love her as if