A renowned radio presenter, Xinran, shared her collection of stories which she’d heard during a journey of exploring and understanding women’s status over the past 50 years in China. It was an extremely touching and disheartening journey — I almost cried a couple of times while I was reading it on the train.
Most of the heroines Xinran had encountered were horribly abused and shamelessly used by men; some of these men were complete strangers while the others were closely related to the female victims. Some of women failed to find a way out of their unbearable situations and ended up losing thier minds or committing suicide; in the worst case both. The luckier ones were not even aware of the possibility of a different kind of life and saw history repeating itself with their daughters and granddaughters without a word of compliant…