Excerpt from Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother by Xue Xinran, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Until then, I never realized how ignorant I was about the real China and how misguided I was in my education about my mother's and grandmother's generations, so I started to reeducate myself by learning the truth from people. I went on a journey to find out the answers to my bewildering questions from my country and my people. Over the next eight years, I traveled around and met more than two hundred Chinese women for my radio program. I listened to them, and their stories struck a chord deep within me. I found myself as one of them - as a daughter, our lives watered down by the tears from our past.

I moved to London in 1997. After eight years of digging, searching, and feeling for Chinese women, I felt empty and run-down. During my time as a radio presenter I had received about a hundred letters every day with personal secrets full of dreams and confusion, and I had witnessed my country jumping onto a rapidly moving express train toward the Western lights, but the people still lacked the necessary education to grasp the massive force of change that was sweeping across the country. Therefore, as a Chinese woman who had walked a long march to find out who I am, I chose to start afresh in London, where I could deepen my understanding of the world.

But once there, I was stunned and hurt by how little Westerners understood the Chinese people. And on my many trips back to China I discovered how little the younger Chinese understood about their parents' generation. I found that our children have been cut off from the real history and even from their own family history. They have no idea about what kind of life their mothers and grandmothers have endured; they don't even believe that they have love stories.

Then one day in 1998, while I was teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, an Italian student came to me with a book he had been reading and asked me, "Is it true that Chinese women physically lack emotional cells and are mentally short of love as described in this book?" I was flabbergasted. Finally, through gritted teeth, I told him, "I am going to write a book that will move this world to tears about the Chinese women I know, on their rich feeling, their deep love and unconditional giving."

Since I began writing books about the lives of Chinese women, I have been fortunate enough to receive countless letters, photographs, and videos from adopted Chinese girls and the adopting families from all over the world. Their letters, like the two that follow (and the others on p. 187 and pp. 195–199), bring me comfort, and it is with their encouragement that I have finally managed to write down the stories of Chinese women who were forced to abandon their babies.

Dear Xinran,

I am the (adoptive) mother of two beautiful daughters of China. My daughters are now 11 and 9. They both are very happy in our family and much loved. They also will never forget they have a birth family in China. They love their birth mothers and both of them, like you, would very much like to see their birth mother's face and hear her words. Please write your book. In this way they will know the heart of their birth mothers. Though we have told them we will look for their birth mothers if they desire to find them, we have also told them such a search may not be successful. The message you send from birth mothers may be all they ever have of their Chinese family.

One thing you can tell the Chinese birth mothers is that their daughters have not forgotten them. In our family their birth mothers are honored. My daughters and I study Pu Tong Hua. We have already returned to China 2 times with our daughters. They love the land of their birth, as their father and I do. We are proud to be an American Chinese family.

Please send our love, gratitude, and honor to their Chinese mothers.

Excerpted from Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother by Xue Xinran. Copyright © 2011 by Xue Xinran. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.