The good woman of Henan

Persecuted under Mao's Cultural Revolution, Xinran Hue later trained as a broadcaster and became China's first radio agony aunt. The poignant stories she heard, from formerly voiceless ordinary women, have been collected in a new book, The Good Women of China

Xinran Hue was 42 years old before she hugged her mother for the first time. The woman who pioneered China's first radio agony-aunt programme says, "My mother's face went very red and she said 'Oh no, please don't. I'm not used to it.'" Xinran explains that in China until the late 1980s, when the Cultural Revolution was finished and the political ice began to melt, touching or hugging could lead to criticism or imprisonment. Sex was seen as a defining characteristic of delinquent behaviour. Her programme, "Words on the Night Breeze", which began in 1989, enabled people who had grown up with the Cultural Revolution to discuss such personal matters openly for the first time.

She says "Chinese women had always thought their lives should be full of misery. Many had no idea what happiness was, other than having a son for the family. That was happiness, because it kept the family tree going. You have to understand that emotions and ideals such as happiness or equality are luxuries for the poor. First they want clean water and electricity; then washing machines and fridges; after that it's time for happiness. Listening to me, they discovered the possibility of another kind of life and began to question themselves, 'Why don't I have that?'"

In starting the programme the question that obsessed her was: what is a woman's life really worth in China? Two generations had grown up in complete sexual ignorance, with all their natural instincts in confusion. Foot-binding was still a recent memory, yet women lived and worked alongside men, supposedly treated as their equals. It needed much persuasion and many meetings before her bosses at Henan Broadcasting, in east central China, agreed to let her tell real stories from real people.

Once the programme was launched, tens of thousands listeners wrote to her. Every evening between 10pm and midnight she broadcast their stories, creating for the first time a true picture of the daily lives of Chinese women. An English friend said of her, "I've never known anyone who could listen so hard!" and Xinran listened as the past poured through her headphones. Nothing like this had been heard before - tales of incest, child abuse and neglect, forced marriage, rape - the deep sorrows hidden beneath Chinese women's apparently stoical exterior. They had learned to be submissive and complicit or just blind themselves to these matters, and for a long time there had been a great silence. After decades of propaganda, the audience was hearing the truth about themselves.

Within a short time Xinran - by now in her mid-30s - had become a highly-paid and successful media figure, famous for her courage and compassion. She was made director of programme development and planning, responsible for the future strategy of the whole broadcasting station, but she still chafed against state authority and the insidious self-censorship it imposed: "In China I was working in the gap between two side was the Communist Party and the other side was my own soul. I began to find the burden overwhelming." Five years ago, in the summer of 1997, she left China in search of freedom. She entrusted her 10-year-old son Panpan to her parents and came to London by herself, with little English, and weighed down by the suffering in her own and her country's past.

After two years, and by now reunited with her son, Xinran wrote down some of the stories she had heard. They became a book called The Good Women of China. It reflects her belief in the importance of emotional life - a reaction to having had her own so long repressed. "Her mission," according to Rebecca Carter who edited the book, "is to make the Chinese more able to speak about things. The whole book is about the fact that people were very guarded because they had to be. There's a big difference between what you can publish outside China and in it and Xinran very much wants this book to be published in China." (It has just been bought by Shanghai Joint Publishing House.) Esther Tyldesley who translated it says, "Our current idea of China is terribly homogenous, based on the Wild Swans model, but intellectuals from good families aren't typical - the peasants are typical and Xinran has talked to them, so her book offers a much broader canvas."

Now married to an Englishman, the literary agent Toby Eady, and living in London, Xinran says her very first memory is of the Red Guards "setting fire to my parents' house and burning their furniture, books, even my baby toys and books. This memory is very strong. Sometimes it fills my mind and I have to withdraw from the ordinary life around me. It gives me terrible nightmares. Even now I don't find it easy to tell other people."

Xinran was born in Beijing in July 1958 and named Xue. (She took the name Xinran [shin-ran] later - the word means "giving pleasure".) China was at its poorest but both her parents came from privileged families and even after handing over much of their property to the Communists their wealth was still evident. They were cultivated and westernised. During the Cultural Revolution her grandfather was singled out for persecution and imprisoned, despite being over 70. Her mother's family were also prosperous, owning vast properties in Nanjing, in south-east China. In the early 1950s, when the Chinese army carried out its first purge, Xinran's mother, then in her teens, was relegated to the "Black" class of capitalist descendants. She was sentenced to field-labour and re-education at the military academy. There she married one of her instructors, a gifted engineer who spoke six languages.

A year after her parents' marriage, Xinran was born. When she was a month old she was sent to live with her grandmother "because the government persuaded people that they shouldn't devote their life, energy and talents to their family but to the motherland. Between the 1950s and 1985 many couples were separated and sent to poor areas to rebuild the new China. Everyone accepted this, my parents the same as anyone else." She didn't learn her parents' history until she was in her 30s.

She remembers her grandmother's house in Beijing: "Big yard, small lake, little wooden bridge, water flowing. Everything was very natural. She had seven grandsons and only one grand-daughter, so that made me a bit different. She was very thin, a tiny woman with glasses, always beautifully dressed in the finest silk; but she didn't touch me a lot because in Chinese custom this isn't important - what matters is the spiritual things your family give you." Xinran was looked after by servants, but her grandmother devoted a lot of time to her and told her stories under a trellis on which grapes grew. She didn't go back to her mother for six and a half years and when she did she didn't recognise her: "I called her 'Auntie'."

Soon after family life had resumed, Xinran's father was accused by the Red Guards of being a "reactionary technical authority". Her parents were charged with being "representative of feudalism, capitalism and revisionism". That was when their house was burnt. "Two weeks later my parents were sent to prison and I didn't talk to them again for nearly 10 years." Because of their parents' "crimes" Xinran and her little brother were sent to a "Black school", which was more like a prison than a school. "They gave us orders - 'Get up!' - 'Go to sleep!' - for years I didn't hear a sentence more than five words long." She learned to sew warm clothes and make shoes for her brother. They were in a group of about 14 "Black" children who were not allowed to contact others. If they did they would be spat at and beaten. She says they became dirty and silent, fought a lot and became "like a machine. This was hard for me. I came from a beautiful home and I couldn't understand why my life had fallen down.

"At the beginning I was very ashamed of my parents. I was only six and a half and at that age, when people tell you what's right and wrong, you accept it. I thought my father must be very bad because of what I'd been told about him. But when I was being beaten, I started asking myself, are they good? Have they told me the truth about my parents? Yet not everybody was unkind. One day a teacher came and said 'OK Little Snowball' (because my skin was very pale) and took me to a store room in a corner of the big exercise square. In it were stored lots of books. He said, 'In future if you feel sad don't cry - I'll give you a key, come here and read, but don't tell anyone else.' At the beginning reading was very hard for me but the only time I felt safe was hiding in this room. Sometimes, with spit (she demonstrates, rubbing the air with her fingertip) I made a hole in the dirty window and watched the children playing, dreaming of the time when I would join in."

She spent almost six years at the "Black school", then at 13 moved on to a secondary school, where things were not as bad. She could meet her mother more often and even her father could visit twice a year. Since the Communist take-over in 1949, China's elite were educated at military schools. Xinran won a place at one of them until she was old enough to serve in the army. In her 20s she did two degrees - one in English and international relations and a second in computer theory - before studying international law in the army's political department.

The cautious liberalisation of China was beginning. She says: "Deng Xiaoping had said we should open our doors to the whole world; but people had been in back rooms for so long that when the door suddenly opened, no one could see through it or knew what lay outside." Skilled and sensitive people were needed to run the new-style media, and in particular broadcasting. In 1988 a competitive examination was held to select 14 out of 14,000 candidates. By now a beautiful and highly-qualified young woman, Xinran came second and was given a job. In 1989 she started at Henan radio station as head of the evening broadcast team. She says, "At the beginning, everything was an experiment, because before 1988 there had been only one voice for radio and TV. So before we had any idea what was allowed, we tested it out: very carefully at first, gradually getting bolder." The move brought a personal problem: "My son Panpan had been born the previous May. It meant leaving him, but this wasn't hard because you got three months off and after that you had to go back to work. I had a live-in nanny so there was always someone to keep him interested. He was never alone, so he didn't ask for me. In China people didn't think children had these feelings."

In 1989 Xinran began broadcasting the programme that was to make her an icon. Within three or four months she was getting well over 100 letters a day - mostly from women - telling their problems. She would tell stories from their letters or they would talk to her on the phone, and in between she played music, chose bits of books to read aloud and ended by wishing them good, happy dreams. Soon she was filling the two hours before midnight.

She says, "When I interviewed a woman the first thing was to give her space - a warm and friendly feeling - because she needed someone to listen. I discovered that women had no idea how to talk about themselves. In family tradition, in education, in society, even if you asked them, women had never talked about what happened in their own lives. Some kept their old beliefs - that a naked woman is not to be seen - and likewise not her innermost feelings. If they didn't choose to tell me I never forced them and the number who refused me was always much greater than the number who talked. Some had so much pain in their hearts and in their past that you felt heavy, as though if you touched them you could break them."

Dominic Ziegler at that time was the Economist's correspondent in China. He says, "Xinran had a reputation for doing something that hadn't been done before. She may well have invented the genre there. Radio is the best medium for pushing out the boundaries of what you're allowed to say - April 1989 was a brief time when the Party lost control of the media organs - and somehow she persuaded the authorities [to let her do the show], though how she managed to continue after the crackdown I don't know."

The programme went on to be a huge success but in autumn 1995, after six years, Xinran resigned. The stories she had heard became so oppressive that she had to get away. She was tired of administration and endless meetings and wanted to spend more time meeting ordinary women in person. For two years she toured some of the remotest parts of China and talked to women living in the direst poverty before persuading the authorities - and her radio station bosses, who were reluctant to lose the money she brought in from corporations keen to sponsor her - to let her come to England.

"My mother said 'Don't worry about Panpan. I'll be responsible for him: I want the experience of being a mother and grandmother and I want you to be free and have a chance to escape from your past.' Though Panpan was about nine or 10 my mother treated him like a baby - she once wrote and said she knew she was replaying my childhood. I missed him terribly but Panpan never said he needed me until he came to England in April 2000. On the morning of his twelfth birthday, when I asked him what he wanted to do that day, he said: 'Only one thing: I want you to lie down beside me for 10 minutes.' I was in tears as I suddenly found this cheerful smiling boy was so hungry for his mother. Yet when Panpan went off to secondary school here in England he said, 'Oh please don't hug and kiss me in front of my friends!'"

Xinran is moved by the memory of her son's plight and thinking about it makes her weep again. "Everybody who comes into this world wants to be good... with our family, parents, husband, children, friends. We spend our lives trying to be good: but what is good? It's different in different countries and at different times."

When Xinran first arrived in England she lived in north-west London and for the first three months worked as a cleaner in an Indian corner shop from 6.30-8.30; then for the rest of the morning taught Chinese or learned English. In the afternoon she did Chinese voice-overs for TV production companies and in the evenings worked in a Cantonese restaurant as a waitress. "I wasn't short of money but I really wanted to understand how difficult life was for Chinese people abroad. I knew I was just doing it for a short time, but many Chinese women spent years living that kind of life because in England they felt free and were treated as a woman. Here, if you carry heavy things in the bus or tube, men will say, 'Oh please, lady, would you like to take my seat?' In China no one would do that."

She started teaching at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and her Chinese students found her accounts of China hard to understand. "They say, 'Did this really happen?' They have no idea, because they've never had a conversation with the last generation. I always tell them, 'Telephone your mother: ask her why she couldn't tell you.' Almost always their mothers say they can't turn to the past because it's too painful. But they confirm that the stories in my book are the truth."

"It was about then that I met Toby: in April 1999. It was very funny, four people all said, 'Oh, you must meet Toby Eady.' At the beginning we argued quite a lot but when I found out how many Chinese writers and students he had helped, and that he had been to China many times to make up his own mind about it, I started respecting him. In Toby's life Buddhism, books and wine are the important things. Actually, Chinese culture and philosophy built our relationship. Last summer I met Mary Wesley, his mother, and she asked if Toby and I were going to marry. I said, 'I want first to be in the position of an equal towards any man I might marry. I don't want to be a slave or a sympathy wife.'" The couple married in February.

Xinran says, "In China, men didn't treat women like full human beings, which is why my first marriage went wrong. My ex-husband thought he respected me, but he never believed women had the same value and spirit as men. I didn't have a childhood, so a lot of things in my nature never came out. In other people's eyes I was very rigid because of my successful career. Now Toby and I are married I feel happy. We need time to understand each other because we come from such different cultures, but it's starting."

Julia Lovell, who specialises in Chinese literature at Cambridge, says Xinran is an unusual and enterprising person with immense initiative. "She has made her way in England, which shows a lot of mental toughness. China can seem a very male-dominated society and Xinran, with her energy and creativity, is really striking a blow for Chinese women. I found The Good Women of China gripping; Xinran's interview material is so rich and she's caught their voices wonderfully. Wild Swans spawned a lot of inferior Wild Goslings but this book is different."

Flora Drew also translates modern Chinese fiction; her partner is the celebrated (and self-exiled) writer Ma Jian. She says, "Xinran hasn't fallen into the trap of over-sentimentalising her own predicament. The Good Women of China describes other women's suffering and the stories have great poetic qualities. They're very cinematic and powerful.

"There's a certain type of autobiographical writing, mainly by women, mainly for a western readership, cataloguing the suffering the Chinese have endured for generations, and you get a slight feeling that the writers are trying to out-do each other, so the more gruesome the suffering the better the book will do. They expose their wounds as though suffering gave them moral worth. Patriotic Chinese object strongly to these books damning China that are aimed specifically at western readers."

Henry Jhao, Professor of Chinese literature at SOAS, dismisses the genre. "How can you summarise the chaos of China in the 20th century - the civil war, the Cultural Revolution? The situation was confused until Jung Chang came along and boldly simplified it all. Wild Swans is hardly literature but it was a brilliant formula. It was written in English with the west in mind, which already implies a certain dumbing-down. The Chinese were mystified by the book. They said, any family could have just such a history and tell it in a more interesting way!"

Yet Jung Chang was among the first to make Xinran's fledgling book a reality: "I met her not long after she got to England and liked her very much," says Jung Chang. "When she told me her stories I found them so interesting that I introduced her to my agent, Toby Eady." Ten years previously, Eady had taken a bold step in representing Jung Chang, who was then completely unknown. Since its publication in 1991, Wild Swans has sold some 10m copies in 20 countries. Fired by that success, Eady began to specialise in Chinese writing for western readers. When he met Xinran she hadn't finished the book but he encouraged her, found a translator and a publisher and now waits to see if The Good Women of China will appeal as much as Wild Swans .

Xinran's attentiveness towards her husband, her gentle manners and feminine appearance belie her formidable intelligence, technological expertise and resourcefulness. Yet she still ascribes strength and endurance to men, pliability to women. How does she square this with her own experience?

"People may speak about strong, tough, powerful women, but in their heart and soul they're never the same as men - not as mother, lover, or child to their parents. Many women think we should be equal to men. In spirit, yes, but not in our fundamental nature. We should give our families beauty, softness and warmth. Human beings are part of nature, like trees, flowers, stones and water. Man and woman have different feelings because in a natural way we are different. Crying is part of the energy of women, just as big muscles are a natural form of men's energy.

"There's a Chinese saying I like very much: woman's nature is like water; man's is like a mountain. Mountain and water depend on each other. Water supports life and a mountain without water can sustain no life; but water without mountain loses its nature and becomes sea. So the two always depend on each other, like two human beings - but you can't say they are the same."

Xinran Hue

Born: July 19 1958, Beijing, China
Education: 1983-1987 educated at First Military University of People's Liberation Army
Married: In China (one son, born 1988), divorced; February 2002, Toby Eady.
Career: 1989-1997 programme presenter and producer with Henan Broadcasting and Jiangsu Broadcasting.
Publications: Articles in Chinese newspapers and broadcasting journals; July 2002 The Good Women of China.

· The Good Women of China is published by Chatto at £14.99