If you guys are bored during the holidays, I suggest reading two books which I think are a really good read:
1. Sky Burial
2. The Good Women of China
both by Xinran. This two books confirmed my views of the revolutions China went through... (though I shall not reveal them on this blog)
Here's a short excerpt from The Good Women of China:
During my first few days at Shouting Hill, I wondered why most of the children who were playing beside or helping the women as they busied themselves about the cave dwellings were boys, and thought this could be another village in which female infanticide was practised. Later I found out that this was due to a shortage of clothes, once every three to five years, they dressed the boys first, often leaving several sisters to share one set of outer clothing, which had to fit all of them. The sisters would sit on the kang [some sort of stove that doubles as a bed, the stove is heated up on cold days to create a warm bed] covered by large sheet and put them on the set of clothes in rotation to go outside to help their mother.
There was a family of eight daughters with only one pair of trousers between them, so covered in patches that the original fabric had been obscured. Their mother was pregnant with their ninth child, but I could see that this family's kang was no bigger than the ones in families with three or four children. The eight girls sat close together on the kang sewing shoes in a strict division of labour, like an assembly line in a small workshop. They were laughing and chatting as they worked. Whenever I spoke to them, they talked about what they had seen and heard on the day they 'wore clothes'. Every girl counted the days to her turn to 'wear clothes'. They chatted happily about which family was having a wedding or funeral or who called who bad names......
The way women lived in Shouting Hill was the only conceivable way of life to them. I did not dare tell them of the world beyond, or the way women lived there, for I knew that living with the knowledge of whatever they could never have would be far more tragic than living as they did.
I would rate this two books 4.5 stars out of 5, because they are an excellent and touching read (especially if you belong to the female species) but some stories in Good Women of China seems generally repetitive of the same genre.
Lastly, my version of sunset at Chek Jawa-
