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Silent Tears

A Journey of Hope in a Chinese Orphanage

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About this listen

When her family relocated to rural China in 2003, Kay Bratt was thrust into a new world, one where boys were considered more valuable than girls and poverty and the one-child policy had created an epidemic of abandoned infants. As a volunteer at a local orphanage, Bratt witnessed conditions that were unfathomable to a middle-class mother of two from South Carolina.

Based on Bratt’s diary of her four years at the orphanage, Silent Tears offers a searing account of young lives rendered disposable. In the face of an implacable system, Bratt found ways to work within (and around) the rules to make a better future for the children, whom she came to love. The book offers no easy answers.

While often painful in its clear-sightedness, Silent Tears balances the sadness and struggles of life in the orphanage with moments of joy, optimism, faith, and victory. It is the story of hundreds of children - and of one woman who never planned on becoming a hero but became one anyway.

©2011 Kay Bratt (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc. China
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Kay is an American woman whose husband has been transferred to China for work. She, as many who have just moved to a new country, gets lonely and decides to volunteer at a Chinese orphanage. China is poor and a hierarchy is quite strict so no everything is done the way she would've wanted it and struggles with that fact throughout her stay.

I love how honest she is. She talks openly about her struggles, her secret disagreements and her difficulty with seeing pain and suffering at the orphanage. I saw myself in her when she struggled with not being heard when she has an idea and struggled to get through to management, a frustration many have dealt with from time to time. I was interested in how she dealt with it as a human being. Unfortunately, once you've heard about the first struggle and how she dealt with it, you have heard it all. Two years later and it is still the same. If I lost my place in the book, I would probably never find my spot again, because it is all very much the same. I drifted in and out of this book a lot and never felt like I missed anything.

Kay helps children in need

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