An intimate account of growing up in changing China
Lijia Zhang’s memoir of growing up in 1980s China is the story of a struggle to shape her destiny. Born in Nanjing, Zhang is a bright 16-year-old student who is coerced by her mother to abandon her dreams of going to university and becoming a journalist. Instead, she must now take up her mother’s job of working in the city’s huge Liming factory.

While her mother and grandmother embroider prayer mats to earn additional income, Zhang has been doing well at school, hoping to be one of the less than 4 per cent of Chinese children who are admitted to the university system. But, now, faced with a future as a factory worker, she goes off glumly to the workshop every morning to check pressure gauges on equipment. Used to working hard, she looks for ways to keep her mind engaged; and luckily, when a new open-university system is announced, she is one of the few candidates selected by the factory for a course in mechanical engineering. On her return to the factory, finding that she must remain a worker instead of being promoted to the “cadre”, she begins to study English. Working hard, reading novels and even smuggling an English-Chinese dictionary into the workshop, she labours through the intricacies of the language until she herself becomes a translator and writer. When a friend introduces her to the great works of literature, she finds new inspiration: “I loved stories like Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, about little people from the bottom of the society fighting hard to improve their fate.”

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