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When Chinese writer Lijia Zhang went to buy a copy of an international newspaper in which her book had been reviewed, she was stumped. The review had brutally been torn out, the indented edges of words were hanging on to the rest of the paper. “I should have known, they’d never allow the book in China. A review is bad enough,” says Zhang, who is touring India to promote her book, Socialism is Great! A Worker’s Memoir of the New China (HarperCollins, Rs 450). Zhang is the first Chinese writer to be published by an Indian publishing house.
Borrowing the name of a Communist party song, Socialism is Great! begins when Zhang’s mother takes advantage of an early retirement programme at the state-owned missile factory and names 16-year-old Zhang as her successor. “I dreamt of being a writer, a journalist. But overnight, I became a factory worker in a terribly oppressive environment. I have naturally curly hair and my bosses thought I wore a perm. Only bourgeoisie girls could afford it, so I was left out of all promotions in the 10 years that I worked at the factory,” recalls Zhang, who taught herself English by reading the classics and listening to The Carpenters. Written lucidly in English with Chinese proverbs sprinkled liberally, the memoir is an incredibly honest account of Zhang’s sexual as well as political awakening in the years leading up to the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Post-Tiananmen, a chance meeting with a British tourist saw Zhang’s life take a new turn. She married him, went to live with him in Oxford, studied journalism and began working. But Zhang knew she had to tell her story. “Most of the memoirs that come out from China are about the years before the economic reforms in the 1980s. I wanted to write about the tumultuous years when the youth of China were coming into their own,” says Zhang. “Writing in English freed me, politically as well as literally. It’s not my mother tongue, I could be adventurous and experiment with the language. The book hasn’t been published in China and I doubt if it will. But as long as you’re not a dissident, and you don’t belong to any political organisation, you’re safe,” says Zhang candidly. She is currently working on her first novel titled Lotus, a story about a prostitute from the Chinese countryside, and regularly contributes articles to several media houses around the world.
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