Zhang Lijia: Factory Worker Turned Novelist

Zhang Lijia left school at sixteen to work in a missile factory in Nanjing. She hated life in the factory, and learning English was her way out. In this episode of NüVoices podcast she tells the story of how she went from factory worker to award-winning journalist and now novelist.

Like many in her generation, she was politicised in the late 80s and joined the pro-democracy protests happening all over the country, which culminated in the bloody crackdown in Tian’anmen Square on the 4th of June 1989.

In 1990 she left China to study journalism in the UK. She later worked as a fixer for foreign correspondents in China, but was frustrated at never having her insight on stories taken into account and left to become a journalist in her own right:

I believed that compared to my western colleagues I had an insight into the society, so I started writing long feature stories and got them published in the South China Morning Post and then later Independent, Guardian, Newsweek and the New York Times.

She was later asked to write a book about Chairman Mao. She spent two years of her life speaking to people from all walks of life about the communist party leader only to have the manuscript rejected by censors. That was the point at which Zhang vowed to only write in English.

Since then she has published her memoir, Socialism is Great! A Worker's Memoir of the New China, and her first work of fiction, Lotus. She says of her writing:

I come from a very poor background, so I am naturally interested in little people, or xiao renwu, struggling at the bottom of society.

Her novel Lotus is a deeply personal exploration of gender in China:

I am fascinated by prostitution. This book is very much inspired by the story of my grandmother. In March 1998, twenty years ago now, in front of my grandmother's death bed I learned that she was a sex worker in her youth.

She is currently working on a new book, Orphans of China's Economic Miracle, about China's migrant workers.