Story of A Hard Knocks Life

[Greg.D.]

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/11/dark-side-chinese-dream/602113/

 

This is an excerpt from a new book:

 

"A Woman Missing in the Mountains"

 

A Chinese American woman searches for her missing sister in China, encountering the dark side of the country's economic rise.

 

An interesting read about what sounds like a tough, resourceful woman desperately trying to get ahead and escape a small village life. One of many stories in this book: "The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys With the Hustlers and Rebelsnof the New China"

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781610398145

 

Excerpt:

 

As we drove on, climbing into the mountains, Crystal filled me in on her family’s history. She’d grown up in the 1970s and ’80s on a farm, and was eight years older than Winnie. The family lived in a one-bedroom mud-brick house with a dirt floor and a grass roof. They relied on government rations, which weren’t enough to feed them all. Crystal’s mother couldn’t produce milk for Winnie, who as an infant suffered from calcium deficiency, which Crystal thinks affected her little sister’s intelligence. “She was kind of slow,” Crystal recalled. “She studied so hard, but she never got good scores.”

 

Had the sisters been born a decade or two earlier, they would have probably remained in the countryside and lived similar, circumscribed lives under Mao Zedong’s socialist system. But economic reforms by Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, created something new: the opportunity to succeed and the chance to fail. Crystal moved to Harbin, the provincial capital, where she studied and became a nurse. Winnie left school at 16 and headed to Harbin as well, where she fell into the default profession for many uneducated migrant women―sex work.

[Allon]

Good post, Greg. Wish we had more posts from books about the Chinese people. We have had some, but wish there were more.