Factory Worker To Author: How English Changed Lijia Zhang's Life

Sameer Arshad Khatlani
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At the 2014 Bangalore Literature Festival, I got the first real sense of the bursting of the bubble of spaces one could relatively speak one's mind freely in. The event ended on a bit of a disappointing note when a hostile crowd surrounded us over the inconvenient perspective on Kashmir. Overall, the festival was a memorable experience. I moderated a session and got to meet some interesting people with the highlight being the meeting with Chinese writer Lijia Zhang and getting to know her fascinating story. Over coffee at the festival's writers' lounge, Lijia told me how she was pulled out of school at 16 to work at a factory to make ends meet in the impoverished China of the 1980s. But she did not give up. Lijia would struggle to go on and learn English, circumvent control in China, overcome the trauma of its manifestations such as period policing to realise her dream of becoming an author and journalist.

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China's emergence as the world's largest economy in 2014 represented a dramatic transformation of the country from the days of Lijia's childhood. She was born into a poor and working-class family in eastern China's Nanjing in 1964. Lijia grew up in a compound of the factory, where her mother worked. Like in the former Soviet Union, the lives of workers revolved around China's state-owned factories, which provided them dormitories to stay there. Lijia lived in one of these dorms as a child. All her neighbours worked at the factory. Her friends too were children of factory workers. Becoming a factory worker was her only likely fate as well. But she had a grand plan of going to a university and becoming a writer or journalist. Despite odds, she drew strength from her teacher's encouragement. The teacher would read her writings as an example to show the other students how to write. 

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Lijia's dream appeared to have shattered when her mother took her out of school as she saw no benefits of her education. The mother retired early for Lijia to take over her factory job. She took another job to double their family income as they struggled to make ends meet. For a large number of Chinese, food was scarce when Lijia was growing up. There was a scarcity of items such as meat. Everything was rationed. Lijia would eat all sorts of things to satisfy her craving for meat. She saw no light at the end of the tunnel until English became her game-changer to escape her wretched life. 

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The factory, where she worked, was like a mini-communist state. It provided a lot of things to the workers like a dormitory and school where Lijia studied. There was a kindergarten too. Lijia's life remained within the grey environs of the factory. She hated her life there. So she decided to teach herself English as an escape route in the hope of getting a job with foreign companies starting shops in Nanjing. Lijia also wanted to become a journalist to get out of the factory. English changed her life. She became political and it deepened her interest in literature. After her English improved, she began listening to the BBC, which was a far cry from the Chinese propaganda. It was not easy. But she kept at it. She followed BBC's radio learning programme called ‘new concept English’ and also became fascinated by the Western system, which was very different from China's. Lijia started talking to herself in English while the only place she found to study at work was a rubbish dump.

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Lijia found challenges everywhere with the all-pervasive controls in Communist China. With so much control, nothing was personal. Everything she wanted – dating, high heels, and lipsticks – were not allowed. Even men could not grow hair beyond their earlobes. All women factory workers had to go to what was called a 'hygiene room' monthly to virtually show blood to a woman to prove they were not pregnant. They called the practice period policing. It was part of China's now-discarded one-child policy for family planning. For Lijia, period policing was a very insulting way of control. She overcame all this to go on to write a book on the western image of China while she lived in Oxford in the 1990s. Lijia found the image fascinating but the book did not pass the Chinese censorship and prompted her to switch to writing in English. The censors had no way to control that. She returned to Beijing and began writing for international publications making most of the lenient control over English writings.

Sameer Arshad Khatlani is an author-journalist. He has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper. Khatlani worked in a similar capacity with The Indian Express, India's most influential newspaper known for its investigative journalism, until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, he began his career with the Vijay Times, which has since been rebranded as Bangalore Mirror, in 2005 as its national-affairs correspondent. He joined Times of India, one of the world's largest selling broadsheets, in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was a part of the paper's national and international newsgathering team as an Assistant Editor. Khatlani has reported from Iraq, Pakistan, and the Maldives and covered elections and natural disasters. He received a master’s degree in History from the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Khatlani is a fellow with Hawaii-based American East-West Center established by the US Congress in 1960 to promote better relations and understanding with Asian, and Pacific countries through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. Penguin published Khatlani’s first book The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan in February 2020. Eminent academic and King’s college professor, Christophe Jaffrelot, has called the book ‘an erudite historical account... [that] offers a comprehensive portrait of Pakistan, including the role of the army and religion—not only Islam.'