LIJIA ZHANG
Monday, April 28 at 7:30 p.m.

We are delighted to welcome, from her Beijing home, noted journalist Lijia Zhang. She is here with a lively, eye-opening autobiographical account, "Socialism is Great!" A Worker's Memoir of the New China (Atlas & Co.). "If David Copperfield has been a Chinese girl in the 1980s, in the city of Nanjing, he might have ended up on the assembly line at Liming Machinery Factory, under the authority of the Ministry of Aerospace Industry, making missiles capable of reaching North America. In "Socialism is Great!" Lijia Zhang has written a beautiful memoir of this important period, when China began to recover from its political traumas and open to the outside world. Our current China literature is heavy with victim memoirs, but this is a true tale of aspiration, a young woman coming of age in a nation desperately trying to do the same." - Peter Hessler. "This affecting record of individual striving and fulfillment reminds us, with humor and insight, how the growth of sensibility in unfavorable circumstances remains one of our most pleasant literary experiences. Set against China's recent breathless transformation, it also offers a rare and intimate glimpse of a country and culture that are now reshaping the world." - Pankaj Mishra.

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