Zhang Lijia
Zhang Lijia, prolific author and journalist, has an eye for interesting characters. Her latest novel, Lotus – an unflinching examination of the dark underbelly of China’s sex trade – is populated with personalities that seem to leap off the page: most notably her defiant, iron-willed protagonist, a young prostitute whose riveting journey we follow through the parlours of Shenzhen’s red-light district. Talking me through the process of writing the book, Lijia recounts the time she spent as a volunteer in northern China, distributing contraception to sex workers.
“What really struck me,” she says, “is how normal these people are. They are just ordinary women. They cook, they chop, they do the washing up….”
These women, she told me, are easy enough to find once you know where to look. In seedy shops disguised as karaoke bars, massage parlours, and hair salons, she met a plethora of young girls: those who’d entered the trade of their own free will, those fleeing domestic abuse, those who’d moved to the city chasing promises of a job with no idea what kind of industry they were selling themselves into. When documenting their lives, Lijia stresses the importance she attaches to not portraying them as two-dimensional victims. “Their life is very hard,” she admits, “but it is not total misery.” In fact, she tells me, most of them are quite frank about their work – when I ask about the most memorable people she met, she immediately recalls a woman she saw sitting on the pavement outside a store, dressed provocatively in broad daylight, cross-stitching and conversing amiably with passers-by.
“Most of them wouldn’t dare,” she says, in a tone of mingled warmth and amazement. The woman was in her mid-thirties, slender and attractive, wearing heavy make-up and a bright flower in her hair. She spoke about her family: the husband who’d walked out one day and never returned, the young children who she’d been forced to leave behind. She was hesitant to reveal her name. This was the case with most of the prostitutes—Lijia describes them as “very hard to befriend…one day, they just disappear”. Inhabitants of one of the most prolific yet secret trades in China, they frequently vanish from one city and turn up in another, ghosts haunting the dark underworld of China’s glitzy metropolises.
Of course, this lifestyle of transience is one that Lijia herself is familiar with. A quick glance through her biography reveals a life spent permanently in transit, from Nanjing to London, from America to Beijing. Born in a small village in rural China, she spent most of her childhood running wild in paddies and paddling in the river. As she became a young woman, she watched the country around her, too, grow up and change: the China of the ‘70s was one of rapid modernisation and development, of booming cities and rising skyscrapers, of newly emerged factories spewing black smoke into the previously unpolluted sky. It was in one such factory that Lijia went to work at age sixteen. As an employee at a state enterprise, she was supposed to find comfort in her “iron rice bowl”, the idea that she could work there for the rest of her life: her company provided services from nursery to cremation, and even went as far as to subsidise its workers’ haircuts. As she trudged through the daily monotony of taking measurements and checking pressure gauges, however, Lijia’s mind was fleeing across the Atlantic. Teaching herself English “as an escape route”, she fantasized about finding work as an interpreter in foreign company and starting a new life somewhere far away.
“I’m a dreamer,” she confesses, laughing. “Always a dreamer. I think life would be dull without a dream.”
After finally moving to London, she spent most of her time drifting between her husband’s lectures and a series of part-time jobs: waitress, receptionist, shop assistant. Her mind, however, was always fixed on writing. It was her eventual career as a journalist that finally brought her back to China, and she confesses that she keenly missed it in her absence: “in the village, because life was so hard, people relied on each other a lot…that warmth and closeness, I think, was really special.”
Her attachment to her home country is palpable in her work. Prolifically dotted among her words are pithy Chinese aphorisms like “a newborn calf isn’t afraid of tigers” and “as anxious as an ant on a hot pan”. Although she admits that this kind of translation isn’t easy—“how do you say in English, for instance, that someone is shuo chang shuo duan, talking long, talking short?”—her fascinating blend of English and Mandarin lends her work uniquely rich cultural dimensions.
Among peers like Amy Tan and Tash Aw, Lijia is part of the new generation of writers capturing the China experience from a Western perspective. Although she now lives in London, she tells me that she still feels drawn to her native country and frequently visits Beijing. From the tales of rural-to-urban migration in her novels, to her own time spent jet-setting around the world, Lijia Zhang has spent her whole life exploring liminal spaces: between city and country, between East and West, between reality and dreams.