BEJING BOOK QUEST PAYS OFF BIG

I had gone to China to look for Chinese writers and had met a number of writers over dinner and in hotel lobbies and, on one occasion, with a high-profile dissident, at an ice-cream shop—the Chinese have a weakness for ice-cream sundaes and banana splits; but I’d found no manuscripts. I was on my way to the Beijing airport empty-handed when my guide, Lijia Zhang, who had been taking me around for he last two days, shyly revealed that she herself had written a book—a memoir about growing up in Nanjing after the Cultural Revolution, working a dead-end job in a missile factory, and embarking with fierce determination on the study of English as a means of escape from the claustrophobic world of her parents. Zhang’s studies had served her well: the book was written in English. I read it on the long flight home and made an offer on it the next day.

One of the chief satisfactions of being a publisher is the discovery of new voices. Zhang sounds like no one else. In her frank but fine-tuned prose, you can hear the exotic lilt of Conrad or Nabokov—grammatically perfect English written by a foreigner; the occasional strange locution contributes to its charm. We sent the book out for blurbs, ordinarily a useless gambit, and heard back from Jonathan Spence, Pankaj Mishra, Peter Hessler and Da Chen—an impressive haul. They all loved the book.

Lijia Zhang will be coming to the States in April to promote "Socialism is Great!" She’ll be appearing at the Los Angeles Book Fair, followed by bookstore events in Denver, Boston, and New York. If China is the next superpower, as everyone seems to think, we ought to learn about it not just from economists and Asian scholars, but from its writers, too.

—James Atlas

Lijia Zhang is the author of "Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China, available at bookstores now.