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.