A nanny, single mother of two daughters and literature fanatic, Fan
uses a simple, sincere and humourous tone to pen down the chal-
lenges of being a member of China’s exploited underclass. But she
never believed her fate would be totally changed by an essay. For her,
literature was just a beam of light that shone during the short breaks
between work.
Call of the Books
“My life is a book that’s unbearable to read, and fate has bound that
book in an utterly clumsy way,” reads the beginning of Fan’s essay.
Fan was born in a deprived village near Xiangyang in central Chi-
na’s Hubei Province. She was the youngest of five.
Fan learnt to read novels on her own at the age of six. She read
Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, as well as works
by Daniel Defoe, Maxim Gorky, Charlotte Bronte and Gabriel Gar-
cia Marquez. “If a person cannot feel happiness and satisfaction in
life, it must be because they aren’t reading enough novels,” believed
Fan even as a little girl.
Inspired by books, Fan left home at the age of 12 without saying
goodbye, heading south to Hainan island, China’s southernmost
province, to see the big world. She ate papaya and coconut in the
shade and looked for food in the rubbish bins – “all the heroes in the
books lived this way.”
When she returned home after her three-month sojourn, all she
received was hatred from her father and brothers. In the village, if a
girl abandons her family and then returns, she has “damaged her own
virtue” and shamed her whole family.
Due to this “deviant” behavior, Fan was unable to continue in edu-
cation. She started work as a teacher in a remote village that same year.
She described the days in the countryside being as dull as “viewing
the sky from the bottom of a well.” At the age of 20, she left home
once again, heading north to Beijing.
In Beijing, she changed jobs several times and married a man from
northeastern China, with whom she had two daughters. However,
the man later turned out to be alcoholic and violent.
“I couldn’t bear his domestic violence any more, so I decided to take
my kids back to my hometown. That man never looked for us. Later I
heard he went from Manzhouli to Russia, and right now he’s probably
stumbling drunk down a Moscow street,” Fan wrote.
After returning to Xiangyang, Fan and her daughters were not
welcomed by her eldest brother, who avoided her “like the plague”
and argued that “a married daughter is like poured water, no longer a
member of her parents’ family.” Only her mother fully accepted her,
but still did not have the power to offer help.
Fan came back to Beijing with her daughters, shifted between sev-
eral odd jobs and dwellings and finally settled in Picun Village on the
eastern edge of the city.
“Friends agree best at a distance,” is the phrase Fan used to describe
her relationship with her family. She told ChinaReport that she felt
herself to be like the “duckweed of the floating world.”‘Carrot’ not ‘Ginseng’
“I am a person of very low self-esteem,” Fan said. She mentioned
the word “self-inferiority” twice during the interview.
“I used to be very arrogant,” she wrote in her essay. Her extensive
reading nourished her dream and pushed her to escape from the vil-
lage to big cities. Yet the cruel lessons she learnt from reality from time
to time made her affirm her position in society.
“A carrot is always a carrot. It will never become a ginseng root. I’m
clearly aware of it,” Fan told ChinaReport.
Fan described herself as “a woman struggling to survive on the
lowest rung of society.” Under constant pressure and discriminationFan Yusu (centre) attends a seminar titled “Fan Yusu, Neo-working class Literature and
Cultural Rights” held by the Chinese National Academy of Arts on May 5Photo by cfp Photo courtesy of the interviewee