Clocking in day after day at a giant military factory in Nanjing in mainland China where she worked for 10 mind-numbing years in the 1980s, Zhang Lijia dreamt of escape. Her route out was to learn English, even if her fellow workers mocked her as 'a toad who wants to eat swan's meat' - someone with ambitions way beyond her station.
Zhang learnt English in secret. And along with the language came a political, spiritual and sexual awakening as she gained not only a new soul - 'to learn another language is to gain another soul', as the first Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne famously remarked. She also earned her ticket out of a life of drudgery.
The top-secret rocket factory where she began working at the age of 16 provided housing, a kindergarten, meals and showers, in a numbing, cradle-to-grave 'iron rice bowl'. It also curtailed all talent and ambition: Zhang was denied promotion on the grounds that her naturally curly hair, rare in a Chinese, represented a bourgeois-capitalist outlook. And she even had to show her stained sanitary napkins every month to the 'period police' to prove she wasn't pregnant.
Today Zhang, 43 - whose first book, a powerfully written, vivid memoir of those years entitled Socialism is Great, comes out at the end of March with Atlas & Co - lives in Beijing with her two daughters, 10-year-old May and eight-year-old Kirsti. 'I always wanted to be a writer or a journalist,' said Zhang.
But the road from factory girl to Beijing-based international sophisticate, British citizen and mother of two has not been quick. 'It has been a long, slow process. When I was young I was always very ambitious, I did well academically and put everything in writing. Even today I write all the time in my diary. I write when I'm happy, when I'm sad, when I'm lonely.'
Zhang dreamed of going to university. But disaster struck at 16, when her mother took her out of school and placed her in 'Liming' as the factory is called in her book. Zhang felt her fate bitterly. Her mother feared that her daughter, however bright, had a slim chance of getting into university (her husband, a clerk in the reform-through-labour system, had a 'bad political background'). And she feared that Zhang would end up jobless, like so many others in the city.
As well as circuitous, the road was occasionally dangerous for the girl from Nanjing, who grew up sleeping in the same bed as her beloved grandmother and wastrel brother until she was 16, with five people squeezed into a two-room apartment.