Xiaolu was sustained by literature and especially poetry.
Xiaolu, you really don't know?
Given her unpropitious start in life,
it's remarkable that Xiaolu even survived.
Xiaolu's parents gave her away soon after birth to a poor,
childless couple.
At age thirty, Xiaolu became an immigrant in London and
began to learn and write in English.
Suddenly, Xiaolu saw the possibility of reshaping a drab
and colorless world through the power of imagination.
Xiaolu refused to give in to despair
and thus became the self-made heroine of her own story.
One day on the shore, Xiaolu met a group of art students painting the scene before them-
a sunless, gray sea.
When she was seven, Xiaolu's parents reappeared and took her
to live with them in a newly built communist compound with other families.
He told her that she was“a peasant warrior” and that“she will cross
the sea and travel to the Nine Continents,” something that Xiaolu never forgot.
Two years later, struggling to feed her, the couple passed Xiaolu on to her illiterate grandparents,
who lived in a primitive fishing village on the East China coast.