Personal note written in on cover page with date.

The meteoric journey of a young Chinese woman: born in a communist camp into a family shattered by the Cultural Revolution, she forged an incredible destiny for herself through the sheer force of her astonishing will.

Learning English by listening to the radio, French by watching films and life by traveling, Fei recounts her surprising journey from Manchuria to France. With humor and lucidity, she delivers an original point of view on a China in full mutation.
A unique, endearing and colorful personality.
A stunning story.


One evening in 2007, in one of the tall towers of Shanghai, Fei, 27, saw a strange apparition in his office. A little black pig, its right eye surrounded by a pink spot, looks at her, sitting on its tiny behind. Panic. She seems to be the only one to see him. Could she be suffering from a brain disease? Would these hallucinations sound the death knell for his short existence? This is Fei's opportunity to tell us about his astonishing destiny...
The second-born of a family deposed by the Cultural Revolution, Fei is declared a false date of birth by her mother to avoid the fine linked to the one-child law. Extremely poor, his parents are nevertheless devoted to their children, and even more than devoted as the future will reveal since one day they will sell all their possessions, from the apartment to the jewelry, so that Fei can leave China.
While his brother receives his education from their grandfather, Fei is not allowed to listen to the lessons. To be thus rejected from knowledge because she is a girl and “does not count” awakens in her a deep feeling of injustice. Fei vows very early on to give little girls like her all the books that are forbidden to them at home.
The opening of the country to the capitalist world decided by the Communist Party in the early 1980s created a China that was developing at full speed. To the great incomprehension of her family and sometimes at the risk of her life, Fei rejects the clear path offered to her, the kind civil servant husband, and sets out alone, at 19, on the steep paths that will one day lead her in Paris.