No kidding, Deng saved me from a life of hoe hoe hoe

It's not every day that I think about what I would be doing if China had not undertaken the road to reform and opening up. When I do think about it, I know it's no laughing matter.

When the Third Plenary Session of the Community Party of China's 11th Central Committee passed this historic policy, I was enrolled in Hangzhou University. I was just 15, not yet of college age. I was in my third year of high school when I was plucked by the school authorities to take the college entrance exam. I did not ace it, but passed with a razor-thin margin.

Two years before that, I was destined for a life of digging earth. I was born and grew up in a small town in northern Zhejiang because my mother had been a "re-educated urban youth". The rules had been: the first born of every urban family had to be sent to the countryside for "re-education", a fancy name for farming. My mother had many friends, mostly from Shanghai, and they formed a kind of informal club because they did not really get along with the local farmers, whose life of subsistence farming they were encroaching upon. There were many horror stories, but somehow they managed to laugh about them.