A woman who is inspired by women

Wang Zhousheng owes her writer's vocation to a number of extraordinary women. These include her mother, a soldier's wife who was left to grow cotton to support her nine children in Jiangsu province in the early 1940s, as her father fought the Japanese forces.

"There was no real love between my parents, only a sense of responsibility, binding them to each other," says Wang, grateful for her mother's selfless toil and yet painfully aware of her tragedy.

Later, when Wang went to work on a farm in Chongming Island in 1968, as part of her "reeducation", she met Wang Zheng, a feisty young woman who would talk about evolving ways of fighting the discrimination historically perpetrated on women.