Hard Lives, Big Dreams

An English-language version of Jia Pingwa's work, Happy Dreams, has just been published in both print and electronic formats. It looks at the lives of scrappers against the backdrop of big social changes. Yang Yang reports.

One afternoon in 2004, Chinese writer Jia Pingwa received his primary school classmate Liu Shuzhen at his home in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province. Liu, a farmer from a poor village in Shaanxi, had tried to visit Jia before, but Jia was out then.

This time, Liu told the writer that he came to Xi'an to join his son, who delivered briquettes. But the father left the son and became a scrapper after a fight.