IN THEIR WORDS

Former TV host Jing Yidan's latest book aims to capture life in China over the past decades through family letters. Yang Yang reports.

" 'Have you ever seen a coupon for cloth?' I asked a woman who was born in the 1990s," said Jing Yidan, a former star news host on television, during the launch of her latest book Na Nian, Na Xin (That Year, That Letter) in Beijing on June 29.

In the 1960s and '70s, times of scarcity in China, people needed to use welfare coupons to buy limitedly supplies of daily necessities such as meat, oil, rice, coal, vegetables and cloth.