My name means  ‘magnificent fish’, but look at me, do I really look like a magnificent fish? I’ve got a grocery store in the ‘hutong ‘shou bi’, a little street in the centre of Beijing. At the back of the store there is a tiny room, five metres square, where we live, my husband, our fourteen months old baby daughter Kai Xing and me. We store packets of cigarettes on the top bunk. Lucky we’ve got the top bunk, otherwise I don’t know where we’d put them. It’s a horrible, dirty place, and it costs 1,200 yuan a month, not counting the 300 yuans we pay for water and electricity. We can’t afford to live like our neighbour does. He just bought himself a nice little shop, I don’t know how he managed that. I truly don’t get it…

I’m thirty-two years old and this is what my life amounts to: selling alcohol, batteries, toothpaste and cigarettes from a hole in the wall. I work seven days a week, without a break. My shop is a meeting place. There’s always a crowd here. Things happen around the red telephone on the counter at the entrance. One day a woman from the countryside, who had had a fight with her husband, decided to run away to Beijing. She called her husband from my telephone and told him, ‘I’ve gone. I’m leaving you, don’t bother trying to find me’. The next day a man burst into the shop yelling, ‘Where’s my wife?  Where’s my wife?’ My phone number showed up on his telephone which is how he got hold of my address. What a story! And don’t get me started with the lovers’ tiffs, the love affairs, the family problems… We don’t get bored here.

People say I should grow up. Stop telling everyone what I think the whole time. But at my age I’m not about to change! I admit that I’m very quick to squabble with people. I’m hot blooded – I get that from my father, a peasant. The problem is that I’m no good at arguing. In an argument I’m bound to lose. My husband is always telling me to stop being so frank. Actually I think he’s afraid that I’ll say something really stupid. To tell the truth we don’t really love each other. I was thirty when we were introduced. I was ready to go with the first guy who came my way. We got married in order to start a family. Honestly, we were never in love with each other. That’s why we’re always yelling at each other. He’s a good man, I have to say. He doesn’t go after other women, he does the washing up, he cooks, he does the laundry too. But he’s always going on about my faults. I’ve had enough of living with ‘Big Brother’. There was one day, I was in a good mood, I bought some flowers, changed the sheets. When my husband came home he looked at me and sighed, ‘Honestly, what is the matter with you? You’re not a kid any more’. I just want to be loved for what I am ; I’m thirty-two but I feel like I’ve got the soul of a sixty years old. Sad, no?

At the end of the day our pride and joy is our daughter. She is so beautiful! When you live in Beijing it doesn’t matter if you have a son or a daughter. But in the countryside there are still people who still mutter, ‘Jia chu qu de nü'er, po chu qu de shui’, ‘a daughter who gets married is like water down a drain!’ I come from a family of seven daughters and a son. I was the third daughter and it was tough being lost in the crowd.

At the grocery I make about 700 yuan a day. I manage to put a bit of money away so that one day I can go back to my village in Jiangsu. Don’t think I’m going to spend the rest of my life here! The capital is too expensive and there’s too much pressure. I’m poor here in Beijing. Back home I’m thought of as someone with status, comfortably off. And if you could see where I come from… In Jiangsu, in the north, it’s not especially rich but it is so beautiful. It’s so lush and green, there are lakes and plains. What I miss most about being here are the flowers in the springtime…