دانلود کتاب Socialism Is Great! - a Worker’s Memoire of the New China

“Lijia Zhang has written a remarkable memoir about coming of age at the start of China’s historic reform era. The early to mid-1980s are a period that many have overlooked. Caught between the national trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the upheavals of Tiananmen Square, it was when a nation awoke to its possibilities. In one of the few memoirs of this key period, Ms. Zhang personifies the country’s restlessness and boundless energy. Born into a working class family, she inherited a routine job in a rocket factory. Like the rest of China, she wasn’t satisfied with this predictable but stultifying life and pushed outward. Lively written with a lot of humor and brushes with the law, her story is that of a generation — the one that created the China that so fascinates the world today.”
—Ian Johnson, author of Wild Grass

From Chapter 1:

“Would you like to be a worker, if you have a chance?”
“Of course not, Ma. Why?” I answered my mother flatly, without even looking up from my homework. To be a worker? What an odd question! I was only sixteen, in my first term at senior middle school, and I was doing well.
...
“Not even working at a first-class enterprise like Liming, a real ‘iron rice bowl’?” Ma had spent her entire working life at Liming Machinery Factory, the largest state-owned enterprise in our city, Nanjing. Under the authority of the Ministry of Aerospace Industry, our factory had nearly ten thousand employees. Its prestige derived from not only its scale but also its status as a military factory. With free services from nurseries to cremation, and countless bowls of rice in between, the life of a state employee meant cradle-to-grave security. Plus free showers and subsidized haircuts.