Wang Lili

speakers - Writing from the heart

One of the people who noted our quest for qualified speakers was the author Wang Lili from Henan province, a starting novelist with four books on her name. Since four years she is living in Shanghai, and worked before that for five years as a migrant worker in Shenzhen. She shared her apartment with sex workers. Both experiences offered her enough material for her first two books.
Is she making a living? "You guys are always asking that question first," she sights. From her first book she sold perhaps a 10,000 copies, but the internet companies who freely copy her work might have made more out of it.
"I want to show the human faces behind the economy. Economy professors only look at the figures, I want to show the people behind those figures.
"I had no writing experience when I started, but writing is not a skill you can learn. I'm writing from the heart, it is the water, the emotion flowing from your heart."
The confrontation with the sex workers was for the traditional girl from Henan a shock. She had to share an apartment with other to afford it, but tried to force them out when she discovered they were sex workers. Wang: "At home we had a saying, 'we do not laugh about poor people, but we laugh about prostitutes'."
Fierce conflicts followed, but in the end Wang Lili gave in. Wang: "They were only having a business, they said. And where would they have to live when I would kick them out? I was moved and started to watch them. Now I do not laugh about prostitutes anymore."
Wang Lili blogs both in English and Chinese at Sina.com.