Feature: Jiang Shumei: An old granny, yet a budding author

"There was no food left in my house. I picked up carrots on my way home. My family had eaten carrots for 40 days. It should have been sweet, but when I put one on my tongue again, I tasted nothing but bitterness. I could not eat it any more, nor could my son."

Jiang Shumei's memory of hunger during China's "Great Leap Forward" movement in the late 1950s is a rare insight into a period rarely mentioned in history textbooks.

The 80-year-old woman peasant has included it in her maiden work "Poor Time, Troubled Time", a collection of short stories mainly about ordinary people in north China's countryside who suffered from years of famine and political turmoil.

Published in 2013, the book quickly became a sensation nationwide and won many literature awards. But many readers were surprised to learn the author was an illiterate grandmother who learned how to read at age 60, and became a writer at 70.

TEENAGE DREAM

Jiang has the drive and enthusiasm of a writer half her age.

She has published a book every year since 2013. She went back to the countryside last year, carrying a notebook and a recorder, to record folktales from elderly villagers for her third book, "The Woman with a Long Neck".

The collection won a national award earlier this month. On the podium, silver-haired Jiang, dressed in a purple cheongsam and wearing a string of pearls, was far removed from the common image of a village woman.

But when she spoke, her strong accent marked her out from other winners, including journalists, novelists and sociologist. Some say that while Jiang can share literary awards with the educated, the educated could hardly write Jiang's stories.

"All her stories have a strong sense of the land or wildness, similar to Mo Yan's style of story-telling," says Ma Boyong, a well-established novelist.

Jiang came from the same province as the Nobel Prize winner. Born in an official's family in 1937 in Shandong's Juye County, Jiang's father and brothers received good education, and they were revered for building schools in villages.

However, years of political upheaval reversed the family's fortunes.

Their land was confiscated and houses separated. Jiang suffered starvation after an arranged marriage. In 1960, she escaped with her husband and children from famine to northeast Heilongjiang Province, where the couple worked as low-paid factory workers till retirement.

Like many her age, Jiang devoted most her life to raising children. When her husband died in a car accident in 1996, her daughter advised her to find a pastime to ward off loneliness. Rural women of her generation at large never went to school, so she realized her teenage dream and learned to read and write.

At first, she studied with her granddaughter, reading her textbooks and fairy tales together. She then tried to follow the subtitles of TV programs, lines of her favorite operas and ads on street billboards.

Six months later, she could write, though very slowly. Her family encouraged her to write stories, as she had always been a good storyteller.

Jiang says she wrote "just for fun", but her first piece was about the painful memories of starving.

"I felt very sad when I looked back on those tough times. I seldom cry, but my words moved me to tears," says Jiang, who sometimes had to drop her pen to calm down.

But she persevered: "It is worth writing down and I should share it with my children to let them know what happened in those days. They will understand today's easy living was very hard-won."

In a couple of weeks, she finished the story, "Two Years of Starving". After her daughter put the article on her blog, it quickly received thousands of hits and was reproduced by a literary magazine.

Jiang was paid and inspired. "I just wrote about very common things in my life - I never expected people would want to read them." Since then, she has spent all her spare time writing.

"STINGING DETAIL"

Unused to writing at a table, Jiang sits on sofa, writing on a pillow on her legs. Sometimes she writes all night long.

She writes about other people too - a woman with bound feet, a mute wife, and rude bandits. "Jiang's stories, from a female perspective, embody the indigenous cruelty and kindness of Chinese people in stinging detail," says critic Shi Hang.

"There is no data or any political concepts in my mom's books," says her daughter Zhang Ailing. "She had no idea of revolution, liberation, movements. She just recorded what happened to her and her fellow villagers."

Ma Guoxing, a writer, says Jiang's stories are real and readable; words are free of exaggerations or complicated idioms. Jiang does not add comments; she just writes in a straightforward way.

"Granny Jiang makes me feel ashamed," says Ma.

With two books published, Jiang was invited to be a member of Heilongjiang Provincial Writers Association in 2014. A year later, she joined the Chinese Writers Association, China's top literary organization.

But the official recognition is less important to her than her family's approval.

"My brother laughed at me when I said I was going to write, but after reading my books, he cried, saying my words brought his memories back," she recalls.

"Also, he learned, for the first time, how his little sister had experienced so many difficulties after leaving home."

However, some readers have complained online that Jiang's folktales collection was "so scary", with "too many ghosts" and it "reveals the selfishness and rudeness of human beings".

But Jiang says the folktales are worth recording, as most of the storytellers were 70 or over. "If I didn't write them down, they would be lost."

She has also struck a chord with young readers.

"She reminds me of my grandma, who used to reading interesting tales to me when I was little," one micro blogger commented.

"She is the prime example of how retirement shouldn't be about winding down," said another.

Jiang is now busy writing her fourth book. Despite failing hearing, she has no plans to stop: "I am an old granny, but a still young writer." Endit