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children born to a farmer from Shengmei, Cheng Chai Leung, and his wife, who had grown up in a neighboring village. As a girl, Sister Ping would leave the village elementary school when her classes were done for the day and return home to a long list of chores. She was responsible for chopping wood and for tending to a small plot of vegetables. She helped raise the family’s pigs and rabbits. “I never went out to play. I always worked,” she would later explain. “And I liked working.”
    During her formative years, Sister Ping bore witness to a procession of tragically misguided policy initiatives from Beijing. When she was barely ten, Mao’s Great Leap Forward reassembled China’s peasantry into communes in an effort to reinvent centuries-old agrarian communities as industrial proletariats. The result was severe food shortages, and ultimately the greatest famine in recorded history, which between 1958 and 1960 killed nearly 38 million people. All across China, peasant families like Sister Ping’s suffered almost unimaginable hardship during these years, struggling to ward off starvation and eke out a living despite the frailty of their malnourished bodies and a government whose incompetence was matched only by its indifference in the face of civilian death. It was Mao’s view that in a country as populous as China, individual human lives were anything but sacred. One incidental cost of the Great Leap Forward, he conceded, was that “half of China may well have to die.” The millions of people who collapsed and died in the countryside were simply doing their part, he suggested. “They can fertilize the ground,” he said. In a country where filial piety and veneration of the dead had been cornerstones of the Confucian tradition for over two thousand years, the grieving families of the dead were instructed to plant crops atop their burial plots.
    While she was still a pigtailed child, Sister Ping encountered a world in which human life could be casually extinguished at any moment, and in addition to fostering a slightly callous, unsentimental view of death, the experience seems to have forged in her a survivalist instinct—a fierce conviction that only through hard work could she andher loved ones prevail over adversity and escape the kind of fickle end that others had in store. One day when she was twelve years old, Sister Ping left the village to go cut wood for kindling. In order to reach a remote grove of trees on the far side of the Min River, she joined eight other people in a rowboat. There were only seven oars, and though she was still just a child, Sister Ping took one and did her part to row. But before they could reach the other side, the current picked up and the boat flipped over. Sister Ping was thrown into the water and managed to swim to shore. Afterward she learned that everyone who had been carrying an oar had survived the accident. The two who had not been rowing drowned. The incident made an indelible impression on the little girl, one that she would remember for the rest of her life. “The two people who were lazy and sat back while others worked ended up dead,” she would later reflect. “This taught me to work hard.”
    If in her later life Sister Ping harbored a suspicion, bordering on contempt, of the authority of government and the laws and edicts of officials, her attitude here again may have been developed at an early age. When she was a teenager and attending the local high school, it was announced one day that the school was closing. Schools and universities across China were being shuttered and young people were being sent to work in the fields under the banner of the Cultural Revolution. Mao announced that “rebellion is justified” and encouraged the young to overturn the decadent “old culture” of China. Children turned on their elders, branding them reactionaries, class traitors, and capitalists. Students pilloried their teachers in the schoolyard, dousing them with black