The Free-Spirited Life of a Female Engineer

Unwilling to endure the constraints of living under her parents' protection or the suffocating oppression of an authoritarian family, she resolutely abandoned her iron rice bowl at a state-owned enterprise and headed south in the 1990s for an open coastal city. With only a clay rice bowl to her name, she struck out on her own and carved out a life in a man's world.

She saw both the beauty and ugliness of intellectuals, witnessed the bizarre ups and downs of real estate and construction, and experienced all the sweetness and bitterness of the workplace.

She weathered the generation gap among three generations, saw her parents and younger sister off, and was left with countless regrets.