At 29, Zhou Zhiwei lost her job and her boyfriend, leaving her no choice but to drag her luggage back to her mother’s home in the old part of town.
She had always thought her mother simply wasn’t very educated.
Then she discovered that her mother couldn’t even understand the work notices from the canteen, and could barely write her own name.
To keep her job, her 53-year-old mother enrolled in night classes at the community center.
The first thing she wanted to learn wasn’t “work” or “wages,” but how to write her own name.
As Zhou Zhiwei accompanied her mother to one night class after another, she gradually came to understand that the woman who had spent her whole life telling her, “You have to live well,” had once had dreams of her own that she never got to fulfill.
And she, too, needed to learn not to let others decide her life just because she was afraid of failing.
