A blossoming ambition

In a tranquil setting by Erhai Lake in Yunnan province, Liu Xiaoyang, a 56-year-old village woman, discusses her interpretation of the literary works of Albert Camus, W. Somerset Maugham and Ernest Hemingway with Zhang Yue, a former CCTV anchorwoman.

It's a scene from a recently aired online program, A Room of Her Own.

The last time these two women from completely different backgrounds had an on-camera dialogue dates back 23 years.

In the winter of 2001, the then 33-year-old Liu, a villager living in the rural plains near Xianyang, Shaanxi province, had her first opportunity to chat with someone in Mandarin, a language she learned by listening to the radio.

She was interviewed by Zhang, then the host of the CCTV television program Half the Sky, a show dedicated to women's issues.

They sat on two low wooden stools next to a firewood stack in front of a two-story self-built brick house, where Liu lived a daily routine similar to most local women — cooking, doing laundry, taking care of children and elders after marrying at 23.

Growing up in the isolated rural area where everyone spoke the local dialect, Liu would follow the radio announcer word for word as she worked in the fields, learning Mandarin. She listened to literary works such as The Ordinary World by Lu Yao on the radio.

She would also pick up incomplete books in the village, copy sentences that resonated with her and write down her feelings. She was a dedicated viewer of the TV program Half the Sky.

Yet, despite sensing a void in her repetitive daily existence, she lacked a confidant.

It wasn't until the fall of 2001 that she cycled more than 10 kilometers to the nearest post office, sending a letter to the Half the Sky program's production team. In it, she expressed her feelings of discontent and her desire for knowledge and the outside world.