The academic dream of a female worker

Every day, Wang Lianli, a 57-year-old retired worker in Shanghai, puts on lipstick and gets spotless before she goes out, even if it's just to buy vegetables at a market. Go down to the sixth floor, turn right, and pass a group of retired old ladies under a tree who peel edamame, tease their grandchildren, and gossip about family matters. She never looks at them.

"I don't belong to them, at least in spirit." She said.

The question of which group Wang belongs to has been troubling him. After retiring, Wang wrote several economic papers and started a blog about economics, gradually earning a bit of fame in economic circles. In public, she likes to be known as "Teacher Wang," even though she only attended school until the second grade of junior high school. She is a retired female worker who ran a lathe for 17 years. Today, she still lives in the house more than 20 years ago, sofa, bookcase, and sewing machine crowding less than 10 square meters of the living room. After retirement, the first month she received a pension of 865 yuan, she knew that she was no different from most of the retired workers downstairs.

But she was not reconciled. From the beginning, she was unwilling to accept the fate of "little people". Her dream since childhood was to be a politician. As soon as she entered middle school, she went to the East China University of Political Science and Law to see what the department of International Politics was like. At the age of 12, she even went to the Shanghai Youth Palace alone to see Qiu Jin's bloody clothes. She worshipped heroes.

But, as most ordinary people submerged, life did not give her the chance to achieve her ideal -- the Cultural Revolution halted her studies. In 1977, Wang Lianli, a female worker who scored high in the newly resumed college entrance exam, had to return to the machine because she failed the political examination. Eight years later, she passed the self-study examination of 17 courses and became the first worker in the shipyard of four to five thousand people to obtain a college degree by self-study.

In 1988, Wang changed jobs, working in project budgeting, auditing, and dealing with numbers all day. She finds numbers "as fascinating as art." In 1994, she was forced to resign from a state-owned shipyard because she refused to sign the final account of a project with a price of 100,000 yuan but quoted a price of 1 million yuan. Since then, she has been working in other private enterprises and listed companies, and all her work cannot be separated from "talking with numbers". By 2004, her economic papers on real estate, state-owned enterprise restructuring, and other issues have been published. The ideal balloon, which had been deflated for many years, gradually swelled up again. Some even call her a private economist. She also learned to use the technical terms "Leontief matrix", "indifference curve" and "Coase Theorem". She was also able to work out strange mathematical formulas that looked like the books of the universe. When Wang retired in the winter of 2002, her octogenarian mother-in-law expected her to take on more housework, but instead, she became even busier, working in her house all day. Once, to find the program on the computer to calculate the number of consecutive 40 power, she stayed up all night and forgot to make breakfast.

At first, Wang's article received little attention from mainland media. Instead, she submitted her paper to Hong Kong and even posted it online. She often writes emails to prominent scholars touting her ideas. Gradually, her thesis had a certain influence on the circle.

She calls herself "perhaps the most famous retired female worker in China," yet her family does not consider her "famous." Her husband hasn't read a word of her paper, and her son says he "can't read it." Someone asked her: "Retired, enjoy a grandchild, what do you do all this?" The joy of academic research, she says, is "beyond words". The most immediate reason, she explained, was that she had to come up with figures, to tell the truth, to counter the "lies" of some officials.

When he first met Ba Jin in 1967, Wang shouted "Down with Ba Jin" from just a few meters away. After 38 years, when he saw Ba Jin again, the old man lay down quietly among the roses and slept forever. Among the countless elegiac couplets, she remembered one: "Refuse to forget with repentance, and resist lies with truth." As she walked out of the funeral home, she decided, "I'm going, to tell the truth."

But it is not easy for a retired female worker to speak the truth in academic circles. Occasionally, Wang is invited to attend academic conferences. On one occasion, she attended a seminar on China's real estate tax affairs. On the information of the participants, she was written as "Researcher of Economic Research Center of Peking University", and many experts and scholars called her "Teacher Wang". But when she corrected her identity at the end of her speech, "the faces of some scholars changed faster than the sky in June."

She was even invited to the centennial anniversary of Fudan University for the first time, and her lecturers were all professors from world-famous universities and senior economists from Standard Chartered Bank. When the translator introduced her, however, it was as a researcher, not a retired female worker. November 19, 2007. A professor at Tsinghua University's School of Public Administration found out who she was and invited her to give a lecture to a graduate class. For the first time, she was really "Miss Wang".

She pretended to want to be an insurance salesman, attended two or three months of training as an insurance broker, and later posted articles about insurance on the websites of insurance companies. But more time, she feels helpless for her "female worker" identity, her name card "empty", without a title, unit, only name, telephone. She SAYS, LANG XIANPING'S NAME CARD ALSO IS SUCH, BUT THE SOMEBODY ELSE IS A CELEBRITY, HAVE QUALIFICATION COMPLETELY EMPTY, AND ONESELF IN REALLY HELPLESS, WRITE ON THE NAME CARD "RETIRED FEMALE WORKER" NOT DO?