Inquiry into Life

Inquiry into Life is Zhang Haidi's representative collection of essays. First published in the 1990s, it won the national "Five-One Project" Book Award and the national Striving for Civilization and Progress Book Award, among other honors, and was later included in the "Writers of the Republic Library" in a revised edition. Taking the author's growth from childhood to youth as its main thread, the book is divided into five parts and gathers dozens of essays of varying length: from days in the isolation ward in the company of Leghorn chicks and a mischievous childhood chasing roosters on the rooftop, to fragments of illness, the river she crossed in her teens, and on to study and schooling, fighting for literature, correspondence with friends, and going abroad to attend the Fourth World Conference on Women. The writing blends fact and imagination, treating illness, family affection, reading and writing, the longing for love and beauty, and repeated questioning of fate and the meaning of life. Lines such as "Even if the wings are broken, the heart must still fly" are widely circulated. It is not a collection of inspirational stories with invented plots; rather, using first-person memory as its thread, it presents the long process by which a woman with high-level paraplegia expanded her inner world through knowledge and literature, and serves well as an introductory reader for understanding Zhang Haidi and her writing.