A blossoming ambition

"If you are discontent with something, simply giving up is easy. However, accepting and adapting to it in the meantime, staying true to yourself, is incredibly challenging," Zhang says. "Liu has achieved this. She has faced numerous struggles but has not relinquished her spiritual freedom. Her family is filled with love, warmth and security. This is one of the reasons she possesses such a strong sense of self-worth.

"By carving her own path, Liu has embodied what I believe is the essence of a fulfilling life — grounding oneself in everyday life while allowing the soul to soar," Zhang adds.

A user of the review site Douban comments that people anticipate a specific conclusion for Liu, yet there is no definitive ending — just an ongoing journey. She persists in her love for life, nurturing her crops and blooming garden. Within her intimate realm, she seeks poetic beauty, perpetually contemplating and being stirred. Much like Sisyphus pushing his boulder, despite fate's relentless approach, she defies it. This enduring determination stands as the most inspiring aspect.

The program A Room of Her Own aims to present diverse women's life stories to inspire females to continuously engage in reflection and personal growth, writing their extraordinary tales within the ordinary.

The title of the program is inspired by A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, a prominent feminist writer of the early 1900s.

Approximately 100 years ago, Woolf imagined a scenario where Shakespeare had a sister of equal talent who, hindered by gender-based obstacles at every step, was unable to exhibit her abilities and tragically took her own life on a winter evening.

Woolf encourages all women: "If we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves … if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born."

These words are inspiring for Zhang, and she is determined to do something that would help "Shakespeare's sister to be born".