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EUAN KERR: Ask Wang Ping why she thinks she's so prolific and she uses two terms-- workhorse and first daughter. Growing up in China, the sweeping changes of the Cultural Revolution reached her community when she was seven or eight. The authorities exiled her father and imprisoned her mother, leaving Wang as the head of the family looking after two younger sisters.

WANG PING: There was Civil War and there was no food. And I had to walk like five or seven miles every morning to try to find food for the family with bullets flying around me. And so that's how I knew what life was at that time. That's the only kind of life I had.

EUAN KERR: The schools closed, too. Wang was desperate to learn. The government banned all books except the works of Chairman Mao, but she began reading the books passed around illegally. She learned English through lessons on the radio.

Despite having only a second grade formal education, when she was of college age, she talked her way into Beijing University to study English literature. She then won a place to do a master's at Long Island University in New York. She never intended to write fiction until the day she walked into the wrong class and found herself listening to a lecture delivered by a wild-looking man.

WANG PING: He was just wearing two shirts, and both were misbuttoned, and just crazy long hair-- graying, flying hair.

EUAN KERR: It turned out it was a creative writing class. She completed the first assignment and did so well she decided to do the second.

WANG PING: And the professor just wrote, you should start writing a novel. And this is like enlightenment to me. It's like lightning hit me. I said, I could write. And it suddenly occurred to me I have so many stories inside me. It just all poured out.

EUAN KERR: Soon after she was asked to translate for Allen Ginsberg as he led a group of Chinese poets around the US. That's when Wang Ping realized she could write poetry, too. The stories and the poems have been pouring out ever since.

Wang's new collection, The Last Communist Virgin, weaves stories of China during the Cultural Revolution with those of Chinese immigrants struggling to find their place in America. They're deceptively simple stories of ordinary people dealing with tough times. The tales are sensual and sometimes sad but Wang's characters have backbones of steel.

She also writes about the Three Gorges area, the place where her father was exiled, now flooded as part of a huge and controversial hydroelectric dam project. After 20 years of living in the US, she says she's beginning to think in English, yet she's very conscious of how her native language shapes what she writes. She is a visual writer, but she feels her English vocabulary is limited, so she carefully selects every word she uses.

WANG PING: I have many, many dictionaries. And I have two desks in my office, one front and one back. The back is all dictionaries, different kinds. And I constantly turn, and grab a dictionary, and look-- Chinese-English, English-Chinese, English-English, Chinese-Chinese-- just to look into the roots of every word I use.

EUAN KERR: Tonight, Wang Ping reads from her new short story collection, The Last Communist Virgin at The Loft in Minneapolis. Then it will be on to more projects. She points out that under the Chinese Zodiac, she is a rooster, and under the Western, she's a Leo.

WANG PING: So these two combinations made me, give me kind of like pioneer spirit. So I like to explore, and extremely curious, and I have a huge appetite. [CHUCKLES] And wish I had like 72 hours a day so for me to do all kinds of things I want.

EUAN KERR: As a writer, Wang says the things she wants to do is simply be honest. I'm Euan Kerr, Minnesota Public Radio News.