`A Photograph of My Mother as a Young Woman’, Dinu Li, Sheffield, 13 January 2008

`The photograph shows her with my second oldest brother. It’s a photograph of them in China. I did not use the photograph in my book [The Mother of All Journeys, 2007]. Something about it was almost too precious to share in a book.’

`It’s a photograph of her in her twenties; very young. She is squatting on a path with my brother. The photograph is literally outside the main gate of her village. And the path leads you out of the village, towards the city’.