Meet Jing Li, a San Francisco local author of The Red Sandals: A Memoir (2022), which won The Montaigne Medal Finalist/Eric Hoffer Book Award (2023) for the “most thought provoking”, and for “Overcoming Adversity/Tragedy” as the Finalist/Indie Book Awards (2023-2024). Prior to her book, her short memoir stories were selected into half dozen Anthologies and won series of awards from California writing contests, including the Grand Prize from San Francisco Writers’ Conference (2017). She’s currently working on her next book, America through My Chinese Eyes/Counting My Blessings.

The Red Sandals: A Memoir is about Jing Li’s triumphant true grit surviving life journey in both China and America. It has captured readers’ hearts and minds. Her life began (1956) in northern China’s pine forest mountains, a born-unwanted peasant girl into the masses of illiteracy and famine. She didn’t know what a full stomach felt like until in her 20’s. How miraculous that, with her brain intact, she fought her way up to China’s scholastic top!

A lifelong passionate classroom teacher, Jing Li had taught ten years of English in Taiyuan city’s best college-prep high school before earning her master’s degree (Ed.) in America. However, her American dream didn’t come as rosy – twenty years of teaching high school Mandarin Chinese/ESL in SFUSD was as traumatic as her enduring five years alone separated from her 8-year-old daughter while trying to create a bright future for her family.

Please come meet Jing Li and find out how she defied all odds beating life’s curveballs to survive, thrive and achieve writing an award-winning book in English, her second language, with no ghost writer! Her resiliency is truly motivational and inspiring.

*The first twenty attendees will get a free copy of Jing Li’s memoir, The Red Sandals.