Ma Yan's China: untouched by a booming economy, millions of Chinese peasants can barely afford to eat or go to school. One teen's diary tells their story.

The long road that brought Ma Yan to a book fair in Paris this past March began three years ago in a remote village in Ningxia (Ning-sh-YAH), one of China's poorest regions.

At the time, she was distraught because her parents could not afford to keep her in school. Today, at 16, she is the author of Ma Yan's Diary: The Daily Life of a Chinese Schoolgirl, which has been published in 15 languages.

At a boarding school in Yuwang, 15 miles from her home, Ma Yah and her classmates were required to keep journals. Her account of her struggle against hunger and poverty--missing a few pages that her father used to roll cigarettes--as passed along to a French journalist based in Beijing, who helped bring her story to the world.

Ma Yan's diary shows what life is like for China's rural population, an estimated 750 million people, mostly peasants, who are not yet benefiting from the economic boom in China's major cities.

Thanks to its publication, Ma Yan's family is no longer poor, and 250 other Ningxia youngsters, mostly girls, now have scholarships to continue studying.

What's next for Ma Yan? "I'd like to be a journalist so I, too, can help poor children," she says. Excerpts from her diary follow.

"All three of us went to the market. Mother bought us some food for dinner, but nothing for herself, so we had to eat it alone. I could clearly see that she was hungry and thirsty.

If she's depriving herself like this, it's so that we can live and work. I have to do well and take the competitive university entrance exam, then find work so that Mother can eat until, she's completely full and leads a better life".

--Sept. 13, 2000

"No more money for school this year. I'm back in the house and I till the land in order to pay for my brothers' schooling. When I think of the happy times at school, I can almost imagine myself there. How I want to study! But my family can't afford it. I want to go to school, Mother. I don't want to work at home. How wonderful it would be if I could stay at school forever!"

--May 2, 2001

"This afternoon, when I want to start writing in my diary, I can't find my pen.... You're probably going to start laughing. 'A pen. What a minor thing to get so distressed about!' If only you knew the trouble I had to take to get that pen. I saved up my pocket money for two weeks.... My mother had given me some money with which to buy bread. For days, I had only eaten yellow rice. I preferred going hungry and economizing so that I could buy the pen.... [it] gave me a sense of power."

--July 30, 2001

"These days, everywhere you look, there's only yellow earth. If you walk up to the high plateau to look down at the village, all you can see is yellow barrenness, a dried-out terrain. It's not even a landscape. To tell the truth, there's nothing to see.

Nor does the economy produce anything.... The situation has to change. In the future, our village will be green. Its inhabitants will have acquired knowledge and will know how to build solid houses. If I work hard at school, when I grow up, I'll be able to devote my energy and skills to improving the cruel life of the villagers."

--Nov. 22, 2001

Alan Riding is a foreign correspondent for The Times based in Paris.