Her mother pushed a pinewood washboard against her belly trying to abort Jing Li. At two months old, Jing was left with her resentful peasant grandmother, who had a pair of three-inch bound feet, and had once thrown her own newborn daughter headfirst into the urine pot to drown because she wanted a boy. Running free, playing alone in the wilderness of her remote, impoverished village in Shanxi Province, Northern China's pine forest mountains,...