" 'Have you ever seen a coupon for cloth?' I asked a woman who was born in the 1990s," said Jing Yidan, a former star news host on television, during the launch of her latest book Na Nian, Na Xin (That Year, That Letter) in Beijing on June 29.

In the 1960s and '70s, times of scarcity in China, people needed to use welfare coupons to buy limitedly supplies of daily necessities such as meat, oil, rice, coal, vegetables and cloth.

"She told me she'd never seen such a coupon," Jing, 63, says. "I want to tell those who have only seen clothes what cloth coupons are."

To write the book, Jing sorted out information describing life in China from the 1950s up to recent years from more than 1,700 letters kept by different generations of her family in Harbin, Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.

With the book, she wants to keep alive the memories of the older generations and the reality of the past for not only her daughter and grandchildren but also future readers.