Despite wall-to-wall media coverage of her case, Tang knows she has won only half a victory, and she fears the party is not finished with her yet.
"I am still worried about the future, about upcoming problems and about how to win compensation for my daughter," she said. "I am not making any plans.
"I planned for the future once before. I wanted to open a flower shop. But then I got thrown in the labour camp and that destroyed that plan."
Today her daughter is preparing for the Chinese equivalent of A-levels and her husband works in another province as an unskilled labourer. But Tang is not working and cannot sleep.
"I try not to think about the things that happened and all the details but I still have nightmares and flashbacks; sometimes I think the police are coming back to arrest me."
Her troubles began in October, 2006, when her daughter was snatched by seven men just before her 11th birthday. She is still barely able to discuss what happened.
As the days lengthened into months, it became clear the police had little interest. Eventually, after putting pictures online, she received a tip-off from an anonymous man who spotted her daughter in a local brothel. "Two of my male relations posed as customers and visited the brothel but could not find her," she said. "My family wanted me to give up, but I could not.
"I climbed to the top of a building overlooking the brothel and kept watch, but did not see her.
"Then I posed as a rubbish collector, passing back and forth in front of the door and keeping a look out. Finally one day I saw the back of a girl who looked like her.
"My male relations came back and all three of us went in and we grabbed her. I tried calling the local police but the officer said he was busy. It was only after three or four days of calling that they opened the case."
After six years, two of the men involved were executed, four received life sentences and one was jailed for 15 years.
But for Tang, the verdict was too lenient. She knelt for hours outside the local government in Changsha and then took her case to Beijing.
Eventually, she became enough of a thorn in the side of local officials for them to take action. She was sentenced to 18 months in a labour camp for "upsetting social stability".
"When they arrested me they did not say anything. It was only on the second day, when they showed me a piece of paper that I understood they were sending me to a labour camp.
"I was driven three to four hours to the Bai Ma Long camp. My husband had to chase the car on a motorbike to collect a purse of money for my daughter's school fees from me.
"At the camp were mostly drug addicts, petty thieves and other protesters," she said. "I told my husband to find me a lawyer and not to tell my daughter what had happened."
A huge public outcry got Tang released in a week. Immediately, she sued the Government. Amazingly, she won. She is one of a tiny number of Chinese to have their complaint resolved. According to a study in 2004 by Yu Jianrong, a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, only three out of 2000 petitions to Beijing were listened to - and only then because an official took an interest.
Now Tang hopes she can translate her momentum into compensation for her daughter, who was infected with herpes in the brothel.
"I want my daughter to be better but all the doctors we have seen said the disease is basically incurable. It flares up every few months and affects the mood in our house and her schoolwork."
