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A Family's Reckoning with China
by Edward Wong
An epic story of modern China that weaves a riveting family memoir with vital reporting by the New York Times diplomatic correspondent
The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke of his native land or his years in the People's Liberation Army under Mao. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II and the Communist revolution, when he fell under the spell of Mao's promise of a powerful China. His astonishing journey as a soldier took him from Manchuria during the Korean War to Xinjiang on the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with the Communist Party, he made plans for a desperate escape to Hong Kong.
When Edward Wong became the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, he investigated his father's mysterious past while assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China. He met the citizens driving the nation's astounding economic boom and global expansion—and grappling with the vortex of nationalistic rule under Xi Jinping, the most powerful leader since Mao. Following in his father's footsteps, he witnessed ethnic struggles in Xinjiang and Tibet and pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And he had an insider's view of the world's two superpowers meeting at a perilous crossroads.
Wong tells a moving chronicle of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change and gives profound insight into a new authoritarian age transforming the world. A groundbreaking book, At the Edge of Empire is the essential work for understanding China today.
"Edward Wong's exquisite family chronicle achieves a level of humane illumination that only one of America's finest reporters on China could deliver. In tracing his father's journey—from Hong Kong to Xinjiang to America—Wong gives us a profound story of modern China itself. Anyone who once was absorbed by the power of Wild Swans will savor this meditation on memory, history, and belonging." —Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition, winner of the National Book Award
"At the Edge of Empire is a splendid journey through 80 years of Chinese history told from the viewpoint of a nonagenarian Chinese American and his son, the former New York Times bureau chief in Beijing. Edward Wong is about as knowledgeable a guide to China as a reader could ever hope to find, and the interweaving of the highly personal accounts bring it all vividly to life in a way no other book on China has for me." —Barbara Demick, author of Eat the Buddha and Nothing to Envy
"It is rare for a book to combine past and present, personal history and the history of a vast nation with such thoughtfulness, grace, and panache. I've known Edward Wong as one of our most masterful correspondents, but here, aided by his own and his family's history, he is able to take all of his knowledge and wisdom and experience to the next level." —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends
This information about At the Edge of Empire was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times. In twenty-five years at the Times, he has reported from scores of countries and served as a war correspondent in Iraq and as the Beijing bureau chief. He is the winner of the Livingston Award for international reporting and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. He has done fellowships at the Wilson Center and the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Wong speaks on global issues to television and radio outlets, including CBS, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, and BBC. He lives with his family in Washington, DC.
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