Starred review from June 1, 2024
A New York Times diplomatic correspondent reflects on returning to his family's homeland and unraveling their complicated past. Wong, whose father immigrated from China in 1967, grew up in Washington, D.C., knowing little about his family's lives in China and how his father made the decision to come to America. Stationed in Beijing for the Timesfrom 2008 to 2016, the author, an expert journalist, learned more about his father's convoluted life journey, which is the primary focus of this fascinating, ambitiously textured narrative. His father's parents were Cantonese merchants who "moved effortlessly between Hong Kong, with all its trappings of imperial Britain, and the subtropical countryside of neighboring Guangdong Province in China." The author's father endured Japanese occupation and saw his older brother, Sam, depart to America on the eve of the communist takeover. He ventured north to Beijing Agricultural University and embraced the ideals of the new communist leadership. Promised a career at the air force academy in Harbin as the Korean War broke out, he was rerouted to the remote region of Xinjiang, where he spent "six years in hard postings...in places most Chinese citizens feared going." With the Great Leap Forward, widespread famine emerged, and he began to question the party's leadership and to plot his journey to join Sam in America. First, he went to Hong Kong, "a significant step away from the bleak future that awaited...if he stayed under the Communist system." The author chronicles his other visits to China--e.g., his 2023 trip to Beijing accompanying Secretary of State Antony Blinken--and he closes with an account of his time in Hong Kong in 2019, as violent protests were breaking out just before the stringent antidemocratic National Security Law was passed. Throughout, Wong capably interweaves intimate details with broader truths. A well-written, multilayered work of poignant familial memories and personal reflection.
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June 24, 2024
The upheavals that drove China’s diaspora are revisited in this resonant and moving debut. New York Times journalist Wong recaps his father Yook Kearn’s experiences of China’s 20th-century tumults, beginning with the 1942 Japanese invasion that forced him from Hong Kong to his family’s ancestral village of Hap Wo in Guangdong province, where he weathered the war. The 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese civil war imbued him with revolutionary ardor, and he joined the military. But his bourgeois family background got him expelled from the air force and posted to China’s northwestern frontier, where he observed the tension between ethnic Han settlers and the region’s Muslim Uyghurs. In 1957 Yook Kearn entered college to become an aircraft engineer, but again his suspect class background undermined his ambitions. After enduring semistarvation during the famine of 1958–1962, he left for Hong Kong and eventually America. Wong intersperses Yook Kearn’s travails with his own reporting on China’s 21st-century economic boom, his visits to a depopulated Hap Wo, and the government’s imprisonment of a million Uyghurs in internment camps. Wong’s narrative of his father’s life conveys a grinding oppression and thwarted opportunities. It’s also an affecting elegy for the loss of tradition and familial solidarity wrought by immigration and breakneck change. This illuminates the human cost of China’s revolutionary century.