A moving memoir probes the contradictions of modern China
Edward Wong narrates his father’s journey from servant of the party to escapee
At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China. By Edward Wong. Viking; 464 pages; $32. Profile; £25
Many of the too many books published about China focus on the economic, political and military details of the country’s rise. In an absorbing new memoir, Edward Wong takes a different tack. He explores the country through a triple prism of history, geography and ancestry.
Mr Wong’s father, Yook Kearn, and his uncle, Sam, were born in Hong Kong before the second world war, and spent part of their childhood in southern China. After Sam left for graduate school in America in 1948, Yook Kearn moved to Beijing in 1950 to serve the revolution. Party leaders were in the process of putting back together the empire of the Qing dynasty, which had collapsed in 1911. Yook Kearn was posted as a soldier to Xinjiang, in the north-west.
The book chronicles the shattering of his idealism as Mao Zedong purged the heroes of the revolution, and starvation set in during the Great Leap Forward. For all the party leaders’ language of transformation, they were, he discovered, just “heirs to the imperium”. Yook Kearn fled first to Hong Kong, then to America in 1962. The author was born there a decade later.
When Mr Wong moved to China in 2008 as a correspondent for the New York Times, he dug into his family history. He visited his father’s village and felt the pull of Confucian family ties that bind within China and beyond. He also sensed how they hinder the individualism that has allowed his relatives to flourish in the West.
He travelled to “the fraying seams of the empire” to which his father was posted. In Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, he saw how different cultural, religious and colonial histories create resentment towards Beijing, bringing crackdowns in their wake. “Beijing defined itself through its command of the frontiers,” Mr Wong writes.
The stories are beautifully told and expose the contradictions of modern China. The empire of the title is ever-present; so is the catharsis of the book’s subtitle: “A family’s reckoning with China”. Yook Kearn and Sam want their homeland to succeed, and they can see it becoming wealthy and strong. But always, in the back of their minds, is the struggle with the forces that caused them to leave in the first place. Emigration provided space for that reckoning. For those unable to leave, it is harder. The empire usually wins.
For more on the latest books, films, TV shows, albums and controversies, sign up to Plot Twist, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter
