Join Professor Mark Danner in conversation with New York Times diplomatic correspondent Edward Wong ’98 about his new book “At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China.”

From Penguin Random House:

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.

Reviews

“A sprawling, complex morality tale, sweeping us along.” —The Wall Street Journal

“[A]n absorbing new memoir. . . . [Wong] explores the country through a triple prism of history, geography and ancestry. . . . 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.’”
—The Economist

“A journalist merges family history with his own experience in Beijing to provide a fascinating insight into Chinese life and politics. . . . Wong skilfully weaves his father’s and his uncle’s stories into an account of his own experiences in China, in a way that is deeply satisfying. At the Edge of Empire is valuable both on a political and a personal level, and opens up the complexities of Chinese politics and Chinese life in a way that general readers will find fascinating.”
—The Guardian

“This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad sense of the patterns of Chinese history, reflected in the lives of a father and son, and from his ability to toggle effortlessly between the epic and the intimate.” —Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic

“[A] fascinating, ambitiously textured narrative. . . . Wong capably interweaves intimate details with broader truths. A well-written, multilayered work of poignant familial memories and personal reflection.”
—Kirkus Reviews (STARRED review)

“[A] resonant and moving debut. . . . 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.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“Edward Wong has masterfully merged the story of his father’s life in Hong Kong, China, and the US with all that he himself has seen and heard as a foreign correspondent in Beijing. He has created a seamless and engaging hybrid narrative that reminds us it’s people who write history.”
—Orville Schell, former Berkeley Journalism dean and author of more than a dozen books on China, including Discos and Democracy and Mandate of Heaven, and director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society

One of Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024.

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