The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, D.C., 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 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.
Wong’s new book, At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China (2024, Viking), tells the story of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change, and gives insight into its new authoritarian age. We hosted Edward Wong at Asia Society in New York, for a conversation with Orville Schellabout his book. Watch the video here:
Speakers
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire (2024), a reported family memoir on modern China. He has reported for the Times for 25 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. Wong was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. He was awarded the Livingston Prize for his war correspondence from Iraq, and was on a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war.
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and co-publisher of the China Books Review. He is a former Professor and Dean at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of over ten books about China. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs and other publications, and has traveled widely in China since the 1970s.
The idea of anti-imperialism was strong back then, and my father was deeply enmeshed in that.
Edward Wong
This video of this talk was also published at Asia Society. ∎