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

“In telling this personal story about family memory, exile and return, the book also takes in the breadth of [China’s] evolution during the 20th century.” —The Washington Post

“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

“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

One of Foreign Policy’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024

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.

"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 Times from 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."--Provided by publisher.