At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China

A dual narrative that tells the story of modern China by braiding an intergenerational family memoir with first-person contemporary reporting by the former New York Times Beijing bureau chief

The son of two Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong, Edward Wong grew up around Washington, DC; his father, a former soldier in the People’s Liberation Army under Mao, worked in Chinese restaurants and rarely spoke about his native land. Yook Kearn Wong came of age during the Japanese occupation in World War II, then fell under the spell of Mao’s promise of a new, equitable China, spending harsh years with the Chinese army in northern China and in Xinjiang, along the Central Asian frontier. In 1962, disillusioned with Mao’s brutal policies, he fled to Hong Kong and eventually went to America.


When Edward Wong moved to Beijing as a correspondent for The New York Times in 2008, it gave him a rare opportunity to investigate his father’s mysterious past, while also assessing for himself the dream of a resurgent China that his father once held, then abandoned. He had a front-row seat as the world’s two superpowers met at a crossroads. And the years of his tenure saw China’s economic boom and geopolitical expansion, as well as the darker currents of nationalism and ethnic repression and the autocratic rise of President Xi Jinping.


As a son considering his father’s life and his own time in China, Wong provides an epic, moving chronicle of a family and a nation, one that spans more than 80 years and gives insight into a new authoritarian age in China that is transforming the world. It is the essential work for understanding the sweep and direction of modern China.