At the Edge of Empire

June 24, 2024
The upheavals that drove China’s diaspora are revisited in this resonant and moving debut. New York Times journalist Wong recaps his father Yook Kearn’s experiences of China’s 20th-century tumults, beginning with the 1942 Japanese invasion that forced him from Hong Kong to his family’s ancestral village of Hap Wo in Guangdong province, where he weathered the war. The 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese civil war imbued him with revolutionary ardor, and he joined the military. But his bourgeois family background got him expelled from the air force and posted to China’s northwestern frontier, where he observed the tension between ethnic Han settlers and the region’s Muslim Uyghurs. In 1957 Yook Kearn entered college to become an aircraft engineer, but again his suspect class background undermined his ambitions. After enduring semistarvation during the famine of 1958–1962, he left for Hong Kong and eventually America. Wong intersperses Yook Kearn’s travails with his own reporting on China’s 21st-century economic boom, his visits to a depopulated Hap Wo, and the government’s imprisonment of a million Uyghurs in internment camps. Wong’s narrative of his father’s life conveys a grinding oppression and thwarted opportunities. It’s also 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.