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Join a book night, cosponsored by the OPC and the Asian American Journalists Association, to discuss At the Edge of Empire – 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 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, who was the OPC Foundation’s David R. Schweisberg Scholarship winner in 1998, 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.

Tracy Jan, a deputy health and science editor at The Washington Post, will talk with Wong about his book.

Buy the book here.

Wong has reported for The New York Times for 25 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. Wong was a recent fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. He was awarded the Livingston Prize for his reporting on the Iraq War and was on a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war. Wong graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He has joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from U.C. Berkeley. Wong received an honorary doctorate this year from Middlebury Language Schools.