In conversation with Jiayang Fan at Morristown & Morris Township Library, 12:10 pm to 1:00 pm
About the author
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China, a new book of memoir and reportage on modern China and the Chinese diaspora. He 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. Edward was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. He is on the advisory board of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He was a recent fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Edward 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.
Edward graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree with honors in English literature. He has joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from U.C. Berkeley. He was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Alexandria, Virginia.
MFOB featured book: At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China
The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, Edward Wong grew up among family secrets. His father toiled in 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 planned 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 nearly a century 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.
