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As Edward Wong grew up in America, the only uniform he ever saw his father in was the one he wore to the restaurant he worked in.
There was little talk about his parents' early years in China and Hong Kong. It was only when Edward became the New York Times correspondent in Beijing that he began to dig more into his father's life before the US. He discovered that he had been a zealous young communist under Mao, and had served in the People's Liberation Army for a decade on China's remotest frontiers. Ultimately Edward Wong's father became disillusioned with the communist party and hatched a plan to escape, reaching the Washington DC area in 1967. Edward Wong's book is called At The Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China.
He is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times, has been a war correspondent in Iraq, and the Times' Beijing bureau chief. He will be appearing in-conversation with Anna Fifield at the Auckland Writers Festival 13 - 18 May.
