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 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. 

Wong's new book, At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China, tells the story of a family and a nation that spans decades of momentous change and gives profound insight into a new authoritarian age transforming the world. Join us on June 27, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. for a conversation with Edward Wong about his book. He will be in conversation with Asia Society Vice President and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations Orville Schell.

This event is presented by the China Books Review.

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times who covers foreign policy from Washington. In more than 24 years at The Times, he has reported from New York, Baghdad, Beijing and Washington. As Beijing bureau chief, he managed The Times’ largest overseas operation. He has spent 13 years abroad and filed dispatches from dozens of countries, including North Korea, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Indonesia. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and done fellowships at the Belfer Center of Harvard Kennedy School and at the Wilson Center in Washington. He has taught international reporting as 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. Edward received a Livingston Award for his coverage of the Iraq War and was on a team from the Times’ Baghdad Bureau that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He has two awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia for coverage of China. He was on the Times team that received an award for best documentary project from Pictures of the Year International for a series on global climate change migrants. 

Orville Schell (moderator) is Vice President and Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, and a former dean of the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes.