A review by clairealex
At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China by Edward Wong

5.0

This book provided me a pleasant introduction to Chinese history. It was history told through a father's and a son's experiences in China, with frequent dips into ancient history of various areas. The arrangement was more geographic than chronological, sometimes statting with the father's experience, sometimes the son's, then switching. The moving between places and generations was well signaled and kept me from feeling bogged down by the older background information. We don't get the whole, of course, but histories relevant mostly to the father's experiences. We get the history of Hong Kong because it was the father's boyhood home and the handover from Britain to China because the son was there for it. Because the father spent many years in Xinjiang we learn about Uyghurs. Because he enlisted in the Chinese Liberation Army we get a bit about Korean war.The father was very committed to China and the possibilities of the Chinese revolution of 1949, and that provided a participant perspective on the first 5-year plan and the Korean war. Because of the two generations' experiencing the various places at different times, we also see changes over time.