At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China

Edward Wong, a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, has written a hybrid book that combines family history, a wider examination of China through the ages, snippets of reportage, and other sections that read more like a travelogue. It is an unusual approach, and the reader is left somewhat unsatisfied across each of the distinct areas. It feels like a snapshot into several themes rather than a book that had been written with a clear reason and purpose.

The closest thing to a center of gravity of the book is a personal one. Wong was born of Chinese parents who’d fled China and he was raised in the USA as what he describes as an “outsider.” His father joined the Peoples Liberation Army in the 1950s and was sent to the “edge of empire” to Xinjiang to indoctrinate Kazakhs in Communism. However, his commitment to service and country was undermined by reasons unclear but likely having family in the British protectorate of Hong Kong and in the US, meaning that his career progression was stalled eventually leading him to move to America.

Wong writes that “it was almost a cliché within immigrant Chinese families, the way this journey was talked about among American-born children as a mission, a pilgrimage, a way to learn about their roots.”

The mainstay of the book is Wong’s own journey, although it seems unfair to call it a cliché, to walk in the shadow of his father. He describes feeling “an innate connection to the country” and by the end of his time spend living and reporting from China he realizes that “I had become the surrogate for the life they (his parents) had never lived once they came to the United States.”

Interspersed throughout a book that moves across time and space chapter by chapter, are sections looking at the wider history of China, from the Qing Empire to the rule of President Xi during Covid times. Wong writes of Han-Uyghur violence and the rise of mass internment policies and heavy-handed policing. Yet it is very anecdote heavy and absent as true analysis of “the policies of assimilation” that he references but does not explain in detail.

The hardest part of the book to grasp is his relationship with his father who plays such a central part in the story. Many chapters are told from his father’s perspective, yet Wong admits that his recall of events seven decades later may not be the most reliable. The reader struggles to fully understand the relationship between father and son despite the heavy narrative premise. In parts it almost seems as if Wong is writing about a deceased relative: “maybe I would be able to find out more about his mission and his life.” In others it seems that his father objected to the premise of what Wong was trying to do: “I felt like I was a phantom shadowing him through the decades,” he writes.

Toward the book’s end Wong explains that the work was based on the hope that “I could both better understand my family and peer into the heart of a civilization.” The word “peer” does justice to a book that looks under the surface at China and its people but doesn’t dive deeply into its society, history, and politics.