The rootlessness that haunts the children of immigrants

As a child, Edward Wong had no idea that his father had been in the People’s Liberation Army. The only uniform the young Wong associated with his parent was the red blazer of Sampan Café, the Chinese take-away his father worked at in Virginia. China was seldom spoken of, with Wong getting only snatches and hints of what seemed like a painful family history – one the adults were keen to brush over. But, like many second-generation immigrants, Wong gravitated towards his father’s homeland in a bid to better understand the man. His parents’ silence only compounded the enigma.

The quest took him to study China at graduate school and, after five years reporting in Iraq for the New York Times, to become a correspondent in Beijing in 2008. In his eight years reporting from China and the time since, he has had a front-row press-pack seat to watch the rise of Xi Jinping, the CCP’s tightening grip on the country’s restive borderlands in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong, and the souring of relations between the ‘two empires’ of China and the US.