About the talk:

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 the Communist leader Mao Zedong. But when Wong became Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times, he set out on a journey to learn more about his father's past -- as well as his own. In this talk, Wong will interweave the riveting story of his family's history with a chronicle of the Chinese nation, following in his father's footsteps to the farthest reaches of Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the talk.

About the speaker:

Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China, a new book of memoir and reportage on modern China and the Chinese American diaspora. He has reported for the Times for 25 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. Wong was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and UC Berkeley. He was awarded the Livingston Prize for his reporting on the Iraq War and was on a team that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war. Wong graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He has joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from UC Berkeley. He received an honorary doctorate this year from Middlebury Language Schools.