Wong, Jan

The author shares how she searched through Beijing for the classmate she betrayed during the Cultural Revolution three decades before, hoping to make amends.

In the early 1970's, at the height of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jan Wong traveled from her home in Canada to become one of two westerners at Beijing University. A starry-eyed Maoist at the time, Jan Wong turned in a fellow student, Yin Luoyi, for wanting to move to the United States. Immediately Yin disappeared. Thirty-three years later, Jan Wong traveled again to Beijing to try to find Yin and ease her troubled conscience. As she traces her way from one former comrade to the next, she unearths not only the fate of the woman she betrayed but a web that mirrors the strange and dramatic journey of contemporary China.

Memoirs of a Canadian journalist who spent time in China during the Maoist regime and was transformed from a devout communist into a supporter of the dissident protests of the 1990s.