A Memoir of Misfortune

Su Xiaokang had faced calamity before: in 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, he became the object of a government manhunt and was forced to flee China, leaving behind his wife and young son. Eventually his family was allowed to join him in exile in the United States, and he believed the worst was behind him. Then a terrible automobile accident left his wife, Fu Li, unable to move or speak.

In this remarkably honest account, Su, who blamed himself for his family's disaster, writes wrenchingly of his inner torment and despair. He describes the pain of living in exile, his desperate search for a miracle cure for Fu Li, and his bemusement at his teenage son's increasing Americanization. Above all, Su's moving memoir invites us along on a deeply personal odyssey, as a man who had once been at the center of an international political drama dedicates himself to the far more demanding task of remaking an emotional world for his wife and son.

Su Xiaokang was born in 1949 in China's Zhejiang province. An investigative reporter who made a name for himself during the 1980s for tackling many sensitive subjects, he is best known as co-author of a six-part television series, River Elegy (1988), which caused widespread debate about political reform and China's future. It was this brief period of intellectual effervescence that ultimately led to the Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989. Named number five on the government's wanted list, Su Xiaokang was smuggled to Hong Kong and then Paris before settling in 1990 in Princeton, New Jersey.



ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Zhu Hong, formerly of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is currently Visiting Professor at Boston University.

About Xiaokang Su