A Chinese-American Leaves Home in Search for Freedom, In Communist China

Val Wang was raised in a strict Chinese-American household in the suburbs--she got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe. She tells us why she moved to China in 1998, the country her parents fled before the Communist takeover in 1949. Her memoir Beijing Bastard: Into the Wilds of a Changing China, is about moving to China, living with relatives in Beijing, and discovering a city rebelling against its roots just as she was finding her own identity.