In "A Comrade Lost and Found" she returns to that story. "We actually thought we were doing the right thing," Wong wrote.īut the incident, so matter-of-factly recounted in "Red China Blues" - and, more importantly, what its outcome had been for Yin - haunted Wong for 30 years. "We decided," Wong wrote, " Yin did need help" and "the Communist Party would save her from herself." So they "snitched," turning her in to the Foreign Students Office. Another student, Yin Luoyi, had confided to Wong and a Chinese-American classmate that she wanted to go to America, and asked their help. In her 1996 memoir, "Red China Blues," Wong described her experiences from those years as like "living inside a real-life propaganda movie."īuried in the memoir was an incident that had occurred at Beijing University. In China, by the early 1970s, the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were over, the Tiananmen protests and the military crackdown well in the future.Īnd for Jan Wong, a 19-year-old Canadian college student of Chinese descent, who had come on a summer's visa, had stayed on to study at Beijing University, and had joined student work teams at a machine tool factory and on a dust-blown farm, China was "radical-chic," and "Maoism was mesmerizing."
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