A Memoir of Misfortune

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

Suhas given us new insight into the human condition by virtue of the melancholy voyage he was forced to take. --The New York Times

"Achingly beautiful. . . . A record of intense soul-searching, of a reevaluation of the self's role in the family, and of the impossibility of understanding and mastering one's (mis)fortune. Su Xiaokang writes with candor, feeling, and intelligence." --Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting

Filled to the brim with bitter rapture and auspicious musings about the varieties of love, stages of life and tactics for braving misfortune. These pages simmer with eloquent vitality. --The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

"Su Xiaokang reminds us all of the agonizing consequences exile can have: loss of purpose, loss of language, loss of country, loss of familiar audience. But faced with the greatest potential loss of all, his wife's death, Su comes back from the edge to create an astonishing work of love and compassion, one that reaffirms the triumph of life." --Jonathan Spence, Yale University
Translated from the Chinese by Zhu Hong

Author Bio

Su Xiaokang was born in 1949 in Chinas 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.