Forthcoming in Fall 2009
Sasha Gong, author of BORN AMERICAN
In BORN AMERICAN: A CHINESE WOMAN’S DREAM OF LIBERTY, we learn that soon after arriving in the United States in 1987, Sasha Gong felt that something inside of her had suddenly clicked. Everything – her heart, her soul, her mind and her character – felt at home. She discovered that in all of the important ways, she had been born an American; it had just taken her 31 years to get there. She began to look back at her dramatic journey. Born in China in 1956, Sasha was given a Russian boy’s name by her father, who was expecting a son.
Her determination guided her through very dark days in China. Massive political persecution was rampant, universities were closed and young people were “sent down” to the countryside to do manual labor. Sasha worked in the fields, and was then brought back to the city and assigned to a small candy factory when she reached 16. Throughout, she never stopped her pursuit of freedom through learning and thinking.
Defiance was thus hard-wired in her character, and that character drove her destiny. Sasha sought out a group of like-minded friends, who formed an underground dissident group. Through their writings, they urged people to consider democracy and rule of law as an alternative to communist dictatorship. For that, they were all thrown in jail, including Sasha.
She spent her 21st birthday in prison. For almost a year, she was subjected to intense interrogation and public humiliation. The painful experience only hardened her, and prepared her for the challenges of her future life journey.
Sasha was given back her life just before her 23rd birthday. She sat for the national university entrance exam, and despite never having finished elementary school, achieved the highest score among 200,000 competitors in her province. She was admitted to Peking University, China’s top postsecondary school. Eight years and two degrees later, she was on her way to America with a Harvard fellowship.
The American dream often has an accent. Sasha came to America to escape political persecution, to achieve personal freedom and to pursue happiness. And, for the first time in her life, she felt very much at home.
“China’s rise” is on everyone’s lips these days, but the human factors behind this remarkable phenomenon remains something of a mystery. Who are the Chinese who are leading their country in its quantum leap from communism to capitalism? What kind of people are the movers and shakers behind China’s so-called economic miracle? This book depicts China’s baby-boomer generation through the author’s personal anecdotes of the 1960s and 1970s: how they grew up, what they believed, what they feared and what they desired. While a cursory examination would conclude that nothing about the China of 1967 suggested the China of 2007, the stories show that the seeds of the great transformation were actually planted during those years. The author explores how the political system penetrated and perverted family relationships and did much damage to individuals and social groups.
A Harvard-educated scholar who was denied even a complete elementary school education in China for political reasons, the author has very moving stories to tell. She speaks frankly about political persecution based on family relationships, usually taboo subjects in China. She focuses on the psychological damage done by a totalitarian system, and describes how such a system re-shaped family and morality in China.
What makes this book different from other Cultural Revolution memoirs is that the author wrote the stories from the perspective of becoming an American. Embracing American culture, and speaking as one of a handful of scholars who can travel back and forth intellectually between Eastern and Western culture, the author provides American readers with comprehensible narratives about a mysterious, yet not-so-remote, society.
Sasha Gong is a scholar, writer, journalist and a lifelong political activist. She was born in the People’s Republic of China in 1956. In the 1970s, she worked as a mechanic in a factory for seven years. In 1979, she was admitted to Peking University and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history. In 1988, she began graduate studies at Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1995. Since then, she has taught sociology at UCLA and George Washington University, worked as director of the Cantonese Service at Radio Free Asia, and served as senior program officer at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO. She has published a few books and numerous articles in the Chinese-language press. She is one of the most-read magazine column writers in China. Her blog, which discusses American politics, culture and economics, attracted 640,000 visits in its first eight months.
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