He remembered the persimmons hanging low from the trees in the autumn light. They dangled from the branches above his head, plump and smooth and the color of burnt copper. He sat in the open back of the truck alongside the other soldiers. Trees lined the road, and the air was crisp and dry. They pointed at the persimmons, marveled at them. How sweet it would be to bite into one. Dust trailed the truck as it continued down the dirt road. They were heading into a vast and sere land, a place of ancient paths and towns, many now long gone. A frontier. The warriors who came before them, also gone. Seven decades later, he remembered the persimmons, golden in the rays of the fading day.

When I was in my twenties, Father showed me a small black-and-white photograph of himself that I had never seen before. He placed it in the palm of my hand as we sat together in the living room of my childhood home outside Washington, DC. It had been taken in China in 1953. His eyes glimmered, and his skin had none of the lines of age. He wore a plain military uniform and a cap. I ran a finger over a darkened spot in the center of the cap. A shadow there. Father said that’s where the red star had been, the symbol of the People’s Liberation Army of China. After he mailed the photo to his father in the British colony of Hong Kong, his father rubbed out the star, fearful of what the authorities might do if they saw it. Father got the photo back after he left China and reunited with his parents in Hong Kong. He brought it with him when he moved to America, this keepsake of the revolution.

I am the son of two empires. I was born in Washington and grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb along the Potomac River, when there was talk of the Cold War and containing Communism and preventing nuclear Armageddon. Those were the years of Nixon to Reagan, an arc when global politics was dominated by a titanic struggle between agents of two ideologies, or rather two systems of power. The Berlin Wall fell in my final year of high school. Radio deejays played “Wind of Change” by the Scorpions. The Soviet Union dissolved, and America became unrivaled in the world. We talked about these events in my household and in classrooms and schoolyards, and I read about them in newspapers, which seemed to me, with their correspondents in Washington, New York, and far-flung world capitals, to be chroniclers of the American century.

There was a surviving Communist power in the world, one that was more obscure to most Americans but better known to me. China, the motherland. My parents were village children in the south as the nation tried to repel Japanese invaders in the Second World War. But there was no peace after the surrender of Japan. A civil war between the ruling Nationalists and the rebellious Communists reignited. Mao Zedong and his Red Army won, forcing the Nationalists to retreat to the island of Taiwan. In 1950, Father was in the first class from his high school to graduate into a China governed by the Communist Party.

The zeal for realizing the revolution, for building up the People’s Republic, burned in the hearts of citizens. Father went north to Beijing for university. On October 1, 1950, the one-year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, Father marched with soldiers, workers, and students in front of Mao, who stood waving to them atop Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace. They believed Mao would lead China in reclaiming its past glory and standing up to American imperialism. That fall, the American military advanced against North Korean and Chinese forces on the Korean peninsula. The Communist Party exhorted all citizens to aid in the war effort, warning that the American army could march into northeast China and onward to Beijing.

Father enlisted in the People’s Liberation Army. He spent most of the next decade on the frontiers, as his military career took surprising turns. He went to corners of the country that the vast majority of Chinese have never laid eyes on. Places of beauty and of strife. He trained for the airforce in Manchuria, near the Korean front. Then he spent years in Xinjiang, the northwest region that is home to Turkic-speaking Muslims, the Uyghurs and Kazakhs, a land that rulers in Beijing have sought for centuries to control. Father saw the extent of the Chinese empire, and he witnessed Mao’s efforts to resurrect its power.

I knew nothing about those parts of Father’s life when I was growing up. I sometimes watched him put on a red blazer and black pants to go to work at Sampan Cafe, a Chinese restaurant. For decades, this was the only uniform that I associated with him, until he showed me the portrait of himself that he had sent to his father while he was in the army.

He is not someone who revealed much. What sharing there was didn’t come naturally. On nights he came home early, he didn’t sit on the edge of my bed regaling me with stories, ones about his life or even made-up ones. He had only Sundays off. But he disappeared every other Sunday to do bookkeeping at a takeout restaurant, Chin’s Kitchen, that he co-owned. Other Sundays, we watched American football — the Washington Redskins — and he took the family for drives in a blue Plymouth Duster. We looked at my math textbooks, algebra or geometry or calculus. He knew numbers. I would learn later that he had studied engineering after the army.

At moments, I got a glimpse behind the curtain. One winter afternoon, Father and Mother were driving me and my sister through Washington to visit our grandmother in Chinatown, and the two of them were speaking loudly in Cantonese in the front about something. I stared out the window at the boarded-up rowhouses. Mother turned to us. Communism did something to your father, she said. He’s set in his ways. He won’t change.

My parents said their farewells to China and Hong Kong at different points, under different circumstances. But they never left entirely. No Chinese immigrant I know has ever done that.

I sensed pain there, a wound that I didn’t want to press on. At least not yet. They each had their histories from long before I was born. I later learned that Mother was wrong, that Father had made a change, long ago. At a precarious moment, he had made a decision to take his life in a different direction. A choice about ideas and dreams, agency and freedom, nation and home.

My parents said their farewells to China and Hong Kong at different points, under different circumstances. But they never left entirely. No Chinese immigrant I know has ever done that. Another memory: A summer night sitting together in our basement watching the women’s volleyball final of the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, the United States versus China. My parents shouted with glee when the Chinese team won the gold, jumping around almost as wildly as star spiker “Iron Hammer” Lang Ping and her red-clad teammates. “We’re cheering for China because it’s our homeland,” Mother told me.

I started learning things decades later, by having long conversations with them and other family members and by looking through old letters and photographs. It began before I entered graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley and continued throughout my studies there. I was pursuing parallel inquiries: one into the history, society, and politics of China, through coursework and conversations with professors, and the other into my family history. I spent time with my parents and my uncles and aunts around Washington and San Francisco, and in particular with Father’s older brother, Sam, who had grown up with him in Hong Kong and Guangdong Province and had come to America in 1948 to attend university. As I was starting to unearth the past, I made trips every year to China and Hong Kong. That stopped when I went to New York to work for The New York Times.

I was living in downtown Manhattan when terrorists flew commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. That violence and America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq confronted me with questions about the nature and reach of empire, about the forces that oppose it and the ones it seeks to suppress. On the day I turned 31, I left New York to cover the Iraq War. 

Five years later, I moved to Beijing as a correspondent. It was then that the country and my parents’ lives began opening up to me in a way I had never imagined. I now had the time to piece together past events that had remained in the shadows, and to see the connections among people and places and eras. Beyond that, it was exhilarating starting a life in a nation in the throes of transformation, with its cities of gleaming office towers and artists’ enclaves and striving workers coming in by the trainload from villages, looking to be part of the colossal story of change that the first decades of the 21st century promised to deliver.

For someone just arriving, it seemed like China’s leaders and its people were working every muscle of the country to build the future. It represented the opposite of the abyss I had seen in Iraq. Years of reporting there on the disintegration of a country had left me pessimistic about the nature of humanity and the wielding of power. Two Iraqi colleagues, Khalid and Fakher, were among the many killed in violence that would ultimately result in the loss of about 300,000 lives. The destruction and carnage had been more shocking because they were the direct consequence of American actions. They had been inflicted by a nation — my nation — that just a decade earlier had been handed a historic opportunity to use its position as an unchallenged superpower to help lead the world into a better place. Instead, American leaders took their country down the path of imperial bloodletting in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Those in the American political class stayed in denial for years about what they had done.

When I stepped off an airplane in a gleaming new Beijing airport terminal on a warm night in April 2008, I thought that if any power represented an alternative vision of the future, surely it was China. Back then, the path of progress its leaders had taken since the catastrophes under Mao and the violent suppression of protests in 1989 seemed to signal an embrace of more enlightened ideas.

---

But as with so many things in which one invests a measure of blind hope, the reality turned out to be different, as it had for Father. By the time I moved out of China at the end of 2016, this had become obvious to me: the story of China under Communist Party rule is one of a nation straining with all its might to become an empire that surpasses that of America, and that envisions itself as the inheritor of the rule and the realm of the Qing dynasty. The party is doing so in an era when only ashes remain of all the other imperial powers of that age, and when the moral failings of empire have been well documented, from the British to the Ottomans to the Russians. And yet, Xi Jinping, China’s ruler, has equated the dream of empire with his leadership in deeds and words, in his talk of the great rejuvenation of China.

Many Chinese citizens share the dream. It is rooted in a common telling of millennia of history that begins with an ancient Yellow River civilization and continues through conquests by the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, and reaches a zenith with the commercial, artistic, and intellectual ferment of the Tang and Song dynasties. It is a myth of the motherland of an ethnic Han people whose culture and civilization hold dominion, so much so that even invaders with great martial prowess became Chinese. This was the history I learned when I began studying China. Then I came across historians and writers with different perspectives. They told narratives centered on the idea that China’s history, even up to the last century, was defined by cycles of alternating rule between people from China proper and nomadic or semi-settled people of the Asian steppe and forestlands, ones whose societies were as rich and complex and powerful as those of the Chinese. Several dynasties were established by those peoples from Inner Asia, notably the Mongols in the 13th century and the Manchus in the 17th century. It was the Manchus, the founders of the Qing dynasty, who carried out conquests to form a vast empire with China at its heart at a time when similar imperial powers were rising across the Eurasian continent.

By 1800, the Qing court in Beijing ruled one-third of the world’s population and 10 percent of its landmass. The empire stretched from the Central Asian steppe to the Tibetan Himalaya to Chinese coastal towns. Then the leaders of the Qing surrendered control of parts of their empire to European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan after defeats in the Opium Wars and other conflicts. Decades later, they were overthrown by rebels who wrapped themselves in the banner of ethnic Han nationalism, and who claimed they would restore their state as one of the world’s great powers. These Han elite helped spread the powerful idea of the modern Chinese nation as a continuation of the sprawling and multiethnic Qing empire. The new rulers, the Nationalists, adopted that project and struggled to fulfill it until they were overthrown by Mao, who made the same promises to reinvigorate the nation.

---

In the 21st century, the world is discovering that the Communist Party is on the verge of realizing that dream. It comes decades after the country imploded under Mao’s poisonous policies. Today, the party holds on to much of the territory that the emperors of the high Qing brought together through war and diplomacy. And the party’s dominion could grow. The Chinese military is expanding its presence across disputed borderlands, from the South China Sea to the Himalayas. The party seeks to bring the democratic island of Taiwan under its rule.

The nation’s economic might allows the party to reach into realms that the emperors could never have imagined. From the internet to artificial intelligence, from higher education to Hollywood, China is reshaping the world, and we are only beginning to grasp the significance of that. Much of the world now treats China as one of the preeminent powers. During the Qing, envoys from distant lands paid homage at the court, and they are doing so again. I have stood in Tiananmen Square during a military parade, as Father did in 1950, and watched as leaders from across the globe — Brazil and Russia and South Korea — clapped in the stands next to Xi. Together they gazed down on tanks, missiles, and rows of marching troops.

Many Chinese citizens are naturally proud of the restoration of their nation, pride that is magnified by the party’s nurturing of the fires of patriotism and nationalism. The state has told them in classrooms and films and news articles of a century of China’s victimhood at the hands of Western powers. But there is something too that undergirds their attitude: a profound belief in their own innocence. It is the same innocence that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr says infuses the national character of America. While evil can be done to these societies, they can do no evil. This sense of innocence is what allows an empire to choose to walk paths of darkness in the name of doing good, with the unwavering support of its citizens.

There is a clarity to the nature of each imperium in the way it exercises power far from the center. I saw this with America in Iraq, and I saw this with China.

What I experienced in nearly a decade living in Beijing, the imperial metropole, is only a small part of how I came to see China in this light. Just as important is what I have witnessed along the frontiers, those areas that include Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia — the same contested spaces that were important to Father during his time in China. There is a clarity to the nature of each imperium in the way it exercises power far from the center. I saw this with America in Iraq, and I saw this with China.

Father not only went to the frontier as a soldier, but was born into it. His family came from Guangdong Province, considered part of the barbarian kingdoms of Yue by Chinese rulers of ancient times. In my reporting across southern China, I saw how different those regions were from the north, and it helped me understand better the diversity of the land as much as anything else I witnessed. Those areas of Cantonese speakers that my parents’ families called home were liminal spaces, transition zones between China and the outside world. The people from there bound China to America long before the current era of globalized trade. I have ancestors and relatives who looked outward and made the leap, to Southeast Asia, to Brazil, to Canada. They negotiated passages, temporary homes, permanent homes. Was it any wonder, then, that this southern rim was the origin point for rebels and intellectuals who questioned the power of the imperial courts in the north, and who led movements to topple them?

That is how Father came to Beijing and the northern lands: as an outsider, as a subject from the distant reaches of the empire.

I came too as an outsider, as what some would call an agent of another empire whose mission was to document this one. We made separate journeys, but his came to inform mine. I write here of them. Or rather, I write of how we have each remembered moments in those journeys.

He is 91 now, and he tells me some things will never fade from his mind.

A night when he slept in an alpine meadow under the stars, a saddle as his pillow.

A day when he watched fellow soldiers with rifles try to hunt deer on a snowy desert plain.

Years ago, as we sat together after dinner, he told me he still remembered the words to “The East Is Red,” the anthem that most Chinese citizens learned by heart in the 1960s. Father cleared his throat and sang the words in Mandarin with no hesitation, even though it had been decades since he had last done this.

After he finished, he sat back on the couch and gave me a faint smile. At that moment, he was again the young man in a tan uniform with a red star on his cap riding a horse through the high valleys of the northwest, there at the edge of empire.

From AT THE EDGE OF EMPIRE by Edward Wong, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Edward Wong.

---