Swimming to Freedom: My Escape from China and the Cultural Revolution by Wong, Kent

Swimming to Freedom is a deeply personal, heart-wrenching memoir of Kent Wong's upbringing in Communist China during the Cultural Revolution and his tenacious flight to freedom against all odds. When Kent Wong was a young boy, his father, a patriotic Chinese official in the customs office in Hong Kong, joined an insurrection at work and returned with the family to the newly established People's Republic of China. Hailed as heroes, they settled in the southern city of Canton. But Mao's China was dangerous and unstable, with landlords executed en masse and millions dying of starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Swimming to Freedom is a memoir of a childhood amid revolutionary times, where boyish adventures and school days mixed with dire poverty and political persecution, and a moving story of an inextinguishable yearning to be free. Mao's Hundred Flower Campaign ensnared Wong's father. A decade later the Cultural Revolution closed schools, plunged the country into chaos, and scatte