When Wong was a boy his father, a 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. This is his memoir of a childhood amid revolutionary times, where boyish adventures and school days mixed with dire poverty and political persecution. Mao’s China was dangerous and unstable; the Cultural Revolution closed schools, plunged the country into chaos, and scattered Wong and his sisters to disparate villages where they struggled to eke out a bare existence. As the son of a "capitalist rightist" he had no future in China. He became one of an estimated half million "Freedom Swimmers" who swam across miles of open water to Hong Kong, risking their lives for a better future. -- Adapted from book jacket.