A Memoir of Misfortune

A compelling memoir—both gripping and deeply personal—by one of the leaders of the democracy movement in China, who managed to escape to America with his family only to find himself faced with a tragedy more terrifying than he had ever imagined. In the 1980s, Su Xiaokang, a young journalist, wrote the script for a six-part television series, River Elegy, which probed so deeply into the core of Chinese beliefs and values that it galvanized the entire country in an explosion of intellectual debate. Having survived the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, he now became the focus of a massive pursuit as one of the regime’s five most wanted “criminals,” and was smuggled out of China, leaving behind his wife, Fu Li, and their young son. After two long years and great international pressure, the family was finally reunited in Princeton, New Jersey. For a brief time, it seemed as if the worst was behind them. But on June 4, 1993—exactly four years after Tiananmen—while the family was being driven to Niagara Falls, the car they were in sped off the road. When Su Xiaokang regained consciousness, he discovered that Fu Li was in a coma, from which she would eventually emerge unable to speak or to control her limbs. Suddenly, the national hero who had accepted his place at the center of a political revolution was a husband and a father who had to remake an emotional world for his wife and son. Throughout his candid and extraordinarily moving memoir, we become party to this man’s innermost thoughts and feelings, his guilt and fear, his moral self-questioning, his bravery and strength, as he tells the story of his wife before and after the accident, and of how his sense of love, marriage, responsibility, and the true goals of life was profoundly and forever changed.

Biographies & Memoirs

Su, Xiaokang

Hong, Zhu

Community & Culture

KNOPF

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.

Leaders & Notable People

Vintage

Perhaps the most daring TV documentary series ever produced in mainland China, which directly affected the thinking of Chinese youth on the eve of the 1989 democracy movement. This richly-annotated translation of the original filmscript by Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang puts the series in its intellectual and artistic context and is suitable for use in classes on Chinese culture and contemporary China, with or without the videotape.

Deathsong of the River: A Reader's Guide to the Chinese TV Series "Heshang" (Cornell East Asia Series) (Cornell East Asia Series, 54)

Wang, Luxiang

Religion & Spirituality

Cornell East Asia Series

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Books by Su, Xiaokang