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.