Jan's Fans (9)

Jan Wong

Author profile

born

Montreal, Canada

gender

female

genre

Biographies & Memoirs

About this author

edit data

Jan Wong was the much-acclaimed Beijing correspondent for The Globe and Mail from 1988 to 1994. She is a graduate of McGill University, Beijing University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the recipient of a (US) George Polk Award, the New England Women’s Press Association Newswoman of the Year Award, the (Canadian) National Newspaper Award and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Silver Medal, among other honours for her reporting. Wong has also written for The New York Times, The Gazette in Montreal, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal.

Her first book, Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now, was named one of Time magazine’s top ten books of 1996 and remains banned in China. It has been translat...more Jan Wong was the much-acclaimed Beijing correspondent for The Globe and Mail from 1988 to 1994. She is a graduate of McGill University, Beijing University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She is the recipient of a (US) George Polk Award, the New England Women’s Press Association Newswoman of the Year Award, the (Canadian) National Newspaper Award and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Silver Medal, among other honours for her reporting. Wong has also written for The New York Times, The Gazette in Montreal, The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal.

Her first book, Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now, was named one of Time magazine’s top ten books of 1996 and remains banned in China. It has been translated into Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and Japanese, and optioned for a feature film.

Jan Wong is a third-generation Canadian, born and raised in Montreal. She first went to China in 1972 at the height of the Cultural Revolution as one of only two Westerners permitted to enrol at Beijing University. There, she renounced rock music, wielded a pneumatic drill at a factory and hauled pig manure in the paddy fields. She also met and married the only American draft dodger from the Vietnam War in China. During those six years in China, she learned fluent Mandarin and earned a degree in Chinese history.

From 1988 to 1994, Jan Wong returned as China correspondent for The Globe and Mail. In reporting on the tumultuous new era of capitalist reforms under Deng Xiaoping, she reacquainted herself with old friends and enemies from her radical past. In 1989, she dodged bullets in Tiananmen Square, fought off a kidnapping attempt and caught the Chinese police red-handed driving her stolen Toyota as a squad car. (They gave it back.)

She returned to China in 1999 to make a documentary and to research her second book, Jan Wong’s China: Reports from a Not-So-Foreign Correspondent. It tells the story of China’s headlong rush to capitalism and offers fresh insight into a country that is forever changing.

Jan Wong lives with her husband and two sons in Toronto where she is a reporter at The Globe and Mail. The best of her weekly celebrity-interview columns, “Lunch With,” which ran for five years, have been published in a book of the same name.

[From Random House's Jan Wong Author Spotlight](less)

combine editions
Books by Jan Wong

Average rating: 3.97 · 1239 ratings · 181 reviews · 10 distinct works

	Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now 408 avg rating — 915 ratings — published 1996 — 11 editions	My rating:
	Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found in the New Forbidden City 359 avg rating — 172 ratings — published 2007 — 5 editions	My rating:
	Jan Wong's China 389 avg rating — 74 ratings — 2 editions	My rating:
	Lunch With 373 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 2000 — 3 editions	My rating:
	A Comrade Lost and Found: A Beijing Story 337 avg rating — 27 ratings — published 2010 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Chinese Whispers: Searching For Forgiveness In Beijing 343 avg rating — 21 ratings — 2 editions	My rating:
	Out of the Blue 500 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2012 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now 400 avg rating — 1 rating — published 2011	My rating:
	Jan Wong's China: Reports From A Not-So-Foreign Correspondent 000 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2011	My rating:
	Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found 000 avg rating — 0 ratings — published 2010	My rating:

More books by Jan Wong…

Upcoming Events

No scheduled events. Add an event.

Quotes by Jan Wong

“As the past disappears, I keep getting lost.”
― Jan Wong

tags: a-comrade-lost-and-found

3 people liked it

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
Bookish: 17August11	8	28	19 août 21:30
CBC Books: Book Title Jumble	469	127	03 fév. 23:44
Around the World ...: China	11	75	05 mar. 15:43
Around the World ...: Free and Cheap E-Books	158	212	46 minutes ago

More…

Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Jan to Goodreads.