A Heart for Freedom

September 12, 2011
A key leader in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Ling has written a candid and compassionate memoir of her years at Beijing University, her rise to leadership in the student movement, her escape and eventual embrace of Christianity. A gifted writer with a passion for justice, she weaves a tantalizing web of childhood and young adult experiences to describe her misgivings about the Communist Party of China; her awakening, with other students, to the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.; and her growing sense of empowerment as a woman. What’s especially remarkable about her story is the lack of bitterness toward many in the Communist regime and especially Deng Xiaoping, China’s leader at the time. This book will be treasured not only by Western China watchers and evangelical Christians who have no doubt embraced Ling as their own, but by anyone interested in how protest movements arise, grow, and work though their internal conflicts. Hers is a tale of human dignity and the imperative to live a life of meaning.

October 1, 2011

Though only 45, Chai Ling relates her life thus far. After an impoverished youth in a Chinese village, she earned a scholarship to university in Beijing and went on to graduate studies. She writes of struggling through several abortions, her mother's nervous breakdown, and her rise in the pro-democracy movement to becoming commander of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, a monumental responsibility: "We had wanted a dialogue with the government and now the government was going to kill us along with all the unarmed people on the Square." She became a fugitive and escaped from China in 1990, eventually attending Princeton's program for post-Tiananmen students. She married an American and raised her daughters as Christians. After becoming a wealthy investment banker, she founded All Girls Allowed, which assists girls and women in China. Given the book's publisher, readers may be surprised that religious discussion comes late in the book and is not extensive. Most moving is the author's honesty about her abortions and her attempts to help others in similar circumstances. For the strength to reveal these details, she credits her husband and religion. VERDICT A beautiful and redemptive memoir for readers of Chinese history, personal memoir, or spiritual autobiography.--Susan G. Baird, formerly with Oak Lawn P.L., IL

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2011
Chai's memoir recounts the critical role she played as a student leader in the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. At the age of 17, gifted Chai was admitted to prestigious Beijing University. Chai's rise as a protest leader started humbly: she and her new husband, Feng, brought food and water to students mourning the death of revolutionary leader Hu Yaobang in April 1989, which set off the peaceful student protests against the oppressive government. Chai was eventually elected commander of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters group, and when the students were finally forced to flee the square during a devastating military attack, Chai wound up on the government's most-wanted list. She made it out of China to safety in America, but her marriage to the charismatic but unfaithful Feng did not survive. Chai found a new love in America, converted to Christianity, and discovered a new purpose: battling China's one-child policy. An exciting, blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the massacre at Tiananmen Square, Chai's memoir is an important piece of history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)