Sasha Gong tells of her dramatic journey in a collection of stories. Born in the People's Republic of China in 1956, Sasha was raised by her grandma, who quietly told her about the legend of the "Gold Mountain," a name Cantonese immigrants had given to San Francisco. It became her dreamland.

Sasha came to America to escape political persecution, to achieve personal freedom and to pursue happiness. And, for the first time in her life, she felt very much at home.

Soon after arriving in the United States in 1987, Sasha felt that something inside of her had suddenly clicked. Everything – her heart, her soul, her mind and her character – felt at home. She discovered that in all of the important ways, she had been born an American; it had just taken her 31 years to get there.  And she began to look back at her dramatic journey.






What makes this book different from other Cultural Revolution memoirs is that the author wrote the stories from the perspective of becoming an American. Embracing American culture, and speaking as one of a handful of scholars who can travel back and forth intellectually between Eastern and Western culture, the author provides American readers with comprehensible narratives about a mysterious, yet not-so-remote, society.



A Harvard-educated scholar who was denied even a complete elementary school education in China for political reasons, the author has very moving stories to tell.

She speaks frankly about political persecution based on family relationships, usually taboo subjects in China. She focuses on the psychological damage done by a totalitarian system, and describes how such a system re-shaped family and morality in China.