An Excerpt from the Foreword by Anne Thurston

Born American will warm the heart of every American who reads it. It is the story of Sasha Gong’s long journey home.

Sasha was born not in the United States but in China, and she arrived there during a time of great economic and political distress. Sasha knew early that something was terribly wrong, though she was encouraged in the beginning to believe that she must be part of the problem.

In 1968, in the midst of the Cultural Revolution while many of her relatives were in jail, Sasha got a copy of Alexander Solzhenisyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was a short book. She finished it in two hours, then read it again - and again. Then the thunderbolt hit. If Stalin was responsible for the misery of the Soviet Union, then Mao was responsible for what was happening in China. Sasha’s already shaky political faith was shattered. The lonely, empty, powerless twelve-year old girl with no control over her life was transformed into a political dissident.

Nearly a decade passed before Sasha found the group of brilliant, daring, kindred political spirits with whom she was finally free to express her most precious political thoughts. Her new political friends brought a sense community, comradeship and belonging that she had never felt before. It also brought them all a stint in jail.

Released from confinement in 1978, Sasha was not fully exonerated until 1979. It was then that she began studying for the college entrance exams. Some 200,000 young people in Guangdong took the exam that year. Sasha ranked first. She won a place at Peking University, China’s most prestigious institution of higher learning.

Sometime during her studies, Sasha got the idea of coming to the United States. She had learned of the marvels of this country as a small child, on the lap of her beloved grandmother, the only truly kind person in her early life. China and the U.S. had recently re-established diplomatic relations. For the first time since 1949, Americans began studying and teaching in China, and Chinese students and scholars were leaving, in even larger numbers, to study in the United States.

Sasha aimed high. She applied to Harvard. She arrived in Cambridge in 1987 with a full scholarship. It did not take her long to realize that she had come home.

Sasha says being a citizen of the United States has allowed her to become more Chinese. The more American she becomes, the prouder she is of her Chinese heritage, the more she is able to return to its traditional Confucian values. Here in the United States, she says, she can be both American and Chinese. And as everyone who knows her can surely attest, the rebel in her remains, more daring than devout.

Welcome home, Sasha Gong.