BOOKS: TEEN MAOIST

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Blame it on the reflexive rebellion of the early '70s or on her loving parents' exasperating prosperity (they owned several Chinese restaurants in Montreal). For whatever reasons, including that she was "pretty damn spoiled," 19-year-old Jan Wong, until then a dutiful daughter, reconstituted herself as a true-believing Maoist.

"Don't go," said her father, who had visited China. That settled it. In the summer of 1972, as she recounts in a wry, wondering memoir, Red China Blues (Anchor Books; 405 pages; $23.95), she flew to Beijing to join the workers' paradise. A valued propaganda asset, she was enrolled at Beijing University, along with minders assigned to ensure her political purity. To the horror of her fellow students, she clamored to experience the nobility of manual labor, and was eventually allowed to serve at a Beijing tool factory, pretending to make lathes. Her naivete proved to be almost, but not quite, invincible. She learned fluent Chinese by shouting ritual denunciations ("Down with counterrevolutionary element Yuan...") but eventually began to question the rigid ideological slogans.

Her language skill, anonymous Chinese face and bumptious adventuring helped her catch on in Beijing as a reporter for the New York Times; years later, after working for papers in North America, she returned to China as a correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail. She was still in love with China but not with the gangsters who ran it, and her account of the Tiananmen Square rebellion and massacre is not just good reporting; it is eloquent, hard-earned history. High levels of both foolishness and good sense, in that order, are necessary for a really fine youthful memoir; on both counts Jan Wong's is a classic.

--By John Skow