A China Story: Growing Up in Mao's Cultural Revolution

Ying Qian's A China Story: Growing Up in Mao's Cultural Revolution is a page-turner that I could not put down.

-Ellen LaFleche, North Street Book Prize Judge

In her award-winning memoir, Ying Qian gives a first-hand account of Mao's deadly Cultural Revolution and shares her emotional journey of uncovering the truth of the murder of her father, a renowned nuclear weapons expert, by the Chinese military during that period.

On a summer day in 2010, Ying Qian returns to Beijing from America to visit her family and receives information on how her father was killed during the Cultural Revolution 40 years earlier. The revelation forces her to walk down memory lane to the darkest period in recent Chinese history and compels her to search for information surrounding her father's death. Through the process, she discovers truths that were there all along.

A China Story received the Bronze Award for the Memoir and Biography category in the 2026 Feathered Quill Book Awards competition, the Category Winner Award for the History and Culture category in the 2025 Memoir Prize for Books competition, and the Honorable Mention Award for the Creative Nonfiction category in the 2020 North Street Book Prize competition (Advance Reader Copy). The book was also a quarterfinalist in the memoir and autobiography category of the 2019 BookLife Prize competition (manuscript) and received a 5-star review from Readers' Favorite Book Reviews and Contest.