Review: 'Swimming to Freedom,' by Kent Wong

China was in chaos.

For a decade, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution smashed society to bits. People were sent away for brutal re-education. Others simply disappeared. For many, only one hope remained: Getting out.

"Swimming to Freedom: My Escape From China and the Cultural Revolution" is Kent Wong's memoir of those times and how desperate people tried anything — including swimming the 6 miles to Hong Kong.

"I googled the estimated number of freedom swimmers to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution," he writes. "According to a source in Hong Kong, it was 500,000. For sure, China will never disclose a more accurate number, even if it could."

And the number who died trying remains unknown.

Wong was born in 1948, one year before Mao's Communist Party came to power. The country was in civil war. Wong's father worked for the government of Chiang Kai-shek.

"China was a mess," Wong writes. "The violence had spread from the battlefields to every liberated village. Mao's army was shooting landlords, taking their land away and redistributing it to poor peasants."

In 1951, the Wong family abandoned Hong Kong to return to the new, now-Communist China. There, Wong's father was hailed as a hero for rejecting Chiang. He took a job in Mao's government, and the Wongs were given an apartment.

The honeymoon was brief. Wong's father soon discovered that communists could be just as corrupt as capitalists. His family began to wonder why they had given up their modern apartment in Hong Kong for two shabby rooms infested with cockroaches.

In 1956, Mao did something bold. He asked for the people's opinion on how the government was doing. "Let a hundred flowers bloom," Mao announced. "Let a hundred schools of thought contend."

People, including Wong's father, spoke up. They were almost as quickly silenced.

Now that he knew who his critics were, Mao moved to purge them. The "Hundred Flowers Campaign" was soon replaced by the "Anti-Rightist Campaign." As a former official in the old government, Wong's father was doubly suspect. He spent years in a labor camp.

Those living through it, however, knew it as the Great Famine. Tens of millions died.

In 1966, Mao announced the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was time, he declared, to root out the "bourgeoisie." They went after the intellectuals first. Professors were beaten with sticks or forced to crawl and bark like dogs. Scholars, Wong reports, were made "to kneel on the still-burning ashes of books."

Finally, in 1968, Mao announced it was time for re-education. Students were ordered to leave school and go work on farms. After two years of driving water buffalo and harvesting sugar cane, Wong knew he had to flee.

"You must go!" his mother urged. "We can't all drown in a bitter sea. Some of us must break the curse."

There was an escape route, although it was treacherous. It required forged travel documents, a map, a compass, and a raft. Then he had to cross the mountains, getting as close to Hong Kong as possible.

Wong's first attempt ended just before he reached the sea, as soldiers stepped out of the darkness to arrest him, his sister and a friend.

The trio was arrested and sent to a detention center. After more than a month of near-starvation rations and brutal interrogations, they were released. Forget this nonsense, authorities told them. Go back to the country, and get back to work.

Instead, Wong went back to planning his escape.

His sister made it on her second try. Wong didn't. Holding on to a cheap, inflatable pillow, he jumped into the water and began swimming. Hong Kong was literally within sight when a boat overtook him. It was Chinese fishermen moonlighting as bounty hunters. This time, he was locked up for three months.

Released, Wong went right back to planning. This time he joined forces with two other men, who hired a fisherman with a small boat.

Wong jumped onboard and hid under a tarp. The fisherman pushed off, evading searchlights all the way.

Finally, they reached the Hong Kong coast. There, a van took Wong into the city, a place of "countless sparkling skyscrapers" shining under a clear blue sky.

"My heart cried, 'Hong Kong! I'm back!' " Wong writes.

Eventually, Wong made his way to America and started a new life. He worked as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant in Seattle. He took classes at a community college, then transferred to the University of Washington.

In 1983, 10 years after he fled China, Wong graduated from Harvard Medical School. By the following year, the rest of his family managed to join him here.