Risking it all to escape from Mao Zedong’s chaotic China

China was in chaos.

For a decade, Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution deliberately smashed society to bits. People were sent away for brutal re-education. Others simply disappeared. The country was destroying itself, and 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 those years drove desperate people to try anything – including swimming the six miles to Hong Kong.

It’s a lesson in degradation and determination. Yet it’s also an adventure story of forged documents, homemade rafts and sneaky smugglers.

Wong wants readers to know, it’s not his tale alone.

“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 a brutal civil war. Wong’s father worked for the government of the current, right-wing leader, Chiang Kai-Shek.

But time was running out.

“China was a mess,” Wong writes. “There was blood everywhere. 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.”

Chiang had already sent many of his officials to safety in Hong Kong, which was still a British colony. He soon established a new government-in-exile in Taiwan. But Wong’s father had grown disgusted with Chiang’s administration, which he saw as corrupt.

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. And his family began to wonder why they had given up their modern apartment in Hong Kong for two shabby rooms full of cockroaches.

The Wongs adapted. Then 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.

“He will carry a black wok for life,” Wong’s aunt announced afterward. Not only was his reputation ruined, but now his entire family was at risk.

Still, there were other catastrophes ahead, as years of government mismanagement resulted in widespread food shortages. The government later called this time, from 1959 through 1961 the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” “When no one bought that, this was changed to ‘Three Years of Difficulty,” Wong writes.

Those living through it, however, knew it as the Great Famine. Tens of millions died horribly. “Peasants starved to death in their own villages,” Wong writes. “Cannibalism took place.”

Those who survived had more hardships ahead.

In 1966, Mao announced the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It was time, he declared, to root out the “bourgeoisie.” Fanatical followers, known as the Red Guards, filled the streets, carrying signs promising to “Safeguard Chairman Mao With Our Fresh Red Blood!”

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.”

Still, people persisted. They secretly listened to Voice of America broadcasts on shortwave radio. They quietly passed around handwritten copies of banned novels. “The Count of Monte Cristo” was Wong’s favorite.

Finally, in 1968, Mao announced it was now time for re-education. Students were ordered to leave school and go work on farms. After two years of hard labor — 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. First, you had to forge travel documents. And, you needed supplies: a map, a compass, and a raft or at least an inflatable pillow. Then you had to cross the mountains, getting as close to Hong Kong as possible.

Finally, the plan involved swimming six miles to freedom.

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

“Like three helium balloons ascending to greet the arriving sun, we had been punctured and deflated, dropping to the earth, again, into the endless darkness,” he writes.

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.

Brandishing a rifle, they ordered Wong aboard and back to the mainland. 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.

Once again, Wong set out at night. Once again, the best laid plans fell apart. His friends were discovered and arrested. Then the militia spotted Wong. He ran for the boat as gunshots pierced the air.

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.

It was 1973, but Wong’s journey wasn’t over yet.

First, he had to apply for and obtain refugee status so he could leave for America. Then he had to make 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.

“For us, America has become our new home, our only home where we have rooted our family trees,” he writes. “But we still love Cantonese food more than American food, still care about our parents, and still drive our children to excel, often excessively…

“So much has changed. Yet much remains the same.”