Independently Published BREAKAWAY 30 YEARS RIVER EAST AND WEST: A MEMOIR

Gary Huang recounts the unlikely true story of how a bullied, self-doubting son of a politically disgraced Chinese family broke away from his home country and built a new life and identity in the USA. From Wushan to Washington, Gary relates how he spent sixty years split between the world's preeminent Eastern and Western societies—as a rice-growing peasant and a graduate student, as a People’s Liberation Army factory worker and a white-collar professional, as a son and a father—and the series of breakaways that took him from being an indoctrinated victim of communist persecution to a parent and a citizen in an open society.BREAKAWAY offers a panoramic view of three generations of the Huang family, a drop of water shining and flowing in the turbulent river of modern Chinese and American history. In the rural hinterlands of Wushan, Dazhou, Gary's father, was an underground communist revolutionary with rebellion in his bloodline who was condemned in Mao Zedong's anti-intellectual purges in the 1950s, when Gary and his siblings were compelled to hate their own father and worship Mao. Decades later, Gary chose to make a leap to join an unfamiliar and radically different society, where he would struggle to understand his perception of American racial prejudices and political correctness, all while dealing with successes and failures at work and trying to handle the puzzle of raising two Chinese-American sons.Combining an intimate look at one family's history with a unique immigrant's perspective on the vast evolution of modern China, BREAKAWAY is a nuanced and candid exploration of one man's lifelong quest to establish a renewed self-identity in a new world while maintaining his deep affection for his native land and people.