This haunting, illuminating memoir tells the remarkable true story of a young Chinese man\'s coming-of-age during the tumultuous early years of the People\'s Republic of China In this exceptional personal memoir, Charles N.
Lyrical and luminous, intense and extraordinary, The Bitter Sea is an unforgettable tale of one young man and his country..
Over the course of twenty-one tumultuous years, he went from Li Na, the dutiful Chinese son yearning for a stern, manipulative father\'s love, to Charles, an independent Chinese American seeking no one\'s approval but his own.
He experienced the heady materialism of the decadent foreign white ghosts in British Hong Kong and starved within the harsh confines of a Communist reform school.
He watched from his aunt\'s Shanghai apartment as the Communist army seized the city in 1948.
He saw his father jailed for treason and his family\'s fortunes dashed when Chiang Kai-shek\'s Nationalists came to power in 1945.
Born near the beginning of World War II, Li Na was the youngest son of a wealthy Chinese government official.
Li brings into focus the growth pains of a nation undergoing torturous rebirth and offers an intimate understanding of the intricate, subtle, and yet all-powerful traditions that bind the Chinese family.
This haunting, illuminating memoir tells the remarkable true story of a young Chinese man\'s coming-of-age during the tumultuous early years of the People\'s Republic of China In this exceptional personal memoir, Charles N
