Two memoirs at opposite poles

A Beijing Story

By Jan Wong

Houghton Mifflin. 336 pp. $25

nolead ends nolead begins The Sisters Antipodes
nolead ends nolead begins By Jane Alison

Houghton Mifflin. 288 pp. $23

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Reviewed by Helen Epstein

Going to Beijing for the first time? You might want to pick up Jan Wong's

A Comrade Lost and Found

, a snappy travelogue packaged as a memoir.

Wong is a journalist and third-generation Canadian, the granddaughter of a "coolie" who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In 1972, disgusted with post-Kent State America and "in love with socialism," she became one of only two Western students at Beijing University.

During her year there, a Chinese student named Yin had the bad judgment to ask Wong how she might get to study in the United States. The then-20-year-old "Montreal Maoist," as Wong calls herself, dutifully informed a professor of Yin's question. Yin was expelled from the university; no one knew what happened to her after that. Wong returned to Montreal, graduated from McGill University, and returned to Beijing in the '80s and '90s to work for the New York Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Wong wondered about Yin from time to time, fantasizing that she was suffering somewhere in rural China or, alternatively, had managed to get out and was living happily in Las Vegas. But she didn't take action until 2006, when she was 53. With her husband and two teenage sons in tow, Wong set out "to find Yin, apologize and try to make amends."

This is a potentially fascinating story. Fifty years after Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's rise and fall, Americans are still debating the ethics and consequences of "naming names." Cultures on every continent are struggling to address that legacy and reconcile betrayers and those betrayed under a long list of political regimes.

What happens to individual and collective memory in the aftermath of such psychic trauma? How do today's Chinese look back on Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution? And how does Wong make sense of her own story - that, although she was "haunted" by "snitching" on Yin as a college student, she didn't feel compelled to investigate her fate, despite repeated stays in Beijing as a reporter, until she was past 50?

These are just some of the questions that Wong does not answer in her slick, entertaining, and relentlessly flippant guide to Beijing, filled with thumbnail sketches of old comrades now nouveaux riches, their career trajectories, cars, residences, and new neighborhoods. She has four weeks to find Yin among them: Will she or won't she? And what will happen when she does?

I won't spoil the ending - just let you know that, though some of the stories Wong tells are funny and some are appalling, her writing is so breezy that it's hard to care about any of the characters we meet. Beijing and its people, in Wong's rendition, become a sitcom. We never get beneath the spanking-new surface of things.

Jane Alison's The Sisters Antipodes, on the other hand, is so deeply felt and profoundly moving a memoir that one puts it down feeling emotionally bruised.

Alison's writing is so spare and powerful that rather than summarize her story, I quote her opening paragraph: "In 1965, when I was four, my parents met another couple, got along well, and within a few months traded partners. This was in Canberra, where my father, an Australian diplomat, had just brought us home from a posting in Washington. The other couple were American but diplomats too. . . . Both men were in their early thirties, tall, slim and ambitious; both the women were smart and good-looking. Both couples had two little girls the same ages, and the younger girls shared a birthday and almost the same name. This was my counterpart, Jenny, and me."

The realignment is complete within nine months. Then the American father is posted back to the United States and Jane is 4 when her Australian mother bundles up her daughters and follows him to Washington, D.C. Seven years of letter-writing pass before the Australian father is posted to New York, seven years during which the four "girls" neither see their biological fathers nor hear their voices. "I do not know why," Alison writes. "Because it was expensive and no one made such calls in those days, or no one thought of it, or maybe because a live line between the two households seemed dangerous, fire."

As the fathers are posted around the globe, taking their new families with them, Alison describes their circumstances and details the continuing, devastating consequences of loss - loss of father, name, country, accent, culture - especially for the two younger antipodes, as she calls herself and Jenny. Once placed in a bathtub together, foot-to-foot, they grow into fierce rivals on opposite sides of the globe. She links their cutthroat competitiveness and shaky sense of self-worth to "the fact that we'd each been replaced."

This is a fascinating story from an author gifted, brave, and resilient enough to pursue its literary and psychological depths. Jane Allison writes that she tried for years to turn her family story into a novel but repeatedly failed.

Instead, she has written a groundbreaking, stellar memoir.