A Heart for Freedom

Though only 45, Chai Ling relates her life thus far. After an impoverished youth in a Chinese village, she earned a scholarship to university in Beijing and went on to graduate studies. She writes of struggling through several abortions, her mother's nervous breakdown, and her rise in the pro-democracy movement to becoming commander of the Defend Tiananmen Square Headquarters, a monumental responsibility: "We had wanted a dialogue with the government and now the government was going to kill us along with all the unarmed people on the Square." She became a fugitive and escaped from China in 1990, eventually attending Princeton's program for post-Tiananmen students. She married an American and raised her daughters as Christians. After becoming a wealthy investment banker, she founded All Girls Allowed, which assists girls and women in China. Given the book's publisher, readers may be surprised that religious discussion comes late in the book and is not extensive. Most moving is the author's honesty about her abortions and her attempts to help others in similar circumstances. For the strength to reveal these details, she credits her husband and religion.