The history of Sino-Soviet relations serves as the context for this fascinating memoir of a woman born in Moscow in 1937 to parents who were Chinese revolutionaries. Her parents originally met in Harbin as teenagers, and then rediscovered each other in Moscow at the Stalin Communist University for the Toilers of the East (KUTV), as part of the Chinese delegation to the Comintern. Sin-Lin (Xin Ling, “New Decree,” a reference to the 1936 Soviet ban on abortion that ensured her birth) tells her tragic story from several different perspectives, juxtaposing her own memories of life as an orphan at the state-supported “International House” in Ivanovo with the memories of both her mother and father. The reader only learns much later of the circumstances that led to the very different personal histories of Sin-Lin's parents. Sin-Lin's mother, Lin Na, unbeknownst to her father, Din Ming, had collaborated with the NKVD before their romance in Moscow. Din Ming was lukewarm to a new NKVD overture concerning intelligence work in South-East Asia (posing as Chinese emigrants), and he was sent to a corrective labour camp a year later. Sin-Lin only met her mother, by then back in China, in 1950 as a 14-year-old, after arriving in China as part of a “Chinese Children's Delegation.” She struggled with the language and the unfamiliar surroundings and culture, and only learned her original Chinese name from her mother. “‘A Soviet person, sing a Russian song!’” exclaimed her new Chinese classmates (p. 22).

Sino-Soviet relations continued to shape the unfolding of this complicated family history, which included new marriages for both the mother and father. By the 1950s, Lin Na occupied important positions as a factory administrator, Party secretary and delegate to the National People's Congress; Din Ming was released from the Soviet penal system in 1946, and eventually rehabilitated and allowed to return to China in 1955. The mother preferred not to burden Sin-Lin with too many details of her father's unfortunate history: “The Soviet Union is a great socialist country,” Lin Na explained, “but even there mistakes are inevitable” (p. 62). Sin-Lin's experience was simultaneously marked by hardship and privilege, in common with other Chinese veterans of Interhouse, some of whom were the offspring of now important officials in the PRC. Their Russian-language skills and familiarity with the Soviet Union were highly valued in the 1950s, and many of them found rewarding positions in foreign affairs, translation, the press and education. Sin-Lin attended People's University (built with substantial Soviet support and collaboration) and was invited to join the Communist Party in 1956; she also was sent for “reeducation” to a village in Jiangxi Province after the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In the early 1960s she worked as a translator for the international liaison department of the Central Committee. Years later, in the wake of the further hardships brought by the Cultural Revolution (including the death of her mother in 1968), she translated works into Chinese that illustrated some of the deficiencies and weaknesses of the Soviet system (such as those of Roy Medvedev and Milovan Djilas).

Scholars from numerous fields as well as the general public will find much of interest in this engaging book. The last section includes translated excerpts of Chinese scholarship and Russian archival documents on Chinese revolutionaries in the Soviet Union, including material pertaining to Sin-Lin's parents (unfortunately all of this material appears without proper archival citations). The Soviet Union, central to Chinese political history since 1949, remains at the centre of her life story. The brutal Kang Sheng, she emphasizes, closely collaborated with the NKVD in the 1930s, and used the violence of the Cultural Revolution to silence people such as her mother who were well aware of this history of collaboration (p. 193). The author chooses not to engage with scholarship that might offer insight into some of the problems she explores, such as the Soviet camp system, deportations and the nationalities, or the history of the NKVD and its relationship to the Comintern and revolution in the East. Several episodes in Sin-Lin's personal history remain difficult to understand. By 1979 she was mysteriously close to power herself, and CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang apparently served as a patron. She also offers few details about her marriage to Huang Zhuang, who thrived in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, became the Chinese General Consul in Columbia and brought the author to Latin America in the 1980s. Perpetually a victim yet simultaneously well-connected, she emigrated to the United States and acquired citizenship. Translator Steven I. Levine has done a great service in bringing this complicated but intriguing memoir to the attention of an English-reading audience.