Cheng is simultaneously the memoir’s subject, narrator, and moral instrument. She is fifty-one when the raid occurs, sixty-five when she leaves China, seventy-two when the book is published. The narrator is the eldest of these — looking back from Washington at three decades of material. Her self-portrait is disciplined rather than heroic. She insists throughout that she was afraid, often physically unwell, sometimes despairing. What distinguishes her is not an absence of fear but a decision — made early and held unbroken — that fear would not decide her conduct. The memoir’s style enacts this decision sentence by sentence: prose that refuses to panic, because panic would concede the regime’s authority to make her panic.