Inconvenient Memories: A Personal Account of the Tiananmen Square Incident and China Before and After

A 2019 winner of the Wishing Shelf Book Awards and a 2020 winner of the Independent Press Awards, Inconvenient Memories is a story of love and frustration in the time of the Tiananmen Protests of 1989. In 1989, Anna Wang was a lucky few who worked for a Japanese company, Canon. When Tiananmen Protests broke out, her Japanese boss, concerned with the future of Canon's first-ever assembly plant in China, sent her to Tiananmen Square to take photos for him to analyze for evidence of turning tides. The unfolding of the historical events coincided with her failed love and estranged family relationship. Her coming of age was shrouded by nubilous controversy and relentless violence, which had a lasting impact on her life choice in the following years. As Perry Link, an expert on Chinese history and a champion of democracy in China, comments, “The events of the June Fourth massacre in Beijing in 1989 were so extreme that descriptions of it tend to be emotional. Anna Wang’s story helps us to understand what an ordinary Chinese citizen’s life felt beneath all the sturm und drang of the times. The color of her descriptions brings to life a period of Chinese history that large forces seem to have pressed colorless.”