In this greatly engaging autobiography, Wang, a preeminent historian, tells the story of how his identity shaped his view of the world. Wang was born into the Chinese diaspora on the Indonesian island of Java in 1930, but he was largely raised in what is now Malaysia. His childhood was marked by upheaval. Schooled during the Japanese occupation of the Malay Peninsula, he moved with his family to China in 1947, but civil war soon forced them to flee. In his telling, the South China Sea became