I wrote China Hands to uncover family secrets: how my uncle Frank actually died and who my father worked for. Growing up, I was told that my uncle died in World War II, and that my father worked as a U.S. diplomat. China Hands, which I wrote with my father, the late Ambassador James Lilley, answers both questions. It tells the story of the Lilley family’s engagement with Asia from my great-grandfather’s arrival in China in 1916 to sell “oil for the lamps of China” to my father’s posting as US Ambassador during the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Along the way, we relate my uncle’s dramatic and short life, which ended tragically in Hiroshima, Japan, and my father’s career as a top US “China hand,” working for both the CIA and the US diplomatic service.
Jeff Lilley is the author of Have the Mountains Fallen and China Hands. Read more
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Praise
“There is more to China Hands than just spying . . . The moving early chapters describe the idyllic childhoods of James and his two handsome, athletic older brothers, when their father worked for Standard Oil in neo-colonial Tsing-tao. . . [Lilley’s was] a career of unusual achievement that spanned four decades of American influence in Asia.”
Washington Post Book World
“[Lilley’s] insider account . . . adds considerably to our understanding of four critical decades in East Asia — and offers a great deal of wisdom about how Washington should manage relations with the region today.”
Foreign Affairs
“Mr. Lilley’s insider accounts of U.S.-China relations from the Nixon years through Tiananmen Square are vivid and frank. But it’s his gripping hour-by-hour telling of the events surrounding the student-led rebellion on June 4, 1989, that deserves to be turned into a movie. China Hands is an adventure story worthy of John LeCarré.”
Wall Street Journal
Orville Schell, Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California Berkeley.
“Written simply, elegantly and frankly, China Hands offers a marvelous and accessible way for specialist and neophyte alike to follow China’s unpredictable and always fascinating progress since Lilley’s father first traveled up the Yangtze River in 1917.”
Jeffrey Lilley Writing 