Louisa Lim is the author of The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, and a Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan. Lim is an award-winning journalist, who is the former China correspondent for NPR and the BBC. She opened NPR's Shanghai bureau in February 2006, but she also reported for NPR from up Tibetan glaciers and down the shaft of a Shaanxi coalmine. She made a very rare reporting trip to North Korea, covered illegal abortions in Guangxi province, and worked on the major multimedia series on religion in China "New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China." Lim was part of NPR teams that won multiple awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, a Peabody, and two Edward R. Murrow awards, for their coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 and the Beijing Olympics.
I didn’t want to write this book. Even the thought of it scared me, but it hammered away at my conscience. When I finally gave in, I took elaborate precautions.