I don’t have much time. I am in Altay, Xinjiang, in the northwest of China, which borders Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan.Remote mountainous areasthousands of kilometers away from the Beijing bureau of The New York Times, where I serve as bureau chief.

This time I was on personal business: looking for records of my father’s service in the Chinese military 60 years ago at the Altay Civil Affairs Bureau. I knew the police would soon be on my tail, as they do whenever foreign journalists show up in Xinjiang.

That was in 2014. President Xi Jinping began implementing a crackdown on the region, which is populated by Uighur and Kazakh Muslims.Tougher policiesThis vast land is covered with mountains, deserts and high grasslands, and is inhabited by people of various nationalities. For centuries, under the rule of the Chinese rulers,Imperial VisionIn the past, control here has always been the top priority.

I knew it would be difficult to find any information about my father, Huang Woqiang. But at the Civil Affairs Bureau, I chatted with a young woman named Wei Yangxuan in an office on the second floor. She happened to be a veteran who helped organize activities for veterans. I asked her if she knew of an old military base, mostly Kazakh cavalry, where my father and several other Han Chinese soldiers had served in 1952.

She shook her head.

I knew I would probably never come to Altay again, and I had only this one chance. Suddenly, I realized it was past seven in the morning in Virginia, the suburb where my parents had lived for decades. Maybe if I called on my cell phone, Dad could tell Ms. Wei about the situation at the Kazakh base.

He answered the phone. I told him I was in Altay.

“Where are you?” he said, as if in disbelief.

I asked him to describe the Kazakh base to Ms. Wei, and then handed her the phone.

They talked for several minutes. I looked out the window. In the square below, I saw two parked police cars. Several officers stood around each car, wearing black uniforms and riot gear—helmets, batons, and body armor. I thought I saw one of them looking up at the window. I quickly stepped back.

Ms. Wei returned the phone to me.

Baba sounded confused and a little worried. “I told her about the Fifth Army base,” he told me, referring to the unit of Kazakh and Uighur soldiers where he had served. “Now you tell me why you are in Altay.”

When I was a kid in Alexandria, Virginia, my father rarely talked about China. He didn’t sit by my bed and tell me his life story when he came home early in the evening. In this respect, he was like many Asian immigrant fathers of his generation, who were focused on creating a new life for their families and only on the present.

He worked at a Chinese restaurant called Hai Kee, and only had Sundays off. In those days, we watched football together and read my math textbooks together, algebra, geometry, and calculus. He was good at math. I later learned that he studied engineering after leaving the army.

Sometimes I saw him wearing a red blazer and black pants to work at the restaurant, and for decades that was the only uniform I associated with him.

But one day, when I came home from graduate school to visit my parents and asked them about their experiences growing up in southern China, my dad showed me a photo of himself from his time serving in the Communist army.

It was taken in northwest China in 1953. My father’s eyes were bright and his skin showed no trace of time. He was wearing a simple military uniform and a military cap. I gently ran my finger over a black spot in the middle of the cap. There was a shadow there. He said there used to be a red star there, the symbol of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. My father sent the photo to Hong Kong, where his parents lived at the time. My father was worried about how the British colonial authorities would react to the photo, so he erased the star.

I began to learn more about my father’s past in 2008, when I began spending nearly nine years in China as a correspondent for The Times. I traveled to Guangdong Province in the south, where my parents grew up. This led to deeper conversations with them and my father’s brother, Sam.

My father was born in Hong Kong in 1932, but was forced to return to his home in Taishan County in southern China after Japanese troops occupied the British colony in 1941. He graduated from high school in the spring of 1950, the first year of the Communist Party’s rule, and was admitted to university in Beijing in the fall. He was determined to go to school in the ancient city chosen by Mao Zedong as his capital because he supported the Communist Party’s cause and believed that the new leaders would revitalize China after the destructive policies and corruption of the Kuomintang.

There, he joined other college students in a parade through Tiananmen Square and was reviewed by Mao. He soon dropped out to join the newly formed air force when China joined the Korean War against the U.S. military. Party leaders said that if American forces won on the Korean Peninsula, an invasion of China would be inevitable, and he was proud to have done his part to defend his country.

However, his plan was shattered when Chinese officers suddenly ordered him to interrupt his training in Manchuria and travel with the troops to the northwest, eventually reaching the border of Central Asia. He suspected that this was his father’s fault, because his father was a businessman who returned to Hong Kong with his mother while Sam was studying in the United States. He was exiled because of this.

It is here that the details of my father’s story are shrouded in mystery. On my 2014 trip to Altay, I hit a wall: The police did spot me and followed me until I drove out of town. There was a limit to what I could learn in China.

But I returned to Altay and Dad’s other work in Xinjiang when I moved to Washington in 2018 to work as a diplomatic correspondent for The Times and began writing a book about my family and modern China. I spent dozens of hours interviewing him in his childhood home and reading letters he wrote to Sam after he enlisted.

I was fascinated by his role in the campaign by Mao and Xi Zhongxun (Xi’s father) to establish military control over the northwest, a critical moment that few living people can talk about. It laid the foundation for the Communist Party’s rule in Xinjiang and its suppression of independence movements there, and foreshadowed Beijing’s more recent efforts to repress Uighurs and Kazakhs through a system of internment camps, forced labor, and mass surveillance.

The more I talked with my father, who had witnessed and participated in the early forms of control that evolved into what we see today, the more I realized the value of recording his memories, especially those of the Northwest Frontier.

My father said that it took half a year to travel from Manchuria to the distant Xinjiang. He sat in an open military truck with other Han soldiers, rumbling along the Great Wall into the distance. He was full of fear for what was coming, but he was also shocked by the beauty of China that he had never seen before.

He remembered driving west from Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, where persimmons, plump and glossy, the color of burning copper, hung low from the trees in the autumn sun. How sweet they would be if he could take a bite. The truck was driving on a dirt road, raising dust. He was heading toward a vast, desolate land with many old roads and towns, many of which no longer existed. It was the frontier. The soldiers and generals who had come here before them were no longer alive.

When he reached the sensitive area north of the Tianshan Mountains, near the Soviet-Mongolian border, the ground was covered with snow. In the town of Burqin, Kazakhs rode through the streets on horseback. For my father and the other Han soldiers, it was a whole new world, wilder than they had imagined China would be.

He finally arrived at the base outside Altay on January 27, 1952, the Lunar New Year, the beginning of the Year of the Water Dragon. There were 1,000 Kazakh soldiers there. His mission, it turned out, was to indoctrinate them.

My father told me that every morning, the Kazakh soldiers gathered in a hall. The highest-ranking officer, a Han Chinese political commissar, sat at the front of the room, with the other Han soldiers sitting next to him. He was the only one who spoke, and with the help of an interpreter, he spoke incessantly about the party’s propaganda line.

He spoke of the communist revolution and how the party was leading China into a new era. He spoke of the end of the old feudal society and the elimination of classes. He spoke of Mao Zedong’s leadership and the struggle of the proletariat and the need to resist the imperialist powers, especially the United States.

The official said Mao’s revolutionary vision was rooted not only in the struggles of urban workers but also in the uprisings of peasants, who were as much a part of the Kazakh nomads here as they were in the struggles of the city workers. Although Han Chinese are the majority ethnic group in China’s heartland, the official said the indigenous peoples and Han Chinese have equal interests in China’s future and that the party respects the culture, beliefs and autonomy of all ethnic groups.

This routine was repeated every day. At the morning meeting, my father sat quietly and listened to the commissar’s speech. He felt that he was not yet able to tell others about the party, and could not teach its doctrines and ideas. The party was something he could not understand at present, and he knew that it would take time to understand its methods.

In the afternoons, Han soldiers crowded into the room, warming their hands by the coal stove. It was so cold that the large chunks of beef, mutton, and horse meat that the soldiers had piled against the wall froze. Between formal meetings, Dad would occasionally try to talk to a Kazakh soldier and soon learned a few words of their language.

My father told me that relations between the Han Chinese and other ethnic groups in Xinjiang were peaceful, but I found a darker assessment in a letter he wrote to Sam on May 12, 1963, years after he left Xinjiang. He wrote that the one thing the 15 or so ethnic groups he observed had in common was a “deep hatred of the Han Chinese.”

My father described how, in 1946, after Kuomintang General Zhang Zhizhong assumed the post of chairman of the Xinjiang provincial government, “the Han Chinese became violent and aggressive, oppressing all ethnic groups, leading to uprisings in three major areas of northern Xinjiang (north of the Tianshan Mountains).”

When my father began to be deployed to the restive north, he hoped that the People’s Liberation Army would win the trust of the local people. Communist rule, he thought, would certainly be different from previous conquests.

But military rule began without bloodshed. In early 1951, a year before my father arrived in Altay, Chinese soldiers captured Usman Batur, a Kazakh rebel leader who had fought for years for autonomy for his nomadic people. That April, they hanged him. Hundreds of his compatriots fled across the Himalayas to India and eventually to Turkey. Usman became a symbol of Kazakh nationalism.

My father was stationed in Altay and then in the fertile Ili River Valley before being sent to Wenquan County, near Soviet Kazakhstan, to work in one of the first construction corps formed to control Xinjiang. His superior officer recommended him for party membership, which filled him with hope.

In 1957 he was offered the chance to return to the interior of China to attend university in Xi’an, where he studied aerospace engineering. But he soon discovered that he might never become a party member. Some officials still viewed him with suspicion because of his family background.

Meanwhile, Mao was plunging China into chaos. During the famine caused by Mao’s failed “Great Leap Forward” economic policies, my father was barely fed and became emaciated on campus. His feet swelled and he had trouble walking. He was lucky: Historians later estimated that 30 million to 40 million people died in the famine of 1958 to 1962.

As the famine subsided, he realized he had to flee China. In 1962, he managed to escape to the Portuguese colony of Macau, then reunited with his parents in Hong Kong. In 1967, he moved with his grandmother to the Washington area to reunite with Sam.

My father escaped the violence of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao Zedong launched in 1966. He told me that given his family background, he would have likely been persecuted by Red Guard fanatics and might not have survived. Other family members were not so lucky: His childhood playmate, a cousin who was a scientist in Shanghai, was falsely accused by the Red Guards of being a CIA agent. He committed suicide in 1969, leaving behind a wife and two sons.

Decades later, his other cousin, Gary Locke, who grew up in a very different environment,Beijing hosts US ambassador to ChinaI also worked and lived in Beijing during the same period.

I was surprised to find that the family story was like a Möbius strip, repeating itself through generations and Chinese history. I stood in Tiananmen Square twice, watching Xi Jinping wave to the parade, and in 1950, my father was in the parade, looking for Mao Zedong standing on the crimson tower.

I moved to Beijing as a Times reporter and experienced the feeling of being submerged in the People’s Republic of China that my father had in 1962. More than four months after returning to Hong Kong, he wrote to his brother: “Looking back on the past ten years, I seem to have accomplished nothing. This thought makes me quite melancholy. Usually when talking about this experience with others, I would hide the fact that I had served in the army or wanted to join the party.”

My father, who will be 92 next month and has spent nearly 60 years in the United States, looks back on his time in China with a clear eye, but without the bitterness of his early years. He even speaks of that period with nostalgia, saying that he was at least part of an era when most citizens accepted a sense of responsibility and collective purpose for their country.

One afternoon last year, when I was still writing this book, he told me that the Communist Party was necessary to China because it revived China after the Anti-Japanese War and the corrupt rule of the Kuomintang.

But the Communist Party was fundamentally flawed. Although my father did everything he could to prove his loyalty, to show that he wanted to work for China’s future under its new rulers, even to go to the frontier for them, the party officials would not take him in. These officials were trapped in their own fears, in their own ideas of power, in a maze of their own making, and had no trust, faith, or generosity of heart.

Their leaders are no exception, he said.

Many years ago, as we sat after dinner in my childhood home, he told me that he still remembered the words to “The East is Red,” the 1960s anthem that most Chinese citizens knew by heart. He cleared his throat and sang in Mandarin without hesitation, even though he hadn’t sung it in decades.

After the song was over, he leaned back on the sofa and smiled at me. At that moment, he became the young man in a brown uniform with a red star on his hat, riding a horse through the mountains and valleys of the northwest border of the empire.