Guilt and redemption are among the great themes of literature. Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim wanted a second chance at heroism, Raskolnikov would make himself pay for what he did with the hatchet and the old woman's skull, and there's a lot of hand-washing in Macbeth. But the theme has largely vanished in the current, wonderful craze for memoirs, which are almost always about the great wrongs done to the tender author. Only Jan Wong would have the ice-splitting courage to turn the memoir on its head. She did an awful thing 35 years ago, the kind of thoughtless idiotic cruelty that is the specialty of the young. Her new book, Beijing Confidential: A Tale of Comrades Lost and Found, is her quest for forgiveness.

Mea culpa

In 1972 Wong, a third-generation Chinese-Canadian McGill student, was a burning righteous Maoist with that desire to make the world a better place that is so attractive in a teenager and so sadly absent in the middle-aged and mortgaged.

She flew to China to help Mao in his quest to make a better humanity. She didn't know, as few of us did until recently, that he was a monster whose only ideology was preserving his own power and as well one of the most lavish murderers in human history, rivalling even Stalin. She was a true believer.

Wong landed in the Cultural Revolution (1965-1976), when all things peasant-like were worshipped and anything resembling intellect was despised and punished. In those years, three million people were murdered and 100 million were made to suffer a particular kind of hell in a larger Chinese ocean-sized hell.

Wong did her bit. When she was approached on campus by Yin Luoyi, an unfamiliar young woman who asked her about the West and how to get there, she snitched on the girl. The authorities took over and the girl disappeared, not only from the campus but from Wong's mind. It wasn't until she read her own student diaries in 1994 that she remembered her denunciation. When she bravely told the story in her 1997 memoir Red China Blues, a huge best-seller, it became something of a scarlet letter, especially to people who didn't like her, and an investigative journalist like Wong had plenty of enemies.

A person denounced in China could easily have been executed by the Red Guard. As far as Wong knew, Yin might have been. It haunted her. So in 2003, she flew back to China to search for the woman whose life she had ruined, if not ended. She would face the consequences.

Needle in haystack

It would be wrong to give away too much. But Wong is an unstoppable reporter in a post-post-Watergate era where corporate interests rule and speaking truth to power gets an individual journalist a kick in the teeth, a firing if he's lucky and spending the rest of his career covering the Etobicoke Ratepayers Association if he's not. This is the book she was born to write.

In a nation of 1.3 billion people with 400 million cellphones, all unlisted, and where 40 per cent of the population share 10 surnames, Wong found her woman, whose surname she did not even know, in Beijing, a city that had essentially been razed since Wong's first visit.

They met, in an extraordinary scene that brings home the hugeness of Beijing and how easily a person can be lost — as DeQuincey lost his Ann in foggy London, one of the saddest stories ever told — if a cellphone acts up or Wong goes to the "Big" West Gate when Yin is waiting at the "Small" West Gate, which is what happened.

As it turned out, Wong's denunciation was only one of about 30, all made, unlike Wong's, with the knowledge of what would happen to Yin. She was interrogated all night by the group. She attempted suicide, but failed, and was expelled at dawn, driven away from the university in a black-barred prisoners van and sent to Manchuria. Yin's life improved, obviously, but that is another part of the story.

National characters

Wong's clear prose flows like water bearing what I call "nuggets," little pieces of information and insight that catch in the reader's brain filter.

With Beijing Confidential, Wong is writing a thriller about pursuit, explaining the three tides of history — the Mongols of Kublai Khan, the Ming Dynasty and the 2008 Olympics — that flattened and rebuilt Beijing. She is drawing the astounding arcs of Yin Luoyi's life after exile from Beijing, and interweaving the narrative with the hard-won analysis of other writers.

This last, I admire most. Wong compares the Chinese love of hierarchy with Adam Gopnik's assessment of the "encyclopedic" French insistence on tiny totalitarianism. On the Cultural Revolution's taste for the group encircling and tormenting the individual Kristallnacht-style, she quotes Czeslaw Milosz on the "beguiling allure" of iron rule and how collectivism changes the physical look of a city street. She notes the government's parallels to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Beijing migrant laborers' recreation of his Down and Out in Paris and London. She refers to Stasiland, by Anna Funder, and how collective amnesia has overtaken both China and the former East Germany.

Most importantly, she notes that in none of the cases have the tormentors come forward to apologize to their victims. All those Nazis, and what did the Germans say? I was just following orders. Wong meets her victim and apologizes humbly and repeatedly, while the other senior Communists just smile uneasily, unable to look Yin in the eye, continuing the lie.

This is a new kind of writing, a work of courage and humility. The small, compact book is like a pastille, a pharmaceutical. Read it and confront your own nature: Did you ever do something in your life that haunts you, perhaps merits an apology? We all have, not just Brian Mulroney.

The book is a classic, very much in the tradition of The Railway Man, Eric Lomax's confrontation with the Japanese soldier who waterboarded him in the Second World War, another small book of immense pain.

It's a ridiculous thing to say, as nationality is irrelevant to the matter of great writing, but I'm proud that Jan Wong is a Canadian. She does credit to this country.

This Week

So many people I respect are mad for the novelist Graham Greene, as much for his personality as his books. All my life I have yearned to admire him, but haven't managed it. Michael Shelden wrote an almost psychotically unfair biography that won Greene my sympathy. Then I read two volumes of Norman Sherry's massive biography but after finding what I thought was the final volume only took us up to 1955, I gave up. Now University of Toronto professor Richard Greene (no relation) has published a collection of Greene's letters that has won me over. Greene was a passionate man, generous to other writers and absolutely steadfast in his defence of individuals and nations under attack. I always felt his Catholicism was a prop for his energetic sexuality — guilt made the sex better — and that's reason enough. But he genuinely liked women and treated them well. When he sent a cheque to impoverished writers, he'd send a few bottles of wine with it. What warmth, what style. And his perceptions were dead on. Nobody else has suggested that the Blitz made London look like Mexico. It was all those ruined churches, you see. And seeing the photographs, I see that he was right, as he was about so many things.