The Boston Literary District welcomes **Val Wang** for the fourth installment of “Get Lit After Work,” a pop-up literary biergarten in front of the Cheers bar in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace. **Val Wang** will discuss and share excerpts from her memoir,_Bejing Bastard: Coming of Age in a Changing China_. Raised in a strict Chinese-American household in the suburbs, **Val Wang** dutifully got good grades, took piano lessons, and performed in a Chinese dance troupe—until she shaved her head and became a leftist, the stuff of many teenage rebellions. But Val’s true mutiny was when she moved to China, the land her parents had fled before the Communist takeover in 1949.
**Val Wang** is an author and multimedia storyteller interested in the intersection between the personal and the global. Shortly after college, Val moved to Beijing, where she rode her bike all over town, raised an orange cat, subtitled a number of underground Chinese films and shot her own documentary about a three-generation Peking Opera family. These years in Beijing became the memoir \_Beijing Bastard\_. Her multimedia projects work at the edge of digital innovation in journalism. She created and produced Planet Takeout, an interactive, multiplatform documentary on the role of Chinese takeouts as a vital cultural crossroads in America. The project incubated at WGBH Radio as part of the nationwide Localore initiative. Val is currently producing a documentary about Chinese circus artist Daqi (also known as Xia Zhengqi), who is now performing in Paramour, Cirque du Soleil’s debut show on Broadway. She teaches in the English and Media Studies Department of Bentley University. She lives in Boston but her heart is still partly in Beijing.