From Tea to Coffee: The Journey of an Educated Youth by Cheng Wang is a riveting memoir that recounts the experience of a single "Educated Youth" and his reactions to profound political and cultural changes, differences in time, and the people of all creeds, races, and origins he encountered throughout his life. Cheng Wang recaptures in his memoir the zeitgeist of 1960s and 1970s China when sixteen million "Educated Youths," including him, were sent to the countryside for re-education. He has put half a century of his life into words to provide remarkable insights into the repercussions of the Cultural Revolution, a peculiar time when knowledge was considered useless, and to describe how his own family was brutally affected by the Cultural Revolution and how his first taste of what a Western economic recession was like, among other things.

From Tea to Coffee: The Journey of an Educated Youth by Cheng Wang is a unique, engaging debut memoir, beautifully written, about the author's journey from an inexperienced and uneducated young man to ​becoming a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cincinnati, a Principal Member of Tech Staff at AT&T, and lastly a published author. Cheng Wang writes fondly and with modesty about his personal progress and inner growth while showing why both sides of the Pacific became his home. He is an inspiration as he reveals his thirst to improve his life constantly despite the odds. ​From Tea to Coffee by Cheng Wang is a moving memoir recounting how the Cultural Revolution changed the author's life and his family's lives forever. It's also a profoundly essential read, very well written by a Chinese American author for the Western reader.

“Actual lives flow more like a gentle stream, as opposed to the torrent experienced for two hours sitting in a theater.” This quietly potent line from Cheng Wang’s quietly potent memoir, From Tea to Coffee, expresses something quite true about human life. An autobiography is better sipped quietly in later years than drunk boastfully when young. The challenge, however, is to recover that peculiar intensity felt within each prior moment and to recapture the essence of one’s personal perspective at the time. Cheng Wang was a Chinese youth during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, yet a profoundly insightful observer of his own conditioning, later an accomplished participant in American culture and he excels at both. The result is a fascinating piece of literature exploring the vast similarities and differences between peoples divided by more than just an ocean.

Uniquely qualified, Cheng Wang offers penetrating insights and visceral appreciation for two distinctive cultural alternatives. He has lived and imbibed completely the flavors of both. From Tea to Coffee introduces readers to the rarely glimpsed and mostly misunderstood social phenomenon known as The Cultural Revolution – when intellectual grooming was forsaken for the ideals of agrarian inculturation. Contrary to intrinsic Western indoctrination, such grounding was not just a despot’s attempt at political control, but also a profoundly enlightening and practical experience for the young. Perhaps imbalanced, and therefore needing future societal adjustment, the historical transformation did produce individuals like Cheng Wang, who now invests our own understanding of societal imbalance with lessons learned by one who knows. Just so, we become immersed in our own life-altering streams.