Wang Dan, writer, essayist and poet, was the most prominent leader of the Tiananmen student pro-democracy movement. Following the Chinese government’s crackdown on June 4, 1989, he was arrested and sentenced to four years of imprisonment. After being released on parole in 1993, he continued to speak out against the totalitarian government and was rearrested in 1995 for conspiring to overthrow the Communist Party of China. In 1998, before U.S. President Bill Clinton visited China, Wang was released on medical parole and arrived in the United States. With a doctorate in history from Harvard University, Wang is now the author of seventeen books, including Prison Memoirs and I Walk Alone in the Cold. The excerpt from his Prison Memoirs is the first time Wang’s work appears in English.