At a Sydney book event late last year, I met an author near the drinks table. There wasn’t much air-conditioning at the venue, but there was plenty of good wine and cheese, and, it turned out, good conversation. Which is how I met Wai Chim (Twitter: onewpc) and found a new book to read.

Wai Chim’s Freedom Swimmer starts with corpses in the river, and ends on the open ocean. Based off the author’s own family history, it’s the story of Ming, a famine survivor and peasant boy, and Li, an educated city boy sent to the village as part of the Community Party worker’s program, who together eventually attempt to escape Mao’s China by undergoing the dangerous ‘freedom swim’ to Hong Kong.

There’s been plenty written about the Cultural Revolution, but not much for a younger audience. Freedom Swimmer is a YA book, and the traumas which appear in it – famine, fanatics, tested family loyalties – are tactfully written in a way that, to someone more familiar with the history, comes off as distancing the horror, but is appropriate for a young reader (Allen & Unwin puts the book in the category of 11-14 years). Ming and Li are wonderfully realised, optimistic voices into two different lives of the time – Chinese city student and Chinese village peasant – who bond over swimming and innocently worry about all the things teenage boys do: school work, being part of a group, and girls. Only this is China in the Cultural Revolution, so school work is tilling fields for points and memorising Mao quotes, and being in or out with the group can be the difference between life and death.

Girl problems in this world are, in comparison, innocent and simple. Mothers and aunts aside, there’s only one girl of note, Fei, another famine survivor who is friends with Ming, and later Li. Happily, there’s no love triangle or fight for her affections, and Li’s wholehearted support of Ming’s courtship of Fei is one of the book’s delights. There’s sweetness in Li’s enthusiasm to plan schemes for Ming to see Fei, and Fei herself, although only seen from Li and Ming’s points of view, is revealed through conversation and letters to be even more eloquent than the boys with her own dreams of freedom. At the same time, Fei’s ‘lessons’ are an opportunity to point out another dimension to Communist China: while the Party pronounced too much book learning to be “harmful”, it also created modern opportunities for women who, Mao declared, hold up half the sky.

Each of the characters has their dream of freedom – in the ocean, in poetry and music, in flights of imagination – which they harbour despite the oppression that surrounds them. Chim does a great job of illustrating the atmosphere of the era through Party officials, letters and small moments, building slow enough that, as many of the peasant characters seem to feel, the new society of Communist China is just something to live with as long as there’s food to eat, until events happen that reveal the regime’s brutality, and prompt Ming and Li to swim to Hong Kong or die trying. As a story of resilience and spirit it’s an engaging novel; as an introduction the Cultural Revolution for a younger reader, or any reader unfamiliar with the subject, it’s immediately accessible. And although to me the epilogue in China feels a bit too neat, the image of the final line both aches and uplifts in its promise of a better future.

Freedom Swimmer is published by Allen & Unwin, available here. Recommended read.