What is the worth of a life? Paul Vick explores that timeless question in this compelling memoir of his parents, their lasting legacy, and his lifelong journey to find his own identity and path. Vick was only 16 months old when a plane carrying himself, his parents, and his 3-year-old brother crashed in a cotton field in a remote area of China in 1947. Robert and Dorothy Vick were young Baptist missionaries on their way to their first assignment. Only Robert and Paul were found alive, and Robert lived just long enough to dictate his final wish that Paul be returned to his grandparents in Rochester, New York, for them to raise.

More than sixty years after the crash and his retirement from a successful career as an attorney, Paul resolves to return to China, to find answers to two questions haunting him. What caused his parents to take a perilous journey to a war-torn country, exposing themselves and their two young children to so great a risk? What impact did their lives, and the lives of so many others called to serve during a turbulent period in China’s history, have on the China of today?