Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A Childhood in Wartime China

From Publishers Weekly
This powerful memoir by writer and translator Kwan (Broken Portraits) recounts his tumultuous coming-of-age in China during and after WWII. This straightforward and poetic work illuminates the contradictions of wartime as seen through the eyes of a child. Kwan is estranged from his Swiss mother as a young boy and goes from being raised by servants to the Englishwoman his father remarries. Although emotionally distant, Kwan's father, the wealthy administrator for China's railroads, was a model of honor to his family and country, and Kwan's story is as much about his father as it is about himself. After Japan invaded China, Kwan's father took a position in the pro-Japanese government in order to work for the Resistance covertly. As a half-caste, Kwan was tormented in school and, without friends, became a silent voyeur of the world around him. He took solace where he could find it, whether with his dog, Rex, in his tree house watching the neighbors, gardening with the owner of a local antique shop, catching crickets with his father's tenant farmer or through the rituals he performed as an altar boy. After WWII, there followed the battle between Communists and Nationalists, and, caught in the middle, Kwan's father was falsely accused and imprisoned for collaborating with the Japanese. Before Kwan was sent away to safety, his father repeated his guiding tenet: "As long as you are true to yourself, you can't be false to anyone else." This engaging story of family, loyalty, patriotism and war shows how unforeseen events change people and how, in turn, they can reshape those events to survive and retain their imprint. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Kwan (Broken Portraits), who was born in China and lived there until he was 12 years old, describes in his memoir the tense urban atmosphere during Chiang Kai-shek's desperate grasp for power. The author, raised in an upper-class family, the son of a multilingual, Oxford-educated father and a Swiss-born mother, tells here of his painful experiences in a society that disparaged his biracial roots. China's political reality during his early years and the dangers his father risked in working for the Resistance became clear to him as an adult, enabling him to authenticate his memory of the character and tone of his youth. Winner of the 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize for nonfiction, this book is certainly a welcome addition to Chinese memoirs that, in recent years, have focused on the later experiences of Mao Zedong's reign, e.g., Yang Rae's Spider Eaters (LJ 4/15/97), Chen Chen's Come Watch the Sun Go Home (LJ 6/1/98), and Jaia Sun Childers's The White-Haired Girl (LJ 2/15/96). Peggy Spitzer Christoff, Rockville, MD Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
It's almost easy to call this kind of memoir "searing," and so it is; but Kwan has a tender and unflinching eye, and he cares very much about what he writes. And he writes of being a small child with a Caucasian mother and a Chinese father, isolated from other boys by his heritage and his family's sense of dignity. His father's secret work just before and during World War II protected their existence somewhat--they never suffered real privation--but when his father was arrested as the Communists came to power, the fragility of their lives became clear. Kwan limns emotional resonances brilliantly: his love for his Chinese nanny, his hatred of his brutal schoolmasters, and his ambivalence about Catholic ritual. He describes the repressed and cultured lives of his wealthy and influential family members while trying to untangle all the undercurrents of race, war, resistance, gender, and sex that flowed among them. Some of this has the same hallucinatory power as J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun. A mesmerizing read. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Buy from Amazon     Compare Prices

Luminous recollections of a lost world, from an Anglo-Chinese writer who recounts how his privileged and sheltered childhood turned into a dangerous adolescence in war-torn China. Born in 1934, Kwan was the youngest son of a Swiss woman who married into a Chinese family that traced its lineage back to the Han dynasty. The author's Cambridge-educated father was administrator of China's national railways system, and Kwan draws on his progenitor's writings as well as his own memories in his memoir. Early childhood was idyllic: a warm-hearted nanny took care of him in a house in Beijing filled with beautiful objects, cared for by numerous servants, and the site of elegant parties. When his mother, who mostly ignored him, ran off with another man, Kwan left Beijing to live with a lively Anglo-Chinese family, the Findlay-Wus. As he adjusted to the new household, Japan invaded and occupied large parts of China, sparing only the areas where Europeans lived. After Kwan's father married Mrs. Findlay-Wu's sister, Kwan moved back to Beijing and started school, but the war increasingly intruded—especially after Pearl Harbor, when Kwan watched as the Japanese took away his American and British school friends with their parents. Kwan describes the family's move to Quingdao, lonely school days during which he was reviled for being a half-caste (the Europeans and Chinese were equally racist), the civil war that broke out as Japan was defeated, the arrest of his father (now an intelligence officer), and the family's ensuing privations. As the Communists gained control, an older stepbrother arranged for Kwan to leave China and go to school in Hong Kong. He would not return until 1987. Permittinghimself the latitude usually granted to chroniclers of childhood, the author recalls numerous seemingly verbatim conversations, but these enrich an always absorbing narrative. A lively account, filled with the vivid details of daily and family life that make the best memoirs evocative portraits of their peoples and their times.


Buy from Barnes & Noble     Compare Prices