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Searching for Billie: A Journalist's Quest to Understand His Mother's Past Leads Him to Discover a Vanished China
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Biographies GeneralHistorical FiguresChinese History
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ISBN10: 9887554669
ISBN13: 9789887554660
Publisher: Blacksmith Books
Published: Apr 8 2024
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.14
Height: 1.25 Width: 5.53 Depth: 8.52
Language: English
ISBN13: 9789887554660
Publisher: Blacksmith Books
Published: Apr 8 2024
Pages: 320
Weight: 1.14
Height: 1.25 Width: 5.53 Depth: 8.52
Language: English
Ian Gill's first visit to Hong Kong takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie's friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Shanghai and Hong Kong. He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great-grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s - and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985. The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China's turbulent century between the Anglo-Chinese wars and the advent of communism.
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