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3 books match the query 'Wartime China'
Echoes of Chongqing
Women in Wartime ChinaDanke Li
University of Illinois Press, 2010
This collection of annotated oral histories records the personal stories of twenty Chinese women who lived in the wartime capital of Chongqing during China's War of Resistance against Japan during World War II. By presenting women's remembrances of the war, this study examines the interplay between oral history and traditional historical narrative, public discourse, and private memories. The women interviewed came from differing social, economic, and educational backgrounds and experienced the war in a variety of ways, some of them active in the communist resistance and others trying to support families or pursue educations in the face of wartime upheaval. Their stories demonstrate that the War of Resistance had two faces: one presented by official propaganda and characterized by an upbeat unified front against Japan, the other a record of invisible private stories and a sobering national experience of death and suffering. The accounts of how women coped, worked, and lived during the war years in the Chongqing region recast historical understanding of the roles played by ordinary people in wartime and give women a public voice and face that, until now, have been missing from scholarship on the war.
Teaching in Wartime China
A Photo-Memoir, 1937-1939Edward Gulick
University of Massachusetts Press, 1995
After graduating from Yale in 1937, Edward Gulick spent two years in China’s Hunan Province, teaching English at a mission school for Chinese boys. Faced with the prospect of invasion and military occupation by the Japanese, the school’s leaders moved the students to safer quarters in a distant town. Gulick participated in the evacuation, traveled widely in the area, and kept detailed journals of his experiences. Drawing on these journals and on a collection of remarkable photographs he took at the time, he has created a memoir in words and images that vividly conveys the texture of daily life during his sojourn in China. Gulick is a keen observer and his narrative successfully interweaves two voices: that of the earnest young man who found himself caught up in the turbulence of central China on the eve of World War II, and that of the historian who pondered the experience for many years while teaching the history of China and Japan at Wellesley College.
Voices from Shanghai
Jewish Exiles in Wartime ChinaEdited by Irene Eber
University of Chicago Press, 2008
When Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by these refugees in the years after they landed in China, Voices from Shanghai fills a gap in our historical understanding of what happened to so many Jews who were forced to board the first ship bound for anywhere.
Once they arrived, the refugees learned to navigate the various languages, belief systems, and ethnic traditions they encountered in an already booming international city, and faced challenges within their own community based on disparities in socioeconomic status, levels of religious observance, urban or rural origin, and philosophical differences. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these fascinating accounts make their English-languge debut in this volume. A rich new take on Holocaust literature, Voices from Shanghai reveals how refugees attempted to pursue a life of creativity despite the hardships of exile.