Tea on the Great Wall

September 15, 2015
Between 1932 and 1940, from age 5 until she was 13, Chapman lived with her family in China. Her father was an American businessman, her mother a correspondent with China Press, lending prestige and privilege to their stay until the ravages of WWII sent them back to the U.S. as refugees. Chapman recalls a house full of attentive servants (speaking a pidgin English that is painful to read) and suffering the constraints of her mother's lessons on the social graces as well as lessons of Chinese culture that she drew on later in her life. But the sounds of war determinedly penetrated their privileged lives, until Japanese warships invaded Shanghai's harbor. Swastikas were hung in her German school, and many instructors were replaced by those more in alignment with Nazi ideology. The family faced a harrowing journey back to the U.S.; her father remained behind and was eventually held for a while in a Japanese prison camp. Chapman intersperses her memoir with reflections on current-day China.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)