Women in wartime China: two memoirs show how rise of communists struck well-off lives

There comes a time when, as people age, events move from being “within living memory” to “history”. There is great urgency to capture these voices in places such as China where, for reasons of war and turmoil, fewer voices were captured at the time.

Hong Kong-based Earnshaw Books is now publishing the memoirs of two women, remarkable in their own ways and similar in others, who lived through these times and who, atypically, have set down their memories in English.

Margaret Sun and Daisy Kwok have some things in common: although both spent their formative years (and in Kwok’s case, the rest of her life) in Shanghai, both were from families from southern China. Kwok was a bit older, but both knew Shanghai during the Japanese occupation, as well as the period before.

Sun’s Betwixt and Between is the more substantial of the two books. Sun was born into what sounds like a middle-class family – her father worked for German conglomerate Siemens – but the Chinese civil war, and her father being accidentally caught up in a foiled embezzlement, almost reduced them to poverty.

Sun herself sold cigarettes and snacks on the street outside the building where three generations of the family lived in one room. The company her family kept, however, remained reasonably cosmopolitan and, somehow through all this, Sun grew up with considerably fluency in English.