Book: 'Canton Elegy' by Stephen Lee Jin-nom and Howard Webster
"The story you are about to read will have to make do for the conversations we never had … I thank God for the loan of the four souls that were given into my care."
by Stephen Lee Jin-nom & Howard Webster
Watkins Publishing
4 stars
"The story you are about to read will have to make do for the conversations we never had … I thank God for the loan of the four souls that were given into my care."
So reads the prologue of , the moving autobiography of Stephen Lee Jin-nom written in 1955 as a record for his four children and the children they would have in the future. He wanted them to know the extraordinary life of a quiet man who ran the local grocery shop.
After his death in April 1970, the manuscript sat in an attic in the family home in San Francisco, California. It was during Christmas 2011 that the autobiography was read by Howard Webster, a Briton married to Julianne Lee, one of his grandchildren. They were visiting to present their newly born twins.
"Even though English was not his first language, I thought it quite beautiful and moving and in places utterly harrowing," says Webster, a writer, photographer and film director who lives in London. "It is a love letter to his kids. It is a very unusual thing."
After their return to Britain, Webster began editing the book and showed it to his literary agent.
Born in a village in Zhongshan, Guangdong province, in November 1902, Lee was sent to the US by his grandfather in 1910 after the death of his father.
