Interviews

Readers' Questions

1.  You started with a narrow account, for your family, of your experiences in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai. However, you substantially broadened the scope to create the book you have now. What motivated you?

There were several motivations. First, I felt the usual account omitted information on what was going on outside the writer's city or internment camp. Also, as I read more, I was concerned about how little I had known before. For instance, previously I had a vague impression that the International Settlement was a colony: I'd never even heard of the Land Regulations for Treaty Ports. I came to the conclusion that my memoir should have a larger scope than the usual story of internment by the Japanese.
     Secondly, I was horrified at the Chinese Holocaust and concerned that I knew virtually nothing about it until taking up my own writing task. The media concentrated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was little or no information about the other side of the story of the Pacific World War II: what horrors the Chinese had suffered. Also, I found there was a third area of conflict: that between the Communists and Nationalists in China. Throughout the memoir, and in a concise way, I've tried to bring out the several sides of the story of what happened during the war.
    Third, accounts of the cosmopolitan, modern, pre-war city of Shanghai fascinated me. I had lived there, but previously knew so little about it, and believed accounts of Treaty Port life, for both foreigners and Chinese, should be included in my memoir as they would be of interest to others.
    Fourthly, there are few people now alive who remember these events and places. Much has been written up in academic books (both Western and Japanese) which few read as they are not very accessible, partly because they are in academic libraries and partly because they are written in a style that is not readily understood by the ordinary reading public. I would like to make this information more available to the public in general.

2.  Why do you think you were so ill-informed about Pacific World War II?

For good and kind reasons, my parents didn't discuss, and distracted us from, the wartime experiences.
    There was another factor, affecting information for everyone, and that was the cover-up of what the Japanese did. As soon as (in the 1930s) the Japanese noticed international disapproval of their actions in the Far East, their governments started a strong and so far (2008) unrelenting propaganda campaign of denial. This was backed by the Allies (in particular the United States) who feared Japan would join the USSR.
    However, there is a third factor, and that is (particularly in N.America) the media's not meeting their responsibilities in investigating and reporting on the Chinese Holocaust. I mentioned the inaccessibility of academic studies to the public, but it is not academics that are expected to inform the general public, it is the media. The media are the people who communicate most directly with the general public.

3.   In your Epilogue you deal in more depth, than is usual for a memoir such as yours, with the aftermath of the war to the present day. Wouldn't it have been preferable, and neater, to end with the dead seagull waving goodbye, and with your Afterword?

I think not (not preferable, not neater). As a child I was impressed with how the tragedies of World War I continued to affect and be remembered by those who survived, in particular for the Scottish branch of my family.
     In the 1930s World War I was very much a presence generally. Wars don't just stop and then everyone returns to normal. They continue to have an effect. For World War II, I believe this is more true of the Pacific war than of the European. In the Pacific apologies and amends were not made and there was actually a concerted effort by the powers involved, on both sides, to cover up. If you want to see Holocaust denial, study what happened to the Chinese from 1931 to the present. One example is the petty attacks from Western academics, and threats by the Japanese right wing, against Iris Chang author of The Rape of Nanking.

4.  In writing Gudao Lone Islet, have you satisfied your own curiosity and interest in the further writing about China?

Indeed No: One area on which I touch in Gudao is the wonderful burgeoning of a modern literary and visual media culture centred largely in Shanghai. In my next book, The Japanese Sandman, I will explore this further through the lives of real people. The Japanese occupation and warfare between rival political and criminal factions in China had a tragic effect on their lives. This will be a devastating story of innocence, love and loss.

5.  Why The Japanese Sandman?

It is the title of an American popular song released in 1920 and is appropriate to the fate of one of the people in the book, the wife of a brilliant young writer of that era. Given that she was a dance hostess, I’ll be able to use the marvellous (mainly American) popular music of this time period (which fellow aficionados such as Dr. Greg Leck will enjoy) as a part of the background. It was widely played in Shanghai. The jointly British and American International Settlement of Shanghai received music and films from the United States far sooner than did Europe. Of course, the flowering of popular writing, and films in the United States had a corresponding one in China.
     There are other connotations to the word sandman: as someone who puts you to sleep (in this case the long sleep of death).