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Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A Childhood in Wartime China

by Michael David Kwan

Despite its unprepossessing title, Vancouverite Michael David Kwan’s memoir, spanning the mid-1930s to the late ’40s, is an engrossing book. The son of a young Swiss woman (who quickly disappears from his life) and a wealthy Chinese father, young Kwan is born with brown hair and a long nose, both emblems of his stigmatization as a half-caste. Precocious and determined, he defies family tradition by refusing to kowtow to his paternal grandmother, or to play the whipping boy for Catholic teachers and peers.

One of the special achievements of this fascinating book is the intertwining of two stories: one of family and friends, and another of wartime China itself. The country is torn apart by Japanese aggression as well as by an intense internal political struggle between Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalists (who find support among the urban middle-class) and Mao Tse Tung’s communists (who appeal to the rural masses). But equally invidious are the deep-seated racial and social biases that plague Chinese society. The author’s voice issues from the deep hurt of one who is caught between the two vastly dissimilar worlds of China and Europe. Lacking the company of his parents or his two older brothers, and left in the care of a major-domo and a coddling nanny, he discovers soon enough the limbo of the half-caste, whether he’s in Beijing, Qingdao, Tianjin, or Shanghai.

Not that the book is wholly sombre in tone – there are amusements and diversions galore. Kwan embroiders comic incidents and characters into the narrative fabric, and if some of these appear to make too much of exaggerated eccentricity – both on the part of Westerners and the Chinese – there is an undeniable truth at their core.

But there is sharp pain mixed into the mirth. After all the tumult and turbulence – public executions, wartime platitudes and propaganda, and the incarceration of Kwan’s heroic father – the inner story is one of bruised longings, heartbreaking solitudes, and lives collapsing inward after partings and departures.

 

Reviewer: Keith Garebian

Publisher: Macfarlane Walter & Ross

DETAILS

Price: $29.99

Page Count: 244 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 1-55199-049-0

Released: May

Issue Date: 2000-5

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, History

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