China Diaries: A Novel of Pre-War China

Few remember there was a war raging in China years before Pearl Harbor was bombed. Though most are aware of Europe's holocaust, China was experiencing its own suffering under the Japanese siege of Shanghai, the infamous rape of Nanking, the capture of Hankow and finally Hong Kong the day World War 2 began. Almost missing from this history is the story of sex slavery and atrocity: of the so-called comfort women, of wholesale massacres, medical experiments, germ and biological warfare. Then there is the story of stateless refugees fleeing the holocaust of Germany and Russia seeking refuge under China's extraterritoriality laws-laws that stoked even higher the flames of Chinese resentment already burning for most anything foreign. Fewer still remember the major part played Pan American World Airways and their subsidiary, CNAC, the Chinese National Aviation Corporation. As the Japanese closed remaining seaports and all but the famous Burma Road, these airlines provided the only communication left with the West. Indeed, during the days after Pearl Harbor one of Pan Am's Clippers, trapped in Australia, flew the first commercial round-the-world flight even as CNAC pioneered flying the most dangerous route in the world-the famous Burma Hump, and the only interior route to the west not controlled by the Japanese. This backdrop sets the stage for my fictional characters to intermingle with the heroes who actually lived during those times and tells their fascinating story. Here's a synopsis: It's 1994. All Captain Stephen Cannon knows of Anna, his Russian émigré mother, and Alex, his aviation-pioneering father, is from their China Diaries, their personal journals that chronicle their courtship in China through Pearl Harbor. Then, after an epic escape from the siege of Hong Kong by Clipper, carrying important documents to the States, Anna disappears into the maelstrom in 1943. From the diaries, Stephen has always been embittered by his conviction that Anna abandoned him as a baby and returned to China with no explanation. Now, fifty years later, he receives a call from a Chinese exchange student whose great uncle has just emigrated to Hong Kong from the PRC bringing with him Anna's Russian map case, journals, a strange medal, and the incredible story of how they escaped the infamous Japanese rape of Nanking, in 1938. Beset with revisionists intent on suppressing his mother's story, Stephen jets to China to recover the diaries and discover the real she left. In doing so, he enters the nineteen-thirties world of his mother: a China beleaguered with warring political factions, ten years of Japanese aggression, espionage, love, betrayal and an environment where émigré women survived using their wits and beauty.