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This is the true story of three-generations of an Anglo-Chinese family who lived in China during a turbulent era of conflicts from the 19th century till modern times. When the central character, “Billie,” was born in Changsha, China, in 1916, she was such a tiny baby that her Chinese parents may have feared for her survival.  She arrived in a basket at the welcoming home of an English postmaster and his Chinese wife. Her adoptive father was a highly unusual Englishman who was raised in China from infancy, spoke Chinese fluently and understood and respected the Chinese. He also risked his career by breaking social convention in marrying a Chinese. He sent his new daughter to top-English-speaking schools, an education she parlayed into a career in Shanghai with Reuters news agency and then T’ien Hsia, an influential cultural magazine written by Chinese and western scholars as a bridge between east and west.

She worked with people who would play a prominent role in China’s history, as well as American writer Emily “Mickey” Hahn who become a lifelong friend. In 1937, after the Japanese started war against China, Billie unexpectedly became a radio broadcaster for Free China, a job she held until she and her colleagues fled for Hong Kong. They set up a Chinese Government Information Office as a conduit between the Nationalist government in Chungking and the outside world.  ​She worked for W.H.Donald, the Australian journalist and close adviser to Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling, who would offer Billie a position as personal aide. When war came to Hong Kong in 1941, Billie and her young son Brian became prisoners-of-war in a Japanese internment camp. She endured years of starvation and the devastating loss of her son. An unexpected romance with an English journalist pulled her back from the abyss but Liberation led to their separation. 

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