What happens to two small Anglo-American children during World War II when the Japanese invade China? Their British father, Ted, who held a position as a salt mine inspector, is killed and their American mother, Alice, who was born in Peking, China, in 1908, is taken as a prisoner-of-war. This is the dramatic true story at the center of Jennifer Dobbs’ masterful and moving memoir, LOST IN CHINA: A Memoir of World War II.
First time author and 86-year old Dobbs’ narrative and descriptive skills are that of a seasoned writer and she does an excellent job conveying the voice of her six-year-old self while effectively describing the people and places she and her younger brother, John, encountered growing up in China. When the father of a family they know is killed in a riverboat accident, she writes, “Whenever I think about Penny and her brother not having their Daddy anymore, I’m very sad and feel like crying. I’m lucky I’m a girl. Girls are allowed to cry.” Dobb’s recounting is also impressively solid in its historical information but, to avoid weighing down her narrative, the various facts are relegated to footnotes at the end of each chapter. These range from Japan going to war with China two years before the official 1939 start of World War II to salt being taxed in China since 300 BC (and this tax being the main source of finance for the Great Wall) to a description of Craven A, a popular brand of British cigarettes during the war that came in “flat red metal boxes of twenty and round metal tins of one hundred; a black cat was pictured on the red cover.”)
Indeed, Dobbs is so historically informed that these notes could form the basis for a fascinating book about Chinese society in the early 20th century. In some chapters, she paints scenes she had no personal experience of, relying on scraps of information, and indicates this by using the phrase “My Imagination” in her chapter headings. Moreover, Dobbs is so skilled a writer that even these scenes do not interrupt the more fact-based majority of the memoir. As Dobbs puts it, “Most of the story is true. What isn’t true was invented to make sense of the true.” Her memoir is not only a fascinating personal story, but a portrait of values and attitudes that created Western civilization, which are now considered politically incorrect.
Impressively solid in its historical information and skillfully written, Jennifer Dobbs’ LOST IN CHINA: A Memoir of World War II, effectively describes the people and places she encountered growing up with loving and evocative attention.
~Kevin Baldeosingh for IndieReader