Bold Plum: with the Guerillas in China's War against Japan - Softcover

Lindsay, Hsiao Li

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1430302925 ISBN 13: 9781430302926

Publisher: Lulu.com, 2006

Synopsis

Hsiao Li Lindsay is a master storyteller and a historian's dream. She offers a day-by-day account of flight from Beijing [in 1941] with Japanese troops in pursuit, years with the Communist guerrillas in North China, childbirth on the trail, and refuge in Yenan. Bold Plum shows us the communist movement in all its precarious local variation. Lindsay's keen eye and prodigious memory are a gift to us all. Gail Hershatter, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA./ This is a rare item. Bold Plum has all the virtues of a remarkably sharp authorial memory and a story line that ranges from tragically massacred peasant villages to living intimately with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Lin Biao, and the whole gang. Jerome Silbergeld, Professor of Chinese Art and Film, Princeton University, USA./ I just couldn't put Bold Plum down. Her courage and the choices she had to make are amazing. Fatima Jibrell, Goldman Environmental Prize 2002./ Hsiao Li lives in Beijing, China.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Bold Plum is for the first time available in its original English. It has been published three times in its Chinese translation.

Bold Plum can be read as a fast paced story of love and adventure or as a source of information for scholars who want to know more about the social history of this formative period of Chinese history.

From the Author:

In 1947, when I started to write my story, Bold Plum, the tumultuous events in China of which I had so recently been a part were swirling through my head. I wrote in English because I wanted people throughout the world to know how the Chinese people had suffered during the anti-Japanese war and how they had fought courageously with very few resources.

My story is one woman's experience of the Chinese resistance to the Japanese occupation. My narrative is from a particular point of view, and an unusual one at that, of a Chinese woman activist married to a non-Chinese, who lived and worked side by side with the Communist Army in the guerrilla areas of north China and with the Chinese Communist Party at their wartime headquarters at Yenan.

My story is also a love story between a Chinese woman (myself) and an English man (Michael Lindsay, who became Lord Lindsay of Birker). A Chinese woman marrying a foreigner was almost unthinkable at the time. My story is one of courage and the hardships we endured during our life together under the Japanese occupation of China from 1937 - 1945.

At Yenching University in Beijing, my husband Michael and I were secretly helping the Chinese Communist army in their fight against the Japanese. We were almost caught by the Japanese on the day of the Pearl Harbor bombing in 1941. We dashed out one gate of the University, just as the Japanese secret police came in the other gate to arrest us. For two and one half years we were constantly on the move with the Communist Army in the guerrilla areas of north China, in order to evade the Japanese Army. In 1944 we made a dangerous 500-mile journey with frequent crossings of Japanese lines of control to reach Yenan, the wartime headquarters of the Chinese Communists.

Times have changed since 1947. There is now ever-increasing interest in China in the English-speaking world. My story is part of the history of a turbulent period in China seen through the eyes of a woman who lived through it.

About this edition

• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1430302925
• ISBN 13: 9781430302926
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 360