Slow Boat to China: The Personal Diaries and Letters of Pegge Parker, 1942-1951

Pegge Parker lived two lives. Her second life was as a wife, mother and freelance journalist, but her first was the wild adventure of a courageous young woman traveling the world on her writing skills alone. In a time before cell phones or email, when the world seemed much larger, Pegge moved from Washington D.C., where she was a newspaper columnist, to live in places such as Alaska, China, India, and the rest of Europe, making a living as a freelance reporter. Communication took days or weeks at a time. World War II was raging. Governments were collapsing and being reborn from the ashes. The Cold War was on the brink of starting. And she was a woman, trekking the world alone, keeping meticulous notes on every place, person and thing she encountered, seemingly fearless. In this intimate collection of Pegge's diaries and letters, you will delve deep into the heart and mind of their author. Love found and lost, lives created and taken away, the everyday struggles of a female reporter, who becomes so enmeshed in the beginnings of the Cold War, that neither she, nor anyone around her seemingly knows what is happening. Through her own words, you'll travel with Pegge through the intricate web of her life: sometimes as the one weaving the web and others as the one entangled in it. Hers is a story you won't soon forget.

John and Pegge spent their lives traveling the world reporting as foreign press correspondents. John first taught English in China during the 1930s, after graduating from Carleton College. He then joined the United Press in 1944 as a war correspondent. He met Pegge Parker, a beautiful widowed journalist with an eye toward writing her way around the world. They married, living and working in India during the first years of their marriage. The Hlavaceks were then off to New York and next Jamaica, where John and Pegge supported the family by covering news events across the globe. In 1961, the family moved to Florida when John began work as staff correspondent for NBC in Havana. John and Pegge meticulously chronicled their lives before and after they met-and the stories they brought to us from afar. Today, John resides in Omaha, Nebraska. Pegge passed away in November 2008.