Family Memories

Shanghai identity parade

Why did a schoolboy of 14 need 3 pieces of identity simply to exist in Wartime Shanghai? In 1941 my father was thirteen years old and had a British passport. By August 1942 he also needed papers from the Swiss Consulate and the Vichy-administered French Concession. Three documents for one boy — and a small […]

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History is Doubt

Leave a Comment / Family Memories / Suzhou

Reconstructing a life from silence, missing archives and contradictory memories How do you write about someone’s life when the people involved wouldn’t talk about it, the archives have holes in them, and the surviving sources sometimes disagree? While researching “Murder at the Docks”, I gradually realised that silence, missing records and contradictory memories weren’t simply

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