An excerpt from Searching for Billie sheds light on the life of a World War II internee at Hong Kong’s Stanley camp – the author’s mother – in the chaotic days following the Japanese surrender.
1.Addressing an audience at the Hong Kong YMCA in February 1927, the writer Lu Xun (the pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881–1936) warned that despite ten years of literary revolution and the promotion of a written vernacular language, Chinese people had still not found a voice. They were all living in what he called wushengde Zhongguo, “voiceless China.” “Youth must first transform