A unique meeting between the authors of two moving books based on their mothers’ contrasting experiences of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Betty Barr will discuss Ruth’s Record, an annotated version of her American mother’s wartime diary, which provides a gripping account of life in Lunghua internment camp. Keiko Itoh’s My Shanghai 1942-46 is a sensitively-observed, fictionalised account of her Christian Japanese mother’s struggle to come to terms with her privileged position in a city at war, and the growing conflict between her loyalty to her country and her own values. Moderated by Duncan Hewitt.
