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Eileen Kan was my “Chinese mother” during the time I lived and taught in China.
Using my cheap portable tape recorder, she dictated her remarkable story to me in English over a series of weeks in 1989. The famous student democracy demonstrations were gripping the attention of the world as we sat in her room and she described the experiences that underpinned that “chaos.” Alone, she managed to survive the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, the terrible privations of the Mao years, and finally China's first tentative opening to the outside world.
Eileen’s very personal story is also the story of what the times were like for ordinary Chinese people. And those years are never far from the hearts of today’s Chinese people as they embrace their future.
--Marsha Bryant
Eileen Kan was my “Chinese mother” during the time I lived and taught in China.
Using my cheap portable tape recorder, she dictated her remarkable story to me in English over a series of weeks in 1989. The famous student democracy demonstrations were gripping the attention of the world as we sat in her room and she described the experiences that underpinned that “chaos.” Alone, she managed to survive the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, the terrible privations of the Mao years, and finally China's first tentative opening to the outside world.
Eileen’s very personal story is also the story of what the times were like for ordinary Chinese people. And those years are never far from the hearts of today’s Chinese people as they embrace their future.
--Marsha Bryant
