Searching for Billie: Discovering a vanished China
About
Join us for a presentation by Ian Gill, author of Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to discover a vanished China. Ian’s first visit to Hong Kong takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s – and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985. The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China’s turbulent century from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s to the advent of communism.Because of his mother’s circumstances, Ian Gill was conceived in a Japanese prison camp in Hong Kong in 1945 and born in New Zealand after liberation. With his mother, he spent his early life in England, China and Bangkok. After boarding school, university and joining newspapers in England, he worked as a journalist in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Hawaii (where he took a master’s degree as a grantee with the East-West Center), Hong Kong and Singapore for 14 years. In 1985, he joined the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral financing institution with headquarters in Manila. Over two decades, he travelled widely around the Asia-Pacific region, writing and producing video documentaries.
The presentation will be followed by a banquet starting at 6:30pm at Emperor’s Garden Restaurant 96-100 Hay St, Haymarket to celebrate Chinese New Year.
Location
Ideas Space Darling Square Library
The Exchange, Level 1, 1 Little Pier Street, Haymarket NSW 2000
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Searching for Billie: Discovering a vanished China
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