20th Century Chinese History - Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, Pacific Theater - World War II - China & India, China - Travel Essays & Descriptions, Japanese History - World War II & Aftermath, U.S. Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, China - Armed
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Overview
After graduating from Yale in 1937, Edward Gulick spent two years in China's Hunan Province, teaching English at a mission school for Chinese boys. Faced with the prospect of invasion and military occupation by the Japanese, the school's leaders moved the students to safer quarters in a distant town. Gulick participated in the evacuation, traveled widely in the area, and kept detailed journals of his experiences. Drawing on these journals and on a collection of remarkable photographs he took at the time, he has created a memoir in words and images that vividly conveys the texture of daily life during his sojourn in China.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
This compelling memoir, supplemented with 162 photographs, recounts a young Yale graduate's two-year sojourn in central China teaching English at a mission boarding-school for Chinese boys. Gulick refers often to the then-raging Sino-Japanese war, describing air raids and the school's relocation as the Japanese advance. But most impressive here are his observations on the differences between Chinese and American culture, his gentle search for ``the quintessential Chineseness of China'' and his ability to look deeply into ``the nature of everyday things'' as he became ``less an intellectual and more a person.'' Accepted into graduate school, Gulick returned to the U.S. in 1939 and was saddened to discover that the fate of his beloved China was of little interest to Americans. His photos convey with subtle artistry the character of the Chinese people, their towns and cities, their way of life and the haunting landscapes of Hunan Province. Gulick is emeritus professor of history at Wellesley. (July)Library Journal
In this autobiographical account, Gulick (Wellesley emeritus) details a young English teacher's experiences at a middle school in central China during 1937-39. Hired by the Yale organization in China to teach after his 1937 graduation, Gulick experienced Chiang Kai-shek's China during full-fledged Japanese attacks. The story begins with an idyllic school opening followed shatteringly by an air raid at Thanksgiving; the school is moved and the town subsequently destroyed by residents to thwart the Japanese. Fear of more attacks, deteriorating living conditions, news of Hitler in Europe, and, finally, the author's departure from China complete the sequence. Based on journals as well as memories and illustrated with the author's striking contemporary photographs, this account combines a young teacher's perspective with the retrospective insight of a historian. The book is about wartime experiences, not about teaching. Recommended for Asian collections.-Margaret W. Norton, Montay Coll. Lib., ChicagoBooknews
Gulick (history, Wellesley College) relates his experiences teaching English at a mission school for boys for two years in China's Hunan province, drawing on detailed journals he kept during his travels, and the extensive b&w photos he took of Chinese colleagues and neighbors in rural and urban areas in the years before war transformed China and the revolution excluded American observers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
August 31, 1994
Publisher
Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, c1995.
Pages
296
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780870239120