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Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood (2014)

by James McMullan(Favorite Author)

3.92 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1616202556 (ISBN13: 9781616202552)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Algonquin Young Readers

review 1: Read the galley. It's a beautifully written memoir of a British child in colonial China, and his travels to the US, Canada, colonial India, and eventually back to North America both before, during and after the Second World War. The few color illustrations I saw were luminescent. I was troubled, however, that although as children we take the world we live in for granted, as an adult, the author didn't question the colonialist privilege he grew up in.
review 2: Like Tomi Unger's memoir of his childhood during the Nazi occupation of Alsace, this is an adult illustrator of children's books interpreting difficult things he now understands years later. McMullan's family were prominent missionary-turned-textile brokers in 1930s China, and he gradually picked up on t... morehe tensions and constraints of the Japanese occupation, as well as his privileged position as a British colonist, culminating in an escape to Canada in 1940. While his father served in the British Army in Burma, McMullan stayed in Canada and then a boarding school in India, observing vastly different home fronts of WWII. This is an odd book--a children's illustrated panel book in form, but a very sad, adult memoir of loss and perspective in content. less

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