Candid memoir of expatriate life in 1930’s-40’s ChinaWhen I first started reading Emily Hahn’s candid memoir I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a witty and fascinating conversation that I didn’t quite have the context for. There’s a reason for that, when China to Me was first published in ...
When you’ve been stared at and cut dead, you are in danger of taking it out on the next person you encounter. Francie remembered the impulse from the rugged days of school in England: spite leads to spite. Therefore she tried extra hard to be polite to the next person she saw who, as it happened,...
Barclay must not be allowed to suspect anything about the eavesdropping. In the first painful hours, Francie held on to that idea instinctively, not because she felt guilty—she didn’t—but because her head seethed with angry plans, from which she didn’t want to be dissuaded. She wasn’t angry with ...
In the corridor they broke ranks to disperse at a run for class. It was in the corridor that Francie, still in a mood, encountered the person she most disliked in the whole school, the person who, presumably and logically, should have been her best friend—Jennifer Tennison. She caught her breath ...