My latest book is Pearl and Bessie: A baby abandoned on a rubbish dump, and the woman who saved her.
It was co-authored with Julia Bishop.
Here is the cover blurb:
On the rubbish dump, a baby cried.
The cry was weak, and fading. The wild dogs had picked up the cries, and the scent, and were circling, closing in.
Bessie walked towards the sound and found a day-old baby girl. She had been abandoned because of her sex. It happened often here, in south west China.
If Bessie did nothing, the baby would be torn to pieces. So she picked her up, carried her to safety, and later adopted her. Yet, in saving her life, did Bessie condemn the baby she named Pearl to a life of fear and persecution?
This is Pearl’s story, and that of Bessie, plus Alf – Bessie’s then fiancé, later husband – and John, a second Han Chinese child the couple adopted.
Bessie and Alf were Methodist missionaries in Yunnan province, south west China, in the first half of the twentieth century. They lived through momentous times, including the Japanese occupation, the Second World War, the civil war, the Communist takeover and the Cultural Revolution.
They saw the mass movement to Christianity of tens of thousands of members of a downtrodden indigenous people: the Hua Miao.
This book follows their personal stories against the backdrop of a turbulent century. It features...
Pearl: rescued from a rubbish tip, sent to boarding school in England and then training in Southampton as a nurse, and returning to China to practise. Pearl falls in love with a young missionary, Mildred, who is engaged and must choose between her fiancé and Pearl. She chooses her fiancé, perhaps because of the mores of the times.
As a Chinese girl brought up by western Christians Pearl is trapped in the space between two cultures. Life is made hugely complex for her, and highly perilous for periods. Pearl is interrogated, persecuted and attempts suicide during the Cultural Revolution, but eventually finds love and companionship with a woman doctor.
Bessie: a firebrand in a radical church, the Bible Christians, which had championed women preachers since its inception in 1815. An activist who today might espouse causes such as climate change, #MeToo and the treatment of refugees, but whose mission then was to bring the Christian message to indigenous tribes brutally oppressed by the Han Chinese.
John: a boy Bessie and Alf adopt when Pearl leaves for England. John is a troubled, volatile youth with a loathing of authority, who is expelled from his expensive boarding school in Hong Kong, gets into regular scrapes and clashes repeatedly with his step-father. He comes good in the war, working with the American Air Force defending this area of China from the Japanese, and emigrates to America. There he goes through two volatile marriages, dying at 97 having been honoured as a war hero by both America and China.
Alf : a highly practical man who built schools and churches, and also a scholar who loved to debate Confucian philosophy. In 1951, when all foreigners are given two weeks to leave China, he escapes to Hong Kong where he lives the rest of his life. Pearl is allowed out of China twice to be with him, but is refused permission to be with him as he dies.
Their stories are brought vividly to life thanks to a remarkably complete set of letters, diaries, photographs, unpublished memoirs and official records.
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