‘A multi-generational family saga’

Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to
discover a vanished China
by Ian Gill

Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2024
$25.85  /  9789887554660

Reviewed by Tom Koppel

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In 1916, a 40-day old Chinese girl of unknown parentage was adopted by an Anglo-Chinese family. This was the mother of author Ian Gill. He calls her Billie, but she also went by several other names and nicknames during her long and fascinating life, one filled with more than a little turmoil and tragedy.

Searching for Billie is a multi-generational family saga. Gill himself was conceived during a wartime romance when Billie was interned by the Japanese in Hong Kong, but was born in Britain shortly after hostilities ended. His father, who eventually settled in British Columbia, already had a wife and child in Canada, and Gill did not meet him until, as an adult, he had begun doing research for this book.

Billie was a survivor. Her life included wild ups and downs, including a failed marriage and a first son who died in a drowning accident. At times she was nearly destitute. At other times, her family hobnobbed with the largely British elite, which was a powerful force in China, as well as with some top personages in, or close to, the Nationalist (Kuomintang) regime. In her later life, she held a high position with the United Nations in Geneva and met Queen Elizabeth when she was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

The book takes us through various phases in China’s modern history, from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s and the Boxer Rebellion, through both world wars, the Japanese conquest and occupation of China, and the advent of Communism. Set against that background, we meet Billie’s 19th century ancestors, including several who ran hotels in England and China and were involved with the P & O (Peninsular & Oriental) shipping line, which dominated the routes between Britain and the Far East.

One key figure was Billie’s father, British-born Frank Newman, whose career was as a customs and post office official, first for the Imperial Chinese government and later, after Sun Yat-sen’s 1911 revolution, for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. Billie’s Chinese mother had traditional bound feet, which prevented her from travelling easily, whereas Frank’s work and personal life took him around most of China and to Europe and America as well. Away from his family much of the time, he eventually had a separate second family with a Russian-born woman and her daughter. Billie’s mother sued him for desertion and non-support.

Billie received an excellent education in Shanghai at a private British school. Most pupils were British, but it also took in some children from mixed British-Chinese marriages, although these liaisons were in fact discouraged by a “British community that equated whiteness with superiority.” Her perfect written and spoken English were rare enough to open doors for Billie throughout her life. She worked many years for a Shanghai cultural magazine published by the American-educated son of Sun Yat-sen. She also worked part-time as a secretary for the British consulate in Shanghai and for Chiang’s top foreign advisor, and became a prominent radio news broadcaster. She had fleeting contacts with visiting foreign celebrities, including Ernest Hemingway.  When they met, China’s First Lady, Madame Chiang, told her: “I’ve heard all about you. May I call you Billie?”

As the Japanese army closed in on Shanghai and bombed it, “Almost every evening…Billie Lee went on air. The time of the broadcast stayed the same, but the studio location changed every few days to avoid detection by the Japanese.” She was even issued a bulletproof vest. Ultimately, her magazine and its staff were relocated to British-run Hong Kong, which fell to the Japanese only days after Pearl Harbor.

Billie suffered the privations of tight captivity, increasingly serious food shortages, and disease outbreaks. She had to have her appendix removed in primitive conditions. Her British passport protected her from the atrocities, including rape, that befell thousands of Chinese women, although even Europeans risked torture and execution. During the occupation, she became attached to Australian-born George Giffen, a journalist who had written for London’s Daily Telegraph and the Toronto Star, and had risen to deputy editor of a major Hong Kong daily paper. His Canadian wife and daughter had been evacuated to Canada. After Billie’s son’s drowning, Giffen was very supportive. They decided to have a child (author Ian Gill) together. Billie hoped this relationship would last, but when the war ended, Giffen chose to join his wife and daughter in Canada, where they soon had a second daughter. Billie was left with a young child and had to get on with life, first in New Zealand but then in Britain, in Bangkok, back in China before the Communist takeover, and eventually in Geneva.

When Gill was nearly 40, he finally got to meet his father. At the time, Gill was “facing changes in his peripatetic life. He had come out of a painful divorce and was about to change jobs and
countries” for the seventh time in 14 years. Getting to know George Giffen, then in his mid-70s and living on bucolic Denman Island, BC, was a pleasant surprise. “Their conversation was desultory but not awkward.  Ian felt as if they were catching up after a long absence.” Giffen’s two daughters, both married teachers, made their half-brother feel welcome. “It’s nice to have a son in the family,” George told Ian, who would return to visit his father several times, “so much so that Billie grew jealous of the vacation time he spent in Vancouver when she wanted him in Geneva.”

The book offers rich insights into aspects of Chinese geography and history many readers will probably know little about. We learn about the remote cities and regions where Frank Newman worked, and about the non-British concessions, such as Russian, German, and Japanese. Frank’s parents were a British couple who settled in Chefoo and ran a high-end hotel. Today known as Yantai, the city has seven million people. Back then, it was an idyllic seaside resort town where the well-fixed Brits of Beijing and Shanghai escaped to clean and less crowded surroundings.

We meet some colourful characters: Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen was a pistol-packing con man, card shark, and former bodyguard to Sun Yat-sen. Emily (“Mickey”) Hahn, who became Billie’s lifelong friend, was an American author and New Yorker contributor, who smoked cigars (as well as opium) and carried around a pet gibbon. While in China, she worked on a book about the women of the Chiang family.

We enjoy the sub-story of how Ian Gill uncovered the riveting tale of his mother and her family. This required extensive archival research and interviewing as well as accompanying Billie on visits to Geneva, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Communist-run Shanghai. The latter was a “world that, in the areas where she had lived, had changed almost beyond recognition.” The “open society that had embraced interchange with the west…had gone forever.  In the places they…revisited, colour and distinctiveness had been replaced by a grey uniformity.”  Fortunately, for the reader, Billie’s life story itself was anything but grey.

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Tom Koppel is a veteran BC author and journalist who has published five books on history and science. For 35 years, he has contributed feature articles to major magazines, including Canadian Geographic, Archaeology, American Archaeology, Equinox, The Beaver, Reader’s Digest, Western Living, Isands, Oceans, and The Progressive. His book Kanaka: The Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (Whitecap Books, 1995) is available by email from  koppel@saltspring.com  Tom lives with his wife Annie Palovcik on Salt Spring Island. Editor’s note: Tom Koppel has also reviewed books by Dr. Allen Jones, M.D., Kirsten Bell, Steven Earle, Daniel Kalla, Britt Wray, and May Q. Wong,  for The British Columbia Review.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
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Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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