My grandmother Gertrude Chaney Pye was a missionary in China from 1909 to 1942. When her husband, Reverend Watts O. Pye, died in 1926, Gertrude did not return to America but instead chose to remain in Shanxi Province to raise her son, my father, Lucian W. Pye. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, then occupied North China in the lead-up to the Second Sino-Japanese War that started in 1937, she stayed. When my father went off to college in the United States in 1939, Gertrude still stayed. Only Pearl Harbor finally forced her to leave. She made passage in 1942 on one of the last boats out, the Gripsholm, a neutral Swedish ship. As a child, I heard many stories about her, but one in particular stood out: during the Japanese occupation, she shooed Japanese soldiers off her front porch with a broom.
When I mentioned this anecdote about my grandmother to my editor, Greg Michalson, who I was fortunate to work with on my first novel, River of Dust, he suggested I write a new novel inspired by her experience. I’m deeply grateful to him for his literary wisdom and keen editorial eye and for his excellent team at Unbridled Books. I’m also thankful to my delightful publicist, Caitlin Hamilton Summie, and to my generous agent, Gail Hochman.
China and Japan scholars Patrick Cranley, Prof. Richard J. Samuels, Virginia Stibbs Anami, Rick Dyck, Jeanne Barnett, and Pat Barnett Brubaker helped me grasp the history of North China in the 1930s. My story was informed in particular by the biographies and journals of three American women who lived in China during that era: Agnes Smedley, Helen Foster Snow, and Nym Wales. The China experiences of my father and his closest friends, Charles T. Cross and Harold R. Isaacs—uncle and grandfather figures to me as a girl—were also crucial, as were seminal texts by Edgar Snow and Jonathan D. Spence, numerous other personal accounts of that time, and several studies of warlords, including one by my father.
This novel was written in his memory and is also for Eva and Daniel, who show me the way as they blaze forward in life.