Searching for Billie

Ian Gill's first visit to Hong Kong in 1975 takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great-grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s – and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985.

The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China's turbulent century from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s to the advent of communism.

Journalist Gill, conceived in a Japanese prison camp, recounts the story of Billie Newman, his Chinese mother. He uncovers and documents her turbulent past in pre-World War II and pre-Communist China. In this deeply personal account, he discovers her remarkable journey from an adopted child - raised as British too, she considered herself to be Eurasian - to an adult working and socializing in the milieu of tycoons, diplomats, journalists, intellectuals, United Nations officials, and many others in 1930s and 1940s China. His book paints a fascinating picture of middle and upper-class life in Hong Kong, Singapore, Nanjing, Manila, Wellington, and what is now called Chongqing. In addition to researching historical records to unravel his mother's life story and her English roots, he visited China with her and called on some of her friends and acquaintances. Physical distance and past conflicts had significantly damaged his relationship with his mother, but his book shows that their travels together and his learning much more about her changed both of their lives and relationship for the better. VERDICT: Readers interested in Chinese history, Asian and Western relations, especially pre-World War II and pre-Communist China will enjoy this book.--Mark Jones "Library Journal"

Because of his mother’s circumstances, Ian Gill was conceived in a Japanese prison camp in Hong Kong in 1945 and born in New Zealand after liberation. With his mother, he spent his early life in England, China and Bangkok. After boarding school, university and joining newspapers in England, he worked as a journalist in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Hawaii (where he took a master’s degree as a grantee with the East-West Center), Hong Kong and Singapore for 14 years. In 1985, he joined the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral financing institution with headquarters in Manila. Over two decades, he travelled widely around the Asia-Pacific region, writing and producing video documentaries.Since 2006, Gill has returned to journalism. During his exposure to a wide range of countries, he has paid particular attention to cultural differences in attitudes towards race, class and gender and how they have evolved over the past two centuries.

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