Customer Reviews

An American in China 1936-1939: A Memoir

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the period or traveling to China. The work essentially consists of the diary of Gould Hunter Thomas during a sightseeing trip he took to China in 1936. Due to a strike that occurred in the shipping line on which Thomas had tickets, he quickly found himself marooned in China and short on cash. Through a stroke of luck he landed a job with the Texaco company and spent the next several years traveling around China: from Peking, to Tsingtao, to Chungking and on to Canton. The book gives an excellent impression of what it must have been like to be in China during the Japanese invasion. It is also very well illustrated, with a large number of photos showing the things seen by Thomas during his adventure. I have read a number of works on China during this period but no other work I have encountered provides such an honest and interesting description of the times.

Reading Gould H. Thomas' memoir on his years working for Texaco in China of the mid-to-late 1930s is stepping into a world that simply doesn't exist any longer. It's a wonderful read: the pace moves well and while, beyond Gould, you don't meet many characters you feel much attachment toward -- the book is, after all, taken from the author's diary -- you come away with a good sense of what life in the 1930s was like for an articulate young man with a high sense of adventure.

Thomas is a innocent abroad of sorts. As a Western businessman in China, he lived the good life. But as a first-time traveler truly interested in the "Orient'' of the 1930s, he also reveled in documenting all he saw and felt, and in seeing and experiencing as much as possible. That's what makes reading this memoir 70 years on such a marvel. Thomas really wants to understand this strange new world and its creatures, and happily ventures into the rural hinterlands on Texaco assignments with only a Chinese office helper as companion. Taken along for the journey via his dairy, you're allowed a peak into a past that is lost to us now. Mass communication and travel have erased both the intimacy and the reckless abandon of Thomas's age.

Where today can you find a major city without any Western presence? Where today would an entire hotel staff come out to greet a customer because he hails from a distant land? When's the last time you became "jolly good friends'' with a fellow travel mate?

On his way to China, Thomas writes of walking the streets of a Toyko where not another white face was to be found. He writes of watching a Japanese hotel staff at work and of realizing that "Western superiority'' might not be as claimed. Yet he is also a man of his era. It's jarring that he is hardly bothered by the multitudes of missionaries he meets at the best restaurants and hotels in a clearly impoverished China, or by the fact that the countries's finest port cities, where businessmen are based, are "international zones'' where Chinese laws do not apply.

But here I'm imposing my much more jaded 21st-century mindset on Thomas's open 20th-century memoir. Thomas clearly loved his years in China and recorded them well. As he put it, writing as a brutal war with Japan loomed, "I have to admit there is quite a bit of zest to living over here just now.'' From the tales he has to tell, I'd have to agree.

This is a fascinating book from every angle.... Replete with photographs [old and new] and detailed maps, artwork etc., there are few superlatives that can meet the high standards of this memoir. Every China Hand buff should have a copy of this one on their top shelf. An excellent account of life in Tsingtao in the late 30's. One of the most readable books I've obtained in years, and I've read many of the top books on China.

Interesting book about doing business in China in the 1930'ies with also an eye for society, environment and culture. Colorful, informative and most entertaining map on Peking included. Excellent and very quick service.