My Dear Boy by Joanie Holzer Schirm

Author:Joanie Holzer Schirm
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO006000 Biography & Autobiography / Historical
Publisher: Potomac Books

I didn’t think I would hear back from the author, but a month later he answered. Agreeing to be a source, I typed a five-page response, attempting to share pertinent on-the-ground information for his next book:

You can’t know how happy I was to receive your letter; correspondence in Czech is my only conversation in my mother tongue. The milieu I live in is entirely Chinese. Chinese is also my language of communication, and I can use English only rarely, when in contact with American missionaries, and lately also Russian, which I speak with a few fellows who are wandering around in the surroundings and about whom I shall write to you. I beg your pardon if my letter is longer than such dispatches tend to be and if I allow for the dam of my self-retained glibness to burst.

I will answer your letter, when possible, point by point: Czechs are present in the Far East in respectable numbers. However, they are mostly settled in large towns on the coast. There is a large Czech colony in Charbin and in various places in Manchuria. These are either immigrants from Russia, who came here during the time of the revolution, or legionnaires who did not return to the motherland. Next to Skodovaci and Batovci—Škoda and Bata employees working abroad—you will find various characters here, from a city policeman in Shanghai to the director of a noodle factory, a makeup artist in the theater in Charbin, the owner of a dry cleaner’s in Tsing Tao, I could list a number of these characters and minor characters from Manzuli to Colombo. But where doesn’t one meet a compatriot?—I have already seen a nice-haired beauty bow down in the Blue mosque in Constantinople and heard her talk in a Prague accent; I ate ice cream at an ice cream maker, formerly a clerk in the Abyssinia bank in Addis Ababa. I think that you, in your novel, borrowed the address of the only Czech in Peking, Mr. Kara, and put old Hall there, the only difference being that Mr. Kara lives on Kuang An Men Wai and not Way. This wai means “outside” in Chinese, the address thus means that it is outside of the gate of Kuang An (huge, spectacular) and, therefore, has nothing to do with the English way.

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