China Diaries: A Novel [Paperback]

Stephen Cannon never knew his parents, both of whom died during World War II. The only connection he has with them is in the form of the journals they left behind, journals he calls the China Diaries because they describe the life of his parents in China in the late 1930s. His father was a pilot who flew for the China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), while his mother was a Russian émigré from Shanghai who worked for the CNAC, married his father against the backdrop of the opening hostilities in Hong Kong, and - for reasons Stephen never understood - left her newborn baby in the States in order to return to China in the early 1940s, whereupon she disappeared. Fifty years later, a young Chinese exchange student contacts Stephen out of the blue and tells him that his great-uncle has information about his mother, Anna Boreisha Cannon, and is eager to share it with him - in fact, the man claims to owe his very life to Anna. Soon, Stephen is on his way to Hong Kong, hoping to finally learn the enigmatic secrets of his mother's extraordinary life.

This is really Anna's story, and it is a truly remarkable one. Some of it comes in the form of her journal entries, but most of it is presented in standard narrative form. Life as a young Russian girl in Shanghai held little promise in the 1930s, but Anna's father saw to it that his daughter was highly educated. That education provided the means for her to get a job with the CNAC and escape her home town when the Japanese invaded. Anna spent the rest of her life seemingly running just ahead of the invading Japanese army. She was in Hong Kong when it was attacked, she witnessed the horrors of the rape of Nanking, and she desperately sought to get word of the Japanese atrocities out to the rest of the world, naively believing they would come to China's aid if they only knew what was really taking place at the murderous hands of the Japanese. While she was in Hong Kong, she met and fell in love with American pilot Alex Cannon, and the reader is treated to an intimate look at their loving relationship as seen against the backdrop of war. Now following his mother's footsteps in Hong Kong and China, Stephen finally learns the remaining history of the mother he never knew. It all makes for a powerful story, one quite capable of changing lives even in the here and now.

China Diaries paints an incredibly revealing portrait of China during the decade of Japanese aggression. It is an ugly time of war, prejudice, treason, betrayal, and mass murder, yet it also extols the incredible bravery of extraordinary women such as Anna and the men of the CNAC who continued to support the Chinese people as best they could in their time of need. This is the story of World War II as it played out on the other side of the globe, a story made no less horrifying by its lack of German concentration camps or sadistic storm troopers. The historical events making up the foundation of this novel did actually happen. The rest of the world, as typified by the League of Nations, ignored the plight of a suffering people in the 1930s and thereby helped bring about the global conflagration of World War II and the later scourge of Communism to the world's most populous country. One must never ignore the horrors of man's inhumanity to man because such horrors will not end until good men somewhere work up the fortitude to take it upon themselves to stop it. China Diaries is not about the U.S. war effort that eventually turned the tides of war, but it does offer insights into the reluctance of America to join the noble fight up until everything changed on a peaceful Sunday morning in Pearl Harbor. We must learn from the mistakes of the past, and China Diaries - besides telling an incredibly gripping story - makes for an excellent and very instructive history lesson for us all.

In CHINA DIARIES, author Louis Stannard's intent is to educate the reader about Pan American's trans-Pacific service to the Orient via its China Clipper flying boats in the latter half of the 1930s, as well as to lay bare Japanese military barbarisms perpetuated against the Chinese citizens of Nanking between December 1937 and March 1938.

This book's timeline, straightened out by me for simplicity's sake, begins in Shanghai in 1936, where 18-year old Anna Boreisha lives with her parents, members of the Russian aristocracy forced to flee their country by the Bolshevik Revolution and now living in China as undocumented expatriates. Anna gets a job with the Chinese National Airline Corporation (CNAC), a Pan Am subsidiary. As the Japanese invade China in the mid-1930s, Anna witnesses first hand the invader's horrific Rape of Nanking. The young woman escapes, washing up, still employed with CNAC, in Hong Kong, where she meets Pan American Second Officer Alex Cannon. The two are married on December 8th during the initial stages of the Japanese assault on the Crown Colony, and a day after Pearl Harbor. Alex decides to take his new wife back to the States, and they flee by flying west to New York on a China Clipper marooned in Asia by the war's outbreak. Back in America, Anna soon gives birth to a son, Stephen, whom she immediately leaves behind with her in-laws to return to Southeast Asia to be near Alex, now flying military supplies over The Hump, and to try and extricate her parents from Shanghai. Anna disappears in China in 1942. Conveniently, Anna is a dedicated diarist, and she leaves journals scattered all over the world, and which serve to tie the plot together.

Stannard's timeline is incredibly convoluted. He begins his story in 1994 with an adult Stephen Cannon, a pilot with Trans Artic Airlines. Stephen has his mother's diaries from late 1941 to just prior to her disappearance. In New York, he's contacted by a young Chinese student whose great-uncle, just escaped from Red China, once facilitated Anna's escape from Nanking, and who claims has more of her journals. As Stephen wings his way to Hong Kong to meet the old man, the author switches to late 1941 and relates the love story and freedom flight to the US of Anna and Alex. Then, switching back to 1994, Stephen collects Anna's diaries from 1936 to 1938, to which time Stannard returns with Anna's story for that period. Then, jumping forward again to 1994, Stephen discovers yet more of his mother's journals written after her "disappearance", as well as witnesses to her activities immediately prior, and the storyline ends with those events. All the while in the 1994 "present", Stephen is menaced by agents of an ultra-nationalist Japanese organization wishing to suppress evidence of the Nanking atrocities.

CHINA DIARIES was not a book I couldn't put down. As a matter of fact, it was So Not A Book I Couldn't Put Down, that I did just that to read another trashy novel that was much more engaging.

Though CHINA DIARIES is occasionally interesting to the extent that it describes Pan Am's Clipper operations and the Japanese Army's capture and occupation of Nanking, the book has significant problems. First, it's way too convoluted; a straightforward plot evolution focusing on Anna from 1936 to 1943, intersecting with Alex and Pan Am as a subcharacter and subplot respectively, would've better served. The 1994 "present" with Stephen was entirely unnecessary, in my opinion. Most damaging, however, was the cookie-cutter sameness of all the characters, and a plot that positively dragged between the occasional interesting bits. Let me explain the former by digressing for just a paragraph to make an analogy...

John Wayne was one of Hollywood's greatest entertainers, but he was a lousy actor. The Duke imparted no unique identity to any of his characters in his many films; they all simply played John Wayne under different names and in different costumes.

Though I applaud Stannard's effort - I certainly couldn't even begin to write a novel, but only pen amateurish and superficial reviews - all of his characters in this book "sound" the same. In any work of fiction, this negative attribute drives me nuts. All of the author's text derives from and reflects the personality of Stannard, and each fictional character is created simply by inserting quotation marks, attaching a different name, and switching to a first person grammatical construction. These techniques, by themselves, don't create interesting or engaging personae.

If, as a reader, I wanted to learn more about Pan Am's China Clipper service and/or the Rape of Nanking, I suspect I'd have been better served by picking up one of the non-fiction histories referenced by the author in his concluding "Acknowledgements". Despite Stannard's laudably extensive historical knowledge that was the basis for CHINA DIARIES, I invested too much time on this book and got back too little.