Teaching in Wartime China: A Photo-Memoir, 1937-1939

After graduating from Yale in 1937, Edward Gulick spent two years in China's Hunan Province, teaching English at a mission school for Chinese boys. Faced with the prospect of invasion and military occupation by the Japanese, the school's leaders moved the students to safer quarters in a distant town. Gulick participated in the evacuation, traveled widely in the area, and kept detailed journals of his experiences. Drawing on these journals and on a collection of remarkable photographs he took at the time, he has created a memoir in words and images that vividly conveys the texture of daily life during his sojourn in China. Gulick is a keen observer and his narrative successfully interweaves two voices: that of the earnest young man who found himself caught up in the turbulence of central China on the eve of World War II, and that of the historian who pondered the experience for many years while teaching the history of China and Japan at Wellesley College.