It is from China, I am writing to you

Author: Boris Maltin
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: In 1909, Jules Lefevre, a 24-year-old French youth who had studied Chinese at the School of Eastern Languages, bid farewell to his unmarried mother and came to China to serve as his "student interpreter" (referred to as "vice-consul" in his letters), thus beginning his long 36-year diplomatic career in China, until his mysterious death in Harbin in 1945—reportedly from high blood pressure, but Father Chaleille, the French missionary who had last seen him, firmly believed he died from food poisoning, "the poison was administered by the Japanese who bribed his Chinese chef." From Chengdu, Chongqing, Hankou, Shantou, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Beijing, Shanghai, to his final destination Harbin, Jules Lefevre experienced China's turbulent era of transition from monarchy to republic, Yuan Shikai's restoration, warlord chaos, and witnessed key historical moments such as China's two civil wars and the War of Resistance against Japan. At the age of 24, Jules told his mother when he first crossed Northeast China, "It is from China that I am writing to you." Over the 36 years, Jules wrote countless letters to his family, almost daily before his mother also came to China, interspersed with photographs. "These letters had been kept in a box on the attic for three or four decades," discovered by his daughter, born in Chongqing in 1921 and who left China at the age of 16, leading to this biography that weaves together letters and narrative. Jules Lefevre's letters are not just family correspondence, though "he only modestly recounted his daily life in private," his occasional ability to vividly reconstruct reality like a journalist, along with the poet's sensitivity and the novelist's imagination, brought the past to life, "reappearing in the words on the page."