Ian Gill

I am the child of an unusual relationship that began in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hong Kong in World War Two. My parents began their relationship following my mother's devastating loss of her first son in a drowning accident in camp. Their relationship helped to sustain them during the last year of captivity but would face challenges when Liberation arrived in August 1945. I would not learn of my mother's full story until we had a holiday in Hong Kong 30 years later and she introduced me to friends, colleagues and POWs from her tumultuous past in Shanghai and Hong Kong and her subsequent struggles to survive and raise me on her own. After my mother was evacuated from Hong Kong, I was born in New Zealand and spent my early years with her in England, China and Thailand. After boarding school and university in England, I became a journalist, working in England, New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Hawaii (where I took a master's degree with the East West Center), Hong Kong and Singapore. In 1985, I joined the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral financing institution based in Manila, and spent over 20 years travelling widely around the Asia-Pacific region, including several trips to China, writing and producing video documentaries. I returned to journalism, including the unravelling of my mother's journey from a controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and romance in a Japanese internment camp in Hong Kong to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. My search uncovered three generations of my Anglo-Chinese family in China, including an English farm girl who ended up owning one of the best-known hotels on the China coast and her son Frank who helped pioneer the establishment of the China Post Office in often remote areas of China. I also tell of meeting my father and half-sisters in Canada at age 40.