This is a very cursory summation of our families' connections with the Far East. Those who may be interested in further information should contact me via e-mail (edperry@ix.netcom.com).
My grandfather, Harold Abbott Rand Conant, is of course the author of the journals and so any further description of his lengthy involvement in Asia here is unwarranted. But his first ties with China did not begin when, as a young engineer (following education at Cornell and Heidelberg (Germany) Universities), he found employment with Standard Oil and took his young bride to the Far East. His own father, Henry John Conant, owned a famous Boston trading company which had extensive dealings in the Far East since the days of the China Clippers (large, 3- and 4-masted sailing ships). H.J. Conant, in turn, was descended from a large number of prominent New England families, the Conant surname, in particular, having its base in Roger Conant, one of the original ''Old Planters'' who first settled that part of the country.
My mother, Elizabeth Dorothy Conant, was HARC's oldest child, and though born in Montclair, New Jersey, was taken by her parents as an infant to China. There she grew up in a household of servants, her ''amah'' (Ah Ging) speaking nothing but Mandarin to her during her early years, so that Mother, in fact, did not even speak English until the age of 6 when she began formal schooling! Her brother (my uncle), Harold Slocum Conant (''Sunny'') was later born in Hong Kong, and was eventually joined by HARC's third child, Elaine Melvin Conant, the entire family then settling into many years' life in Shanghai, where Mother attended the Shanghai American School. She was also befriended by Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai (from whom she lived across the street) and was given a book by her at one time which is in my possession. During the horrendous early era of Japan's war with China during the 1930s, Mother could stand on the roof of hotels in Shanghai, watching the Japanese planes bomb the Chinese civilian population - the world's first such instance of such indiscriminate killing of civilians.
Shanghai, of course, is the fabled city of fiction and many movies. The younger reader may have recalled that the opening sequences of the movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were set in a Shanghai of the 1930s (love those Lucas-Spielberg collaborations), while older readers may recall more fondly (or otherwise!) films such as Shanghai Express. Whatever one's associations, they must certainly evoke images of a cosmopolitan, tension-filled city.
For those of you who actually lived there, of course, the images are likely to be much more mundane, for it is true that one's home never seems to have quite the grandeur and mystery that people from other places may associate with it. (This is certainly the case, for example, with living for years in the San Francisco area!)
The Shanghai of today, too, is a far different place from that described in HARC's journals or as depicted in old films and adventure novels. (This according to many articles as well as my brother-in-law, Nigel, who visited there in the 1970s.) One wonders what memories older Chinese inhabitants of the city retain of what it was like in the first half of this century.
Some day I hope to discover (the new) Shanghai for myself. A good friend, Tom Wong, who acts as a consultant for the government of Taiwan, has also recently been hired by the government in Peking to help establish a free trade zone industrial park about 20 miles south of Shanghai on the coast in order to attract high technology businesses to establish bases there. (We're thinking about having some environmental sensors of our design built in such a park.) When last in Taipei, Tom Wong, his wife, George Wong (no relation), and I had a wonderful Shanghai-style banquet. (George and his family escaped from Shanghai in the early 1950s.) I must say they certainly know how to do wonderful things with seafood in that city!
My father, Edmund Hallie Perry, joined the U.S. Marine Corps as a young man and was sent to the Far East to become one of the old ''China Marines'' during the 1930s. He left an extensive collection of photographs and other memorabilia from his numerous excursions all over China and the Far East (which are now in my possession). Dad was later to be in the thick of World War II, serving on Guadalcanal and elsewhere during the Pacific campaign.
Dad and Mother met at a garden party in Shanghai during the 1930s on the occasion of Mother's Day. Their hostess, Mrs. Virginia McNair, was the wife of a famous missionary, and had invited members of the Marines 4th Regiment, in Shanghai, to the party in order to give them a break and a touch of home, introducing them to young ladies of the International Settlement's families in that city. (Mother had previously been dating a nice young Norwegian boy, and when her father heard that she'd met an American Marine, the roof hit the fan at first until HARC got to know my father!)
The family of my wife, Adrienne Carole (nee Edwards), has an even longer relationship with China. Her grandparents lived in Hong Kong for many years during the late 1800s, and her father, Derek Lawler Piercy Edwards, after school in England, returned to that area of the world, first as a Master Mariner (captain), and later (following World War II) with the Port Commissioner's Office in Hong Kong. He and his wife, Esmee Doreen (nee Courtenay), raised a family of three in Hong Kong, the first, Nigel Treloar Edwards, having been born prior to World War II in that city. My brother-in-law, Nigel, in fact spent the years of the war with his parents in the Stanley prisoner of war camp following the capture of Hong Kong by the Japanese on Christmas Day, 1941. Esmee was pregnant with my wife, Adrienne, when the atomic bombings quickly ended the war in the Pacific (and a good thing, too, as the Japanese were marching the inmates of the prison camp inland for execution when the news ending the war reached the camp's commandant -- he must have thought better of his eventual fate than did many another Japanese trooper).
Adrienne and my wife's younger sister, Veryan, spent their youth in Hong Kong, while Nigel was sent back to ''public'' school in Windsor, England (what we Americans would call ''private'' school), but returned after his education to spend many years as an employee of the famous old English shipping company, Jardines Matheson, living in Hong Kong (where he owned a modernized junk for a while), Fiji, and elsewhere. He later revisited many areas of mainland China during the pre-Nixon detente 1970s and sent us postcards of those travels. (Veryan and her husband, Terry Cockburn, currently make their home in Botswana, so we remain fairly spread out as a family!)
My brother, Lawrence Barron Perry (born in Aiea, the ''Territory of Hawaii''!) and I, too, have done considerable traveling in the Far East, both as U.S. Marines and later. And thanks to Lawrence's good tastes, we are blessed with two lovely nieces who clearly exhibit their mother's Filipino ancestry.
Perhaps one day I'll get around to writing my own memoirs (including the time when, visiting the Hiroshima Memorial Museum, I was treated to some pointedly meant-to-be-overheard remarks by some following tourists who were later found to be members of the Soviet Union's embassy in Tokyo! But that's another story ... as is the picture of the python draped around my shoulders in a Bangkok park. So send me some mail if you'd like to hear more ...!