Chinese Embers by Eva Dower: book review

Chinese Embers (1995) began as a memoir for Eva Dower’s family, written in hospital, prior to her death. Thirty-three years later, it was published by her younger sister’s grandson.

Chinese Embers is essentially a memoir of love, the love of a country and a man during the author’s time in Peking (now Beijing) and Shanghai from 1919 to 1932. Eva Dower (1890-1962) was a country girl from South Australia, who went to China when she heard of jobs at the Rockefeller Hospital in Peking. There she met Frenchman Maurice Rene Roy, the director of a French bank, whom she married in 1921.

Living in the Walled Diplomatic Quarters in Peking, Dower writes of the finance minister seeking refuge in the diplomatic quarters; riding on donkeys by the Great Wall near Shanhaikuan, “the point where the wall runs down into the sea after a 2,000 mile stretch across the country;” visiting a mountain temple after being transported by chair “slung on the shoulders of four brawny carriers;” traveling through opium poppy fields on a small Mongol pony; hunting pheasant, partridges, quails, and deer from Siberia; and traveling on an eight-day train journey, at the request of a Russian timber man, to the border of Mongolia and Siberia to visit his country mansion by a pine forest.

She tells of the feast of lanterns, and having to host a dinner for the visiting General Joffre, “the French Hero of the Great War” in which she is horrified when her century-old turtle ended up in his soup. Her cook told her that “there is worse to come” and there, on the table, are peacock feathers sticking out of a cooked carcass. But the cook whispered again to her that “there’s worse still coming.” Her treasured deer was served as the main course. Her little zoo had become “a dinner like no one else’s.”

But amid the humour, there are tales in a constant atmosphere of conflict, student protests, famine, floods, death, and the Depression. She tells of the birth, in 1923, of her baby “Small Boy” (Maurice Junior) who died before his second birthday of a mystery ailment. Her following child, Maureen, was born in 1925.

After her move to Shanghai, there are tales of severed heads, the “pressure of Communism rising,” curfew, the Japanese-Chinese war, and her last days before the attack on Shanghai. As British and French warships are stationed in the Whangpoo (Huangpu) River, instructions to “foreigners” are: “at the sound of three cannon shots, come at all speed on board the gunboats of your nationality, but one bundle only.”

The book was gifted to me by Joyce Hale, Eva Dower’s younger sister’s grandson’s wife’s mother! The brief, 76-page memoir contains captivating photographs and cartoon sketches. Easy to read, with humour and candour, and effused with love, the short vignettes are all too intriguing but all too brief. It left me wanting to read more. Her relative’s grandson suggests further reading – The Lion and the Dragon by Christopher Cook (1985).