The Mushroom Years: A Story of Survival

by Pamela Masters

The Mushroom Years tells the story of the house arrest and eventual imprisonment of a British family in the Orient through the eyes of a teenager. She and her sisters and her parents are caught with a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0966448928
• ISBN13: 9780966448924
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Henderson House Publishing
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Prisoner in China

Some of the most interesting stories coming out of World War II are those of civilians interned by the Japanese in Southeast Asia and China. The Japanese treatment of American and other soldiers taken prisoner was brutal in the extreme; their treatment of civilians, while hardly exemplary, was less harsh. Author Masters writes of the experiences of her family in World War II in Japanese occupied China, including a two year confinement in Weihsein detention center along with more than one thousand British, American, and other Westerners. She writes in the form of a non-fiction novel. The major events in the book are factual and her recollections seem also to be factual, tallying closely with several other accounts of life in Weihsien. Weihsien was one of the most lenient and humane of the Japanese camps. The inhabitants were allowed to manage most of their own affairs and their hardships were bearable compared to internees of other camps. The stress on them was mental -- including the sudden turnabout of events in which prominent men of affairs, business, and religion found themselves cleaning toilets and boiling soup and sleeping cheek by jowl with incompatible companions. The author was a teenage girl during her confinement and thus we see the camp and the people from her view. I found the book fascinating for its accounts of foreigners living in China before and during the war and the interplay of a wildly assorted group of internees at Weihsien. Some of the characters in the book are given their real names: Eric Liddell, for example, the Olympic gold-medal winner and missionary (remember Chariots of Fire?). Others, such as the obnoxious American missionaries, the Hattons, seem to have fictional names. One would hope that the author will publish someday a revision of the book using the real names of the inmates of Weihsein. "Mushroom Years" is a good reading experience for those who wish to explore the less-trodden byways of World War II in the Pacific. Smallchief.

Destined to be a Classic in its Genre

As an historian of the Greater East Asia and Pacific War and as a lawyer specializing on war crimes trials of that period, I am normally rather worried when I read an eyewitness account of that time where the writer makes free use of direct quotations in inverted commas. Pamela Masters, however, has managed to fuse together a tremendous amount of historical detail, atmosphere and artistic license. Pamela Masters' objective, plainly, was to explain and to convey the authentic atmosphere of a period which she experienced as an attractive young English teenager who had grown up in the port of Chinwangtao, a few miles south of the Great Wall of China and had gone to school in Tientsin. She has done so with an acute sense of timing, something rather rare among professional artists such as became later in California. That is what an historian or biographer seeks to do, too, but she IS an artist and has chosen to employ different tools and techniques to recall what she remembers. And she succeeds admirably: this is a quite splendid account. It isn't strictly "history" but it is about a time, long past, in which the colours, shapes, images and individual personalities come alive. And what a vivid picture she conveys to family, friends and the wider world! Superficially, THE MUSHROOM YEARS seems "factionalised", the kind of work where a meticulous reader can never be quite sure whether to take a particular event portrayed in it as completely factually accurate in detail, something that can be "cited" as such, or whether it should be taken as an outward and visible artistic impression compounded from a multitude of experiences that the author has known both directly and indirectly. On reading the book, I presumed that in fact it contained elements of both, and that, for me, was both part of its great achievement in conveying great verisimilitude, and, for a time that was part of what I believed was my loss, too, for I dared not "cite" it as historical evidence. On checking with the author, however, I am happy to report that I now am satisfied that all but one of the characters were strictly historical individuals whose conduct was recalled with great care. Although the names of some have no doubt been changed to protect a few sensitive, diffident souls, or the reputations of others who were venal, mad or bad, the author has not found it necessary to invent a cast of characters to represent the KINDS of people she encountered in those days. And so I found myself yearning to know more about these individual people and their experiences, completely captivated by this extraordinarily honest and evocative story. Most unusually for works in this genre, this book is not Japanophobic. And at a time when westerners have become accustomed to depicting all Japanese soldiers as serial rapists of western women, it is salutary as well as troubling to be reminded that such horrors were almost exclusively experienced by Chinese and other Asian victims, not by western capt

This is not only a tale of survival but also of forgiveness.

I expected The Mushroom Years to be a story about surviving the ordeal of imprisonment and depravation. However, it is clearly far more than that. I realized early on that that would have been the easy road to take. Ms. Masters has written about her family's years of hardship by first introducing the reader to their life prior to their internment. It was an exciting and priveleged life which turned into one of deprivation for her parents and their three teenage daughters. I was most impressed with the lack of anger and resentment in Ms. Masters' chronicle of her experience at the hands of her captors. I finished the book wanting a sequel because she had drawn me into the lives of the characters who played a role in this most enjoyable true life story of forgiveness and charity in the face of brutal hardships.