Meet Ian Gill, Author of Searching for Billie

Meet author Ian Gill, who will discuss his book, Searching for Billie, a memoir that explores the life of his mother, Billie, a Chinese-Eurasian woman who thrived as a broadcaster in 1930s Shanghai and Hong Kong before being imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp.

Gill will also talk about Billie’s close friendship with American writer Emily Hahn, with whom she shared many adventures during times of love and war.

In his memoir, Ian Gill’s recounts his first visit to Hong Kong, when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai. After moving to Asia, he unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel on the China coast in the 1870s. And he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985. 

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