Growing Up the First Time

Time is the compelling story of the lives of four American children who spent their childhood in Shanghai. These children lived with a foot in two cultures, having the benefit of the best and the worst of the East and the West. In 1943, Mary (at fifteen years of age), her younger brothers, Vincent and Jordie, and her baby sister, Anne spent seven months on their own in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai, China, before being repatriated in an exchange of prisoners between the United States and Japan. Mary Smith offers a glimpse of the life that flourished for sixty years in "The Paris of the Orient"-Shanghai-which will never be known again. This is also a personal and interior account of how growing up in an emotionally charged milieu shaped the lives of the four Smith siblings. This well-written account, accompanied by numerous photographs, transports the reader to a different place and time.