All are welcome to our talk on 13 September ...
Date: Saturday 13th September 2025
Venue: The Allen Room, 1/F, St. Anne's Church, 55 Dean Street, W1D 6AF
Time: 2:30 pm
Speaker: Ian Gill
Title: "Searching for Billie"
Lunch: An optional dim sum lunch beforehand at the Joy King Lau restaurant,
3 Leicester Street, London WC2H 7BL. Tel: 0207 437 1133. Lunch will begin
at noon at a cost of £27 per person including Chinese tea and service.
Booking: Please book now with Florence on
Florence.lkcan@gmail.com and say if you wish to join the lunch.
Lecture cost: £10 for members of Friends of East Asia, £12 for guests, to
include refreshments after the talk. Free of charge to full time students -
please book in advance or on the day and bring your Student ID card to the
lecture.
Guests are always welcome at our lectures and lunches.
Ian Gill's first visit to Hong Kong in 1975 takes an unexpected turn 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. He moves to Asia and 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 and 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.
The backdrop for this fascinating family story is China's turbulent century
from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s to the advent of communism.
Because of his mother's circumstances, Ian Gill was conceived in a Japanese
prison camp in Hong Kong in 1945 and born in New Zealand after liberation.
With his mother, he spent his early life in England, China and Bangkok.
After boarding school, university and joining newspapers in England, he
worked as a journalist in New Zealand, Fiji, Australia, Hawaii (where he
took a master's degree as a grantee with the East-West Center), Hong Kong
and Singapore for 14 years. In 1985, he joined the Asian Development Bank, a
multilateral financing institution with headquarters in Manila. Over two
decades, he travelled widely around the Asia-Pacific region, writing and
producing video documentaries.
Since 2006, Gill has returned to journalism and writing books. During his
exposure to a wide range of countries, he has paid particular attention to
cultural differences in attitudes towards race, class and gender and how
they have evolved over the past two centuries.
Please book now with Florence at <mailto:Florence.lkcan@gmail.com>
Florence.lkcan@gmail.com. Please say if you wish to join the lunch. Guests
are welcome. Payment should be made (see below) at the latest by Monday 8th
September. If you then need to cancel nearer the time, notice should be
given to Florence up to 48 hours before the meeting. Otherwise, the cost
will be non-refundable.
Bank: HSBC
Account name: Friends of East Asia
Account number: 21222074 Sort Code: 40-43-23