About The Mushroom Years

Masters’ memoir, part Ann Frank, part Hogan’s Heroes, centers on her teenage years in a prison camp in Japanese Occupied China, with flashbacks covering her privileged life prior to imprisonment. Born the youngest of three daughters to a British father and an American mother, she tells a fascinating story that begins on December 8, 1941.

Pamela Roberta Simmons, nicknamed Bobby, was born in 1927 in Honan Province, China, while her parents were fleeing from Chiang Kai-shek’s Army of Unification. The story begins when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. At that time Masters is 14 and attending a boarding school in the city of Tientsin (Tianjin) in North China. After getting safe-conduct back to her home in a little Treaty Port on the Gulf of Chihli, she is held hostage along with her mother and sisters to force her father to work for the Japanese. As the months of forced collaboration drag on, she sees the tragic toll it is taking on her father’s health. There is a lot about privation and fear, but Masters recalls in flashback, through delightful, diverting incidents, her family’s privileged life in the Orient dating back to 1895, when her grandfather helped open the first railroad in that country. Finally, in March 1943, at the age of sixteen, she and her family, along with 2,000 Allied nationals, are shipped to Weihsien (Way-shen) Prison Camp in Shantung Province.

To their great relief, they learn they are to be guarded by the Japanese Consular Guard (similar to our Marine Embassy Guard) and not the brutal Japanese Imperial Army. Their commandant turns out to be a repatriated Japanese diplomat with sympathies for the West who, unlike the captain of the guards and his men, speaks fluent English. Masters leads the reader from pathos, to panic, to gentle ironic humor, and back, making you a participant-of-the-moment as you live those memorable years with her. Although the circumstances are horrific, and rations and contact with the outside world are almost nonexistent, the prisoners manage to keep their “to-hell-with-you” spirit going, much to the bewilderment of their guards. You learn of the camp’s thriving black market; the execution of two of its participants; the escape of a Yank and a Brit; the tragic death of Eric Liddell, hero of the movie Chariots of Fire; and the miraculous arrival of precious medical supplies.

The heroic liberation of the camp by a handful of OSS paratroopers out of Kumming on August 17, 1945, is a fitting climax to an unforgettable story.

Updated August 2011