Reviews of The Mushroom Years
I expected The Mushroom Years to be a story about surviving the ordeal of imprisonment and deprivation. 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 privileged 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.
— Katy Peek
As an historian of the Greater East Asia and Pacific War . . . I am normally rather worried when I read an eyewitness account of that time where the writer makes free use of direct quotations. Masters, however, has managed to fuse together a tremendous amount of historical detail, atmosphere, and artistic license.
Pamela Masters’ objective, plainly, was to convey the authentic atmosphere of a period which she expereienced as an attractive young 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 [Tianjin]. She has done so with an acute sense of timing, something historians and biographers seek to do — 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!
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.
There is a good deal here about the nature of fear, privation and loss. But most memorable of all are the affection that the author and her family had for China and the Chinese; the clarity with which she portrays the relationship between the Chinese, Japanese and British and other expatriate foreigners in North China. And then there are the unforgettable and amusing accounts of the mutual antipathy that existed between most of the several thousand internees and missionaries who ended up in Weihsien Prison Camp.
More remarkable still is the fairness of Masters’ description of the fastidiousness of most of their Japanese guards at Weihsien, who — most fortunately for the author, her parents, two sisters and their fellow prisoners — had been drawn from the elite Japanese Legation Guards rather than from the dregs of humanity who brutalized so many hundreds of thousands of Allied Prisoners of War, Civilian Internees and tens of millions of peoples in Japanese-occupied territories during the Greater East Asia and Pacific War.
By the time of their liberation by the OSS, the prisoners even took steps to do what they could at Weihsien to shield their former guards from retribution by Chinese Communist forces surrounding their position, and it should come as no surprise to learn that none of those guards were to face trial as war criminals, not even two whom the internees nicknamed “Gold Tooth” and “King Kong.” In the words Masters gives to her father shortly before leaving camp, “Wonder what’s going to happen to that poor bugger [the commandant] and his family now,” Dad said, with a faraway look, “. . . or all the decent Japanese civilians. God, war has a way of making our enemies friends, and our friends enemies.”
I am happy to recommend this book to anyone between the ages of 12 and 102. It is an authentic voice from a long-vanished era, and if there be any real justice in this life, it will one day become the basis for a truly splendid full-length feature film. I, for one, will want to see that, too.
— Dr. R. John Pritchard (Margate, England)
In The Mushroom Years [Pamela Masters] “tells it like it was,” in the best tradition of literary journalism. The exciting quality in her writing is her uncanny ability to make you a participant-of-the-moment as she takes you through her years in the Japanese prison camp at Weihsien [Weifang] in North China. Their Japanese commandant set the ground rules at the outset [stating] “. . . if your rations are short, ours will be too. If you are cold, we will be too. In short, we are all in the same boat; whether we’re all rowing in the same direction remains to be seen.” Unfortunately, hardship did develop for the prisoners, and developed in spades. They were cold and hungry, and many were treated harshly as the early Japanese victories were replaced by defeat.
Hats off to Pamela Masters! This is a book you’ll refer to time and again, and a book you will never forget.
— William Rowan
Updated August 2011