In her recent memoir, Small Footsteps in the Land of the Dragon, award-winning children’s author Barbara “Bobbie” Wallace provides a captivating account of her childhood years in pre-WWII China. What a storyteller! What a life! Bobbie’s American father abandoned his fledgling career in films to sell lamp oil in China for Standard Oil. Good at what he did, he eventually became an executive for Standard Oil of China. At the tender age of sixteen, Bobbie’s Russian mother fled her revolution-torn homeland and came to stay with her Shanghai relatives. She entered the Harvard Medical School of China in the following year. After becoming a registered surgical nurse, she rose to become head nurse at Shanghai’s only sanitarium. The successes of her parents allowed Bobbie and her sister to grow up with “modern” comforts in a country where they were scarce. When you read her book will find that little Bobbie was a precocious observer. You will see sights she saw and hear sounds she heard in a series of vignettes. In them she relates a rainbow of childlike discoveries and insights. While her accounts are full of humor, they also convey her arm’s length awareness of the darker side of life in pre-war China. We love this book!!
