Participants
Dvir Bar-Gal is a professional photographer, historian, and author. He came to Shanghai from Israel, eventually becoming the guide for one of the city’s most unique tours, a visit to a largely vanished “Jewish Shanghai.”
Prof. Kuan Yu-chien witnessed firsthand the poverty and hunger all too common in China. He also lived in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II. After the defeated Japanese forces left the city, he wondered why Shanghai was being “occupied” yet again, this time by American and British military personnel. Later he became a university professor and author.
Melinda Liu is the long-time Newsweek Beijing Bureau Chief and the daughter of Tung-Sheng Liu, who helped guide American fliers who participated in the Doolittle Tokyo Raid to safety after they crash-landed in China
Pamela Masters was the third generation of her family to live in China. She grew up in the port city of Tientsin, now known as Tianjin. She and her family would be sent by the Japanese military to a civilian prison camp in what was then called Weihsien in North China.
Ronald Morris was born and raised in Shanghai, and witnessed firsthand the brutality of the city’s occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army. He and his mother were both prisoners in the internment camp portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s motion picture Empire of the Sun. Eventually he emigrated to America and worked for many years in the Nevada gaming industry.
Patricia Dunn Silver grew up in Shanghai, the daughter of a prominent American physician. She experienced what life was like for Shanghai’s expat community, as well as the terror of Japanese military aircraft destroying portions of the city. Following internment by the Japanese, she and her family came to America.
Jiayi Song is a media professional, born and raised in Shanghai. She’s part of the generation who were children during the vibrant 1990s, a time of new dreams and new lives. A graduate of the New York Film Academy, her thesis film chronicled the life and death of a legendary Shanghai jazz club.
Prof. Michael Stone has taught a variety of Asian Studies courses at Seton Hall University. He also serves as a Visiting Professor at the Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, in China. He was formerly the Director of Seton Hall’s Global Learning Center.
Prof. Su Zhiliang is an expert on the Battle of Shanghai, as well as the story of the so-called “comfort women” who were forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese military. He helped establish a Comfort Woman Museum on the campus of Shanghai Normal University.
Prof. Hans van de Ven is Professor of Modern Chinese History, at the University of Cambridge. He is the author, co-author and editor of numerous books, including China at War, Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China.
Liliane Willens, Ph.D. is one of the last surviving witnesses to the 1937 Battle of Shanghai. She and her family were stateless Russian Jews trapped in Shanghai. After the war, she came to the United States, eventually teaching at MIT and other prestigious institutions.
Mary Previte was born and raised in China. The daughter and granddaughter of Christian missionaries, she was a student at a school for the children of missionaries in northeast China. Along with her classmates and teachers, she would endure months in the civilian prison camp at Weihsien.