In War and Famine: Missionaries in China's Honan Province in the 1940s

In War and Famine uses a small key - the author's family letters and infant memories - to unlock a whole world. Erleen Christensen was a mish kid, the daughter of one of about two hundred missionaries who remained in China's Honan province during World War II and the civil war that followed. She provides an eye-witness account using letters, diaries, and personal accounts, many still in private hands, of one of the worst famines in China's history and the great devastation caused by advancing Japanese troops. Christensen chronicles how a religiously diverse group of Westerners tried to distribute famine relief and conduct humanitarian and educational missions in the face of rising nationalism, autonomy, and resistance to foreign intervention.