Writing History on their Own: War, Identity, and the Oral History of the “Old China Hands”

Abstract

This article uses the oral history project of the Old China Hands collected by the California State University at Fullerton to illustrate how oral history serves as the vehicle of identity-making. The term Old China Hands first referred to long-term British settlers engaged in the commercial, diplomatic and missionary arenas in nineteenth-century China. During the Second World War, citizens of the Allied nations were interned in the Japanese camps, which then became the common memory for foreign settlers in China. Not until the 1980s did those former civilian internees begin to reconnect with each other and share their stories in public; the oral history project of the Old China Hands was one such effort. Focusing on the organization, facilitation and contextualization of the oral history project, this article will discuss how the recollection of wartime experience became a process of identity-making.