Fresh Lettuce and New Faces

June M. Blurton is a retired speech/language pathologist.

When she was 3, the author and her Estonian family escaped the Russian
Communists by fleeing from Vladivostok to China. In August 1947, she
escaped the Communists again. This time she, her husband, and their baby
daughter fled from Shanghai to Vancouver.

Read’s story deals with her struggle to become a Canadian; her
year-long stay in hospital while being treated for tuberculosis (a much
more frightening disease in the 1950s than today); and her efforts to
bring her relatives from China to Canada. While Read recovered her
health, and most of her relatives eventually joined her in Vancouver, it
is her descriptions of life in the city in the middle years of the
century that hold the reader. Descriptions like these, based in part on
letters she wrote to her sister in New Zealand, illustrate how much life
has speeded up and changed in the past 30 years. This is not Read’s
first book. An earlier, three-volume memoir is based on her
recollections of life in Shanghai’s International Settlement and in a
Japanese internment camp during World War II.