Susan Blumberg-Kason reviews Our Time Will Come, a film by Ann Hui
Chan Sui-jeung was one of the first adults I got to know in Hong Kong, back in 1990 when I moved there for a junior year abroad. The university assigned me to a host family that would take me in for Chinese holidays and perhaps a weekend or two during the school year. Chan and his wife May lived an hour from my dorm, but it was always a pleasure to trek out to Hong Kong Island to visit them.
At the time, I knew SJ Chan was a career civil servant and had a special interest in the Kaifeng and Hong Kong Jewish communities. But it wasn’t until several years ago that I learned Chan was also instrumental in resurrecting the story of the East River Column from World War II. His book East River Column: Hong Kong Guerillas in the Second World War and After narrates the heroics of Hong Kong residents who successfully evacuated hundreds of intellectuals from Japanese-occupied Hong Kong into parts of southern China that were not under Japanese rule. I’ve read about Chinese citizens and foreigners fleeing the mainland during WWII for the safety of British-run Hong Kong before the Japanese occupied it in 1941. But in this case, it was the other way around. Intellectuals in Hong Kong worried about persecution under the brutal Kempeitai, the Japanese military police, so a heroic group of guerillas in Hong Kong and southern China worked clandestinely to bring these writers and scholars up to “Free China.”