A Family’s Extraordinary Journey through China and Hong Kong

Ian Gill will take us on a journey of discovering his own family in Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to discover a vanished China. Ian’s first visit to Hong Kong in 1975 takes an unexpected turn when he meets his Chinese mother Billie’s friends, colleagues and fellow ex-prisoners of war, lifting the veil on a tumultuous past in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He moves to Asia and unravels her intriguing journey: from controversial adoption by an English postmaster in Changsha to popular radio broadcaster in wartime Shanghai, from tragedy and a doomed romance in a Japanese internment camp to being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the United Nations. He discovers a great-grandmother in a determined English farm girl who ends up owning a well-known hotel in China in the 1870s – and he finally meets his father for the first time on a Canadian island in 1985.