So love this (and have to watch it) because it is the precise milieu that my grandfather, Roger Felix Pirard, would have moved in. I have nicknamed him Surabaya Roger, a Frenchman who met my grandmother in Lyon, married her, produced two children and then ran off to spend the rest of his life in Indochina. My mum was born in Shanghai in 1930 in the French quarter. She came home with her mother and sister by the mid thirties but Roger never really returned. He spent the rest of his life trying and failing to start businesses around Asia, dying in Saigon in 1968. I have loads of his increasingly desperate letters to my mum, the only family member who really kept in touch with him. He was interned in Shanghai during the war and afterwards came to Europe and took my mother on a tour, losing his business when the Chinese revolution took over Shanghai. From his best friend, Michel Delaquaize, I got a white Russian godmother, Nina, another of those mysterious European refugees straight out of central casting. From him I also got my French nationality.
So love this (and have to watch it) because it is the precise milieu that my grandfather, Roger Felix Pirard, would have moved in. I have nicknamed him Surabaya Roger, a Frenchman who met my grandmother in Lyon, married her, produced two children and then ran off to spend the rest of his life in Indochina. My mum was born in Shanghai in 1930 in the French quarter. She came home with her mother and sister by the mid thirties but Roger never really returned. He spent the rest of his life trying and failing to start businesses around Asia, dying in Saigon in 1968. I have loads of his increasingly desperate letters to my mum, the only family member who really kept in touch with him. He was interned in Shanghai during the war and afterwards came to Europe and took my mother on a tour, losing his business when the Chinese revolution took over Shanghai. From his best friend, Michel Delaquaize, I got a white Russian godmother, Nina, another of those mysterious European refugees straight out of central casting. From him I also got my French nationality.