World War II Daily Podcast · WorldWarII_Daily

Episode 18 - Jean Bee Chan: From War Survivor to Human Rights Champion

·37 min·2 clips

The family fled across a river and hid behind bushes while two Japanese soldiers pointed bayonets at them.

1. World War II Daily Podcast Episode 18 centers on Jean B. Chan’s life under the Japanese occupation of China and her later work on Asian-American social justice. 2. Jean B. Chan, 88, speaks as a retired mathematician, community organizer, singer, and author, while the hosts Samuel and the podcast team frame her as “living history.” 3. The episode asks what it meant to survive war as a child in Taishan, later rebuild in Nanjing and Hong Kong, and then spend decades educating people about wartime atrocities. 4. Jean says she was born in 1937 in Taishan, in what is now Guangdong, and remembers seeing bombs fall while her family fled from the city back to the village. 5. She explains that her father left for Chongqing in 1941 because he worked for the government, and she did not hear from him for the whole period until the war ended. 6. Jean describes life in the village with no electricity, no running water, no telephone, no TV, and no sugar, oil, or soap, while her family grew rice, vegetables, peanuts, and fish. 7. She says the family kept 23 chickens, a few pigs, a cow, and a shared pond and well, and that the war years were when she became most familiar with the Japanese invasion. 8. Jean recounts repeated Japanese visits to the village for food, especially chicken and pigs, and says villagers used lookout signals to run across the river and hide in the mountains. 9. She says one escape became especially frightening when the bridge was washed out, the water rose up to her, and her aunt lifted her to keep her from drowning. 10. Jean describes two Japanese soldiers coming to the bushes with bayonets pointed at the family, and she says a drawn picture of that scene appears in her book on Amazon. 11. She also says her brother died of a childhood disease when medicine was unavailable, and that she could not cry for 20 or 30 years after his death. 12. After the war, Jean says her mother found a stack of letters from her father at the post office, and the family reunited with him in Nanjing in 1946. 13. She notes that her mother later had five more daughters, making the family six girls, and that they moved from Guangdong through Hong Kong before immigrating to Chicago in 1956. 14. Jean says she spent 6.5 years in Hong Kong and did not want to leave, but her parents took her to the United States anyway. 15. She emphasizes her mother Amy Chan’s work in Chicago, saying Amy sewed clothes, managed the household, learned English, and even made Jean’s graduation regalia. 16. Jean says she did not know about the Rape of Nanjing while living in the village because the family knew only their own suffering, though she later learned about broader atrocities such as Unit 731 and comfort women. 17. The interview style is conversational, with Samuel and the hosts asking follow-up questions that move from childhood survival to historical memory and public redress. 18. The tone stays reflective and personal, with Jean mixing specific wartime memories, family history, and civic organizing in the same conversation. 19. People interested in wartime memory, Chinese family history, and human-rights activism. 20. Listeners wanting fast-paced military history without personal testimony.

As heard by us

A survivor's wartime memory, carried by water, bushes, and the work that followed.

The episode is strongest when it stays close to Gene B. Chen's wartime survival story and the effort to keep that memory linked to awareness work about the atrocities in Asia.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You follow Gene B. Chen through a child's wartime escape by river and the memory that stayed with her.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from World War II Daily Podcast