News Is My Job A Correspondent in War-Torn China

One of the first women journalists in China, Edna Lee Booker arrived in 1922 and threw herself into the story, snagging a number of exclusive interviews with warlords and also with Sun Yat-sen and Mao Tse-tung. She worked on the Shanghai newspaper China Press, and was also the Shanghai stringer for the International News Service, InterNews. Her book was a bestseller on publication in 1940 and was hugely influential in strengthening American support for the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Edna Lee Booker was an American journalist who authored several books about China during the 1930s and 1940s. She arrived in Shanghai in 1922 as foreign correspondent for the International News Service of New York City and as, in her own words, a "girl reporter" for the China Press newspaper, then the leading American daily in China. Patricia Luce Chapman was born in 1926 and lived in Shanghai for the first 14 years of her life, moving to the United States in November 1940. She had a career in journalism, songwriting, and acting.