Danke Li's remarkable collection of oral histories of 20 women's personal experiences in Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) is a timely and welcome contribution to the fast-growing field of the study of wartime China. Using her personal networks, she painstakingly conducted interviews with more than 50 women from 1999 to 2007. One can imagine that the interviews were followed by time-consuming and strenuous transcribing, editing, and crosschecking. As a historian equipped with a profound knowledge and understanding of the history of Chongqing and women in the Republican era, Danke Li in her excellent introduction places these oral histories within the social, economic and political context and the larger historiography of wartime China. Through this study, Li addresses both the impact of war on women and women's impact on the war; these two issues, she claims, have been neglected or silenced because the politics of war memories were dominated by masculine state actors with an emphasis on heroic resistance. Thus, her stories aim at providing “an alternative narrative of the history of China's War of Resistance against Japan” (p. 6) by giving public stages for those women. Finally, Li's oral history seeks to give Chongqing and its people due credit for the role they played during the war.

Danke Li separates the oral histories of Chongqing women into three categories – social, economic, and political – and provides an introduction to each section. These vivid accounts of personal war experiences and memories of Chongqing women indeed offer us nuanced narratives of war memories in several ways. Firstly, gendered memories of Chongqing women demonstrate that the impact of war on women and gender relations was complex, varied and even ambiguous, depending on the social, economic, and educational background of women. While women from poor family backgrounds remember the wartime experiences as tremendous suffering, due to dislocation, poverty, daily Japanese bombing, high inflation, lack of medical care and severe shortages of food, women from rich family backgrounds recalled that they were not so severely affected by the war. Furthermore, we can see some ambiguities in the effects of women's increasing economic role in the public realm during the wartime. Wu Shuqun and Chang Longyu had fond memories of working as a telephone operator at the Jiangbei bureau and a financial analyst for the Minsheng Shipping Company respectively. The war “provided opportunities for young women to work outside their homes,” which was also the case in Europe and the US. However, the stories also tell us that their new economic role did not necessarily lead to emancipation. The income of some women such as Xu Chengzhen, a factory worker, was still controlled by her father, while Wu Shuqun's fiancé, feeling threatened and insecure, “tricked her out of her job” (p. 96). Ren Zaiyi recollects that women's increasing public presence even made them targets of sexual harassment (p. 146).

Second, Li's study shows that personal experiences of state building in wartime Chongqing under the Nationalists were also varied. Most women did not even refer to the presence of the Nationalist government, nor did they mention any social welfare benefits that they gained from the state. Rather, these women remembered that they were left on their own to support themselves in extreme poverty. In contrast, women such as Zhao Zhinan had much more positive memories of the Nationalist government. Zhao, recalling her stay at the Wartime Child Welfare Protection Association (Zhongguo zhanshi ertong baoyuhui) patronized by Song Meiling, remembered her experiences with warm gratitude toward Song for providing such shelters during wartime (pp. 65–73).

Finally, the oral histories also uncover the gendered memories of wartime Chongqing, a city which became a site of influx of new culture and political forces as a part of the development and modernization of China's hinterland. For some women, the glamour of new fashions such as floral skirts, permed hair, qipao and pantyhose, which appeared in Chongqing during the wartime, were enthusiastically received as symbols of modernity. Some women also recalled that the arrival of new teachers and professors from outside Chongqing also galvanized their political consciousness, motivated young female students to participate in propaganda work and thus contributed to the war mobilization of Chongqing citizens.

For teachers of modern Chinese history, there is no doubt that this work will provide valuable reading materials for classroom use. Undergraduate students will be exposed to vivid memories of women's wartime experiences and challenged to consider a gendered history of war. The only drawback is that the stories are not necessarily well geared toward particular themes or issues, especially because the book was edited into an autobiographical style. This raises the question of the best criteria for editing interviews for the publication of oral history. As a historian analysing and using oral histories for my research, I often face the dilemma of how much the contents of oral histories should be interpreted as a reflection of the social realities, and how much as human memories which may have been manipulated over time by various factors. The author herself seems to have been aware of the gap between treating oral histories as social realities and constructed memories, which can be noticed in starkly different frameworks that she provides in the Introduction and in Part IV respectively. Nevertheless, overall, this is an invaluable contribution for anyone who studies and teaches wartime China and modern Chinese history.