Mai-Mai Sze’s Echo of a Cry – a Charming Little Curiosity

A quick reference to a rather charming little book by Mai-Mai Sze, Echo of a Cry: A Story Which Began in China (1947). Sze is best known and remembered today as the American based Chinese painter (she sadly died in 1992), writer and book jacket illustrator. However, Sze was born in China the daughter of Alfred Sze, the noted Chinese diplomat who was the Republic’s ambassador to London and Washington and attended the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 for China. Mai-Mai was educated at private schools in England and then Wellesley, graduating in 1931.

Echo of a Cry is her childhood memoir and has some nice reminiscences of London during World War One, life at the Chinese Legation on Portland Place, being the only Chinese girl at a private school in Sussex and then moving on to America. The book is also nicely illustrated with drawing by Sze. Unfortunately I don’t have a cover for the book.