Quotes from Helen Zia

employees—cooks, maids, amahs, tailors, drivers, accountants, managers, and advisers. A few had their

Well-to-do Shanghai schoolboys had no fears of conscription at a time when country boys their age, lacking strings to pull or money to hire surrogates, were dying at a shocking rate, with hundreds of thousands sometimes killed in a single battle. "Don't use good iron to make bullets," was the saying among the privileged.