My father was born in Shanghai in 1921 while my grandparents lived and worked there for a U.S. steel company. My Great Aunt was a nurse in China and founded the first nursing society there. In the picture, I assume it’s that someone is taking their photo that makes them stare like this out of wonderment since taking photos was very unusual in China then. Things I notice: The children are well dressed and clean and they’re wearing shoes. The stonework looks very well done, not abused at all as public places would likely be. This leads me to think this must be a private courtyard, a schoolyard, or some other protected non-public place where relatively well off children would e. Even the whitewash on the wall is clean. Public spaces in China get abused very quickly due to the enormous numbers of people. Just guessing but the girl on the left looks very bright to me. I hope they all had good lives as all of them can no longer be living, but undoubtedly they all went through a great deal of pain — the Chinese civil wars, famines, floods, the Japanese invasion, World War II, Mao’s brutal communism, and so on. China was not a nice place to grow up in.
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My father was born in Shanghai in 1921 while my grandparents lived and worked there for a U.S. steel company. My Great Aunt was a nurse in China and founded the first nursing society there. In the picture, I assume it’s that someone is taking their photo that makes them stare like this out of wonderment since taking photos was very unusual in China then. Things I notice: The children are well dressed and clean and they’re wearing shoes. The stonework looks very well done, not abused at all as public places would likely be. This leads me to think this must be a private courtyard, a schoolyard, or some other protected non-public place where relatively well off children would e. Even the whitewash on the wall is clean. Public spaces in China get abused very quickly due to the enormous numbers of people. Just guessing but the girl on the left looks very bright to me. I hope they all had good lives as all of them can no longer be living, but undoubtedly they all went through a great deal of pain — the Chinese civil wars, famines, floods, the Japanese invasion, World War II, Mao’s brutal communism, and so on. China was not a nice place to grow up in.