Not A History Book: Patricia Luce Chapman Relives China Upbringing In 'Tea On The Great Wall'

It’s hard to imagine anyone so classy—cool at any age, let alone someone going on 90.

But when Patricia Luce Chapman is awakened at 5 a.m. in Shanghai—the caller believing her to be at home with her son in Rockport, Texas—the gracious socialite, journalist, poet, ardent member still of the Southampton Garden Club, founder and CEO of two nonprofit corporations in Washington, D.C., where she moved in 1963 for a while, award-winning blues and country-western songwriter, one-time actress and, now, China memoirist, laughed off the intrusion.

“Thank you. I was having a bad dream,” she said. “I was going to a party and couldn’t find the dress I wanted to wear.”

That, too, is difficult to imagine—it’s hardly the kind of hurdle that would deter this quietly elegant, focused, down-to-earth woman, as recently evidenced in her recently published book, “Tea on the Great Wall: An American Girl in War-Torn China” (Earnshaw Books). Or, as a PR tag calls it, “Shirley Temple in Wonderland meets Chinese opium addicts, Nazis and Japanese bayonets.”

What a young Patty Potter saw and experienced in the first 14 years of her life in China, as an idyllic and innocent childhood gave way to the terrors and dangers of invasion and civil war in the 1930s, would likely have proved traumatic for many youngsters: “corpses in the street,” the stench of death everywhere, villages “where people were freezing to death,” a Jewish boy whose ear was ripped off by a Nazi soldier, Japanese warships crowding the harbor. She saw the totalitarian juggernaut on the move. She saw, close up, a culture that for many Americans then—and possibly still now—would seem only foreign and strange.

For Ms. Potter in her formative years, however, this was the only world, the only life, she knew. She loved China and loves it still, though not uncritically. She visits when she can, acknowledging the tyranny of the Communist regime, but she also sees the eternal beauty of the land. And its resilience. Given its history over the last 200 years, she says she feels certain that “China will never again be bankrupt or invaded.”

Arriving in the states in November 1940, after conditions finally made it imperative that her mother and siblings flee—her father, by now, was interned in a Japanese camp—young Patty felt unmoored, but she adapted with enthusiasm and intelligence, and with an abiding sense of the significance of what she had witnessed. Blurbs testify to the book’s accuracy and honesty, and the prose, both eloquent and dramatic, is impressive. Ms. Chapman has a keen eye and a lively, conversational style.

Even old China Hands, some reviewers say, could learn something from the memoir. She details what she herself saw and heard, but she also relied on her mother’s journals and her father’s scrapbooks. Her remarkable mother, Edna Lee Potter, was a bold, daring foreign correspondent who ventured often where most people feared to tread. Her father, John Potter, was a banker. Both were part of a small, elite group of “adventuresome” expatriates who had gone to Shanghai “before there were planes or phones,” she said.

They lived well, had servants, went to glamorous parties, were part of an international set, but they also sympathized with the victims of the deepening aggression overtaking the country. The title of the book eventually reveals its full meaning: the young girl did indeed take tea and cake on the Great Wall in Beijing with her family and friends for fun—until one day a Japanese soldier showed up and smashed their cake and grabbed Ms. Chapman, until he was threatened. She remembers the incident vividly: “the cloth of his uniform, his smell,” she said.

“It became clear, after terrifying and wrenching experiences with the Japanese conquerors that, even though America was not at war with Japan, we had to leave for our safety,” she said.

“Tea on the Great Wall” is not a history book, the author points out, but an “adventure story from a young girl’s point of view.” She “lived in the heart of history,” said Ceal Havemeyer, a longtime friend of her daughter, Lila Luce, who recalled corralling her friends to assist in various philanthropic activities, and the great Potter house called “Pao Hai” on Lake Agawam.

“You never knew who would turn up at her parties—presidents, celebrities of all kinds,” she said, adding, “I can hear her voice in the memoir.”

Ms. Luce is one of two children Ms. Chapman had with Henry Luce III, the elder son of the founder of Time Inc. She had two more children with her second husband, architect Istvan Botond, who worked with I.M Pei. Their daughter, Krisztina Botond has a home in Southampton, reason enough for Ms. Chapman to keep coming back summers. It was a curious granddaughter, however, who was the unexpected spur for “Tea on the Great Wall,” when she asked about a pagoda.

“What do the young know about China, especially of the years between World War I and World War II?” Ms. Chapman had mused. Then again, how many adults are aware of Shanghai’s sizable immigrant Jewish population and how Jews fared during the Nazi takeover, an important consideration for her. All the more reason for writing “Tea on the Great Wall,” she said, when she wasn’t pursuing her other artistic endeavors, which include song writing.

“I have an exceptionally eclectic background in international, popular musical styles and sounds because music and words cling to me from travels in many parts of the world, and from many international friendships,” she said. “I have four children, three grandsons and live in a wildlife refuge on the Texas Gulf Coast where I find the peace to indulge my love for beautiful things, including creating my songs.”

The author said she is pleased, most recently with the favorable reception to her memoir’s account of this period, as well as its timeliness. China today, in all its emerging complex political and economic modernity, cannot be understood, or appreciated, “without a sense of its 19th- and 20th-century history,” she said.

Ms. Chapman was, and is, a woman full of purpose and passion, and showing no hint of slowing down. The sudden death of her third husband, Chauncey Brewster Chapman, in 1980 prompted her to write “Survivor’s Guide to Grief: Meeting It, Managing It” in 2008, which not only addresses spiritual and psychological needs, but provides important financial information.

“At the time, I took a whole bunch of notes,” she said, acknowledging the 28-year gap between her husband’s death and publishing her book. “I had been surprised at myself for acting as I did [and wanted to explain this to myself and to others] , but I also had a job. I was running a 501C I started, the Micronesia Corporation, taking care of my four children and looking after my mother, who was living on the ground floor of my house. Dealing with all these needs didn’t give me a lot of time to go into my creative inner self. As writers know, time alone at a desk is a godsend.”

More books are on the way, the 89-year-old notes. It’s anyone’s guess what subjects they will embrace. Her horn of plenty has much sound.