Emma Oxford

Emma Oxford recently spent two years in Hong Kong with her husband Michael Elliott, International Editor of Time magazine. Living in Asia for the first time since her childhood gave Emma the opportunity to research the lives of her parents, Max and Audrey Oxford, a British colonial service couple who met in China in 1943, setting up home in Hong Kong after the end of the war. They witnessed a war that scarred even those who survived and the return of Hong Kong to British rule in 1945, followed by an uneasy peace until Mao’s Communist takeover of China in 1949. Using as its basis the author’s parents’ personal letters and journals, AT LEAST WE LIVED: A TALE OF LOVE AND WAR IN CHINA is the story of a love affair which flourished during an extraordinary time in the Far East, when the old colonial order had been overturned but much of its old lifestyle prevailed.

Emma Oxford now lives in Bronxville, New York but visits London and China regularly. In October 2008 she retraced the overland journey from Chongqing to Kunming made by her parents in wartime conditions in 1943, and in December 2009 she will join a re-enactment of a thrilling escape from Hong Kong into mainland China made by her father and fellow British and Chinese intelligence officers as the colony surrendered to Japanese forces on Christmas Day in 1941.