‘Running with the Tiger’ follows a life through World War II China

Ansie Lee Sperry of Portola Valley will present her memoirs of growing up in China — from her birth in 1914, through the Japanese invasion, to a prison camp in the Philippines — at 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 22, at Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park.

By Marion Softky

The cupcakes were delicious. But it was hard to make the jump of imagination from the scrumptious goodies shrouded in grated coconut, offered at a sunny spring book-signing party in Portola Valley, with their dark source.

Those “Santo Tomas” cupcakes came from a recipe invented by Ansie Lee Sperry while she was interned in a Japanese prison camp outside of Manila during World War II.

Ms. Sperry recalls taking leftover mush from the food lines that served internees twice a day. She would dry it on a tin sheet in the hot Manila sun, and crush it into flour. Then she could add coconut milk, spices, and fresh ginger, and bake the batter into cupcakes on her primitive charcoal stove — a rare treat for people trapped in a grim place in enemy territory during a war.

“There was no sugar; now and then you’d get a duck egg. It made a nice cake,” she says in an interview in her small apartment at The Sequoias senior complex in Portola Valley. “If you have imagination, you can create things.”

There will be Santo Tomas cupcakes to snack on when she reviews her new book of memoirs, “Running with the Tiger,” at Kepler’s bookstore Saturday, Aug. 22 at 2 p.m. Her daughter, Vicky Merchant of Portola Valley, will make sure these cupcakes have additional ingredients not available at prison camp. “We add butter, oil and frosting,” she says.

Prosperous in Hong Kong

The first 23 years of “Running with the Tiger” shows a spunky girl growing up prosperous in China, from 1914, when Ansie was born, until 1937, when the Japanese invaded. The book is written in clear, factual, prose with photographs, detailed sketches by Ms. Sperry, and references. Excerpts from her diary give day-by-day accounts of places and events.

She was born in the year of the Tiger, to Lee Hysan, a prominent and progressive Hong Kong businessman. She and several siblings were actually born in Macao to escape the bubonic plague in Hong Kong.

It was a big and happy family, but far distant culturally from Portola Valley in 2009. She was the second child of her father’s first concubine; she was one of 15 children of her father’s wife and three concubines. They all called his wife — who still had bound feet — “Ah Ma” (Mother). They lived in comfort and harmony.

Her father believed in educating girls as well as boys. When she was 9, Ansie and her sister, Doris, went to England to study at a Moira House, on the edge of Suffolk Downs. “It really was unheard of to be sending such young Chinese girls for schooling so far away,” she wrote in her book.

From 1924 to 1928, the Lee girls had a glorious time. They had no exams and no uniforms, she wrote. They rode horses on the downs, took piano lessons, had no exams for four years, and heard special concerts by violinist Fritz Kreisler. “No child could have had more fun at school than I did.”

Their happy school days were shockingly terminated in 1928 when their father was murdered. The murder was never solved, but may have been involved with the opium trade. The girls came home.

For the next 11 years, she lived a busy, comfortable, and increasingly frustrated life. She finished the Episcopal girls school at the top of her class, and spent a year in Peking, where she became close friends with the daughters of Col. — later General — Joe Stillwell. By chance she was inspired to learn shorthand and typing, a rare skill among Chinese women at the time. “As a hobby, I learned shorthand. That changed my life,” she says.

Another value Ansie brought home from England was an interest in volunteering and service. After she returned to Hong Kong from Peking, she was not allowed to work, so she partied, played tennis with the boys — and volunteered to help doctors in their clinics. She became increasingly restless. “There was something missing,” she wrote. “There was no real challenge. I had to break out of this small island.”

Invasion

In 1937, when Japan invaded China, she wanted to “do her bit.” In 1939, she joined the Chinese Medical Relief Service (like the Red Cross) and served in a rugged war zone in the Chinese interior. She was secretary for the chief.

Visiting Chungking, the capital, she contacted W.H. Donald, Australian adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and took a position as secretary for Mr. Donald. She always called him “Don.” They remained close throughout the war.

Part of her new job was serving as secretary to Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. “She was charming and beautiful,” Ms. Sperry remembers.

But her first letter was to the French ambassador, thanking him for perfume. “I came to do war work,” Ms. Sperry comments. “I quit right off.”

She stayed with Don. They cruised the South Pacific with his new yacht and assorted ships for more than a year. For Ansie, the cruises, which extended as far as Honolulu and New Zealand, were marred principally by seasickness; she was not a good sailor.

On Dec, 6, 1941 (their time), Ansie and Don were on a freighter near New Guinea on their way from Honolulu to Manila. They heard the announcement that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and America was in the war. Ansie wrote in her diary: “Golly, we are in a death trap.”

War and prison

They landed in Manila on Dec. 13 amid air raids. On Jan. 2, 1942, Manila fell. Within days Allied nationals — and Ansie — were rounded up and placed in internment camps.

On Feb. 20, she and Don were transferred to the internment camp at the University of Santo Tomas, to join several thousand others. It would be almost three years exactly before the two were rescued in one of the legendary rescue operations in World War II.

At first, the Japanese turned over operation of the camp to a democratically elected government of internees. They were led and supplied by internees from the Red Cross.

She found herself on double mattresses in a small room crammed with 32 women. There was haphazard netting to protect against hordes of mosquitoes. She soon discovered that bedbugs smell like essence of almonds.

She soon connected with Don. Thy found some lumber to buy, and were allowed to build a shanty in the courtyard. Her accounts of prison life include some amazingly upbeat activities, and some horrors. Cooking and cupcakes, bookbinding, and helping put on shows gave satisfaction. She worked preparing vegetables — until she came down with amoebic dysentery.

Also on the down side were typhoons, downpours, a big earthquake, heat, and frequent trips to the hospital. And ants, the tiny red ones that get into everything and sting.

There was good company. Early in her time in the shanty, she met a handsome young American banker, Henry “Hank” Sperry. What started as friendship grew into love. They were married in Shanghai in 1946.

A transfer to the Los Banos camp, also in the Philippines, in April 1944 marked a change to a more restricted, and brutal regime. And as the war ground on, food became scarce; people began to starve. By the beginning of 1945, they were peeling the rice grains, hull by hull. “The whole camp was absorbed in dealing with this bit of madness,” she wrote.

The morning of Feb. 23, everything changed. The day “exploded like a magnificent firework display,” she wrote.

U.S. forces launched the famous rescue at 7 a.m. precisely, when Japanese guards were busy leading internees in calisthenics. Parachutes filled the sky, troops came by land, and an amphibious fleet rolled ashore from the lake. Soon Ansie, Don, Henry and the rest were chugging to freedom in amphibious tanks.

All 2,146 prisoners were rescued. There were no civilian casualties. Peace, prosperity

After the rescue, it took most of a year for Ansie and Henry to sort out their lives, get back to the United States, and get his bank’s permission to marry. The wedding took place in the Episcopal Cathedral in Shanghai on July 6, 1946. Don died the following November.

The young couple stayed in Shanghai until 1949, until Mao and the Communists took over. They then moved to Hong Kong, where Mr. Sperry was a vice president of Citibank for much of Asia, until he first retired in 1967. “His whole career was in Asia,” says his daughter.

Henry and Ansie Lee Sperry moved to a house in Portola Valley in 1973, after he retired a second time. They moved to The Sequoias in 1990; Mr. Sperry died in 2003.

More than 150 people came to Ms. Sperry’s book signing at her old Portola Valley home where the Merchants have built a new house. Guest included about 10 nieces and nephews from all over the country, Ms. Merchant says, and several fellow prisoners at Santo Tomas.

At a lively 94 years, Ms. Sperry is grateful. “I’ve had a wonderful life,” she says.

The famous rescue from the prison camp at Los Banos is portrayed in a History Channel documentary, “Rescue at Dawn: the Los Banos Raid.”