PE-MIN WOO.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 267, 10 November 1937, Page 22

PE-MIN WOO.

HER COUNTRY FIRST.

BACK TO CHINA TO NURSE.

FEARS FOR OWN FAMILY. Pe-Min Woo. Chinese beauty studying social services in London, fears for her family in captured Peking —father, mother and six sisters. In the China Institute in Bloomsbury she reads the war news. Latterly it has contained the word "cholera." Pe-Min Woo is a trained nurse, and so soon she will sail for Hongkong, go thence to Shanghai. Framed against a large war map on which coloured pins showed the opposing armies, *he said to a reporter gravely: "Of my family there has tieen no news since July: Peking has been bombed and shelled. They may be hurt. They may be safe. 1 do not know.

"For them I can do nothing. But for | China I must go back —to the front lines, or wherever I can be most useful. China has need of her women who can nurse." Name Means "Wear Jade." Slim, perfectly poised, her hair darkly gleaming, with fragile hands that fluttered as butterfly wings, she pointed here and there on the map. She was sheathed in a dress of silver silk, highcollared. faintly military in cut. On her right wrist was a jade bangle. "PeMin translated to English," she said, "means 'wear jade.' "I have one brother. He is 19. From our home lie went to America, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Soon after the war came I wrote to him. There has been no reply. I think perlia|iA he, too. has gone to help China. "I had intended to stay in two years. One year of my studies is over. If this war is long, perhaps I shall never come back to complete them. "There are ten Chinese women students in London. These and 20 other Chinese women have formed a committee to raise money for medical supplies. All others from China who are living here are doing the same thing. We have sent alreadv £1000.

"I am just 22 years old, but I was two years at the nursing college, and three in the hospital. So I am, I hope, efficient." Pe-Min Woo, bound for the perilous places where cholera rages, smiled timidly and said "Good-bye."