From prison camp to painting: Sun City resident recounts her life story

At a youthful 86 years old, Fran Stake lives in Sun City Huntley, where she plays bridge and pickle ball and swims and paints.

Geographically, it's half a world away from Shanghai, China, where Stake grew up; in another sense, the distance is even farther from the place where World War II intruded on her childhood and she spent three years in a Japanese prison camp.

Invited by the Sun City Historians, Stake recently spoke about her experiences for residents of the retirement community.

"Being born there, I didn't like it," she began, later adding, "but I was a kid. What did I know?"

She and her family dad, mom, sister, brother were in China's coastal, cosmopolitan gem as British foreigners, although both of Stake's grandmothers were Chinese.

At first, they lived well enough. Her father had a job with the telephone company, and the family lived in Shanghai's International Settlement so the children could attend a good school. Stake spent summers on the tennis court and at the cinema.

But war was encroaching. The Japanese had been gunning for Shanghai for a few years, and there were incidents, but they didn't really affect the family. Once, her mother took the children to the roof of a friend's apartment building just to watch a bomb drop on North Railway Station.

It happened just as rumors had predicted, Stake said, but she wasn't particularly moved.

"We all looked at each other, and we knew people had died."

One morning when she was 13, Stake and her father took a bus downtown, and as they neared the waterfront, "hordes of people" were running, filling the road ahead. They were covered in blood.

A bomb accidentally dropped by the Chinese air force had just detonated in front of the Cathay Hotel.

The bus driver shooed the riders off and roared away. As Stake and her father took in the pandemonium and turned to walk home, another bomb fell close by at the busiest intersection in town. Before long, a truck filled with bodies drove past.

"There was nothing we could do," Stake said. "I couldn't speak Chinese, and everybody was yelling in Chinese. My father didn't speak Chinese."

With more than 1,700 casualties and 1,800 injuries, the August 1937 tragedy came to be known in Shanghai as "Bloody Saturday." That weekend Japanese troops invaded and fought the Chinese for three months until Shanghai fell.

Still, life went on more or less as usual until Dec. 8, 1941, when Japanese troops marched in to occupy the city. Her father's job was given to a Japanese worker, and Stake's family got by on flour sent by the British consulate.

That meant nothing but pancakes for about a year.

The family had to wear red armbands displaying "B" for British and "1523," their house number on Bubbling Well Road. But Allied foreigners were being moved to internment camps in and around the city, and Stake's family eventually went to Lunghua Civil Assembly Center, the same camp featured in the 1987 Steven Spielberg movie "Empire of the Sun."

Good food was so scarce that a raw onion came to taste as good as an apple, Stake said, and there was no heat in the dorms and no showers for three years. Everyone came down with malaria and itchy chilblains, but "we were darn lucky," she said.

That's because guards were few and generally left their prisoners alone, unlike other camps she heard about. Stake worked in Lunghua's hospital kitchen and later in the main kitchen.

Then one fine day when she was 21, the war was over, and the Americans arrived.

"They came riding into camp, and we were standing there clapping and yelling," Stake said. She got a job with the U.S. Army and before long married a soldier who had been on the first plane into Shanghai. They raised two sons in the Chicago area.

Divorcing after 26 years, Stake enrolled at the American Academy of Art and married one of her teachers. Vern Stake died in 2004.

Hardly one to let losses slow her down, Fran Stake is a health enthusiast who fought to reclaim her health after the camp years took their toll even fending off tuberculosis as a young mother in the U.S. with an unusual remedy.

"I was thinking, what did they do in China when they got sick? And I thought of a friend who had gotten well with a raw egg every day.

"I beat TB," she said, "with raw eggs."