While the principle narrator is Christensen's father, a young missionary doctor who, in a hair-raising journey, smuggled his family behind Japanese battlelines the year before Pearl Harbor, Christensen also tells the story of the many other missionaries who also sought to relieve the suffering of innocents caught in the crossfire of war and revolution - brave women who marched orphans through enemy lines, missionaries turned OSS intelligence officers, a Canadian Anglican cleric, a Swiss trainer of seeing-eye dogs, and a diplomat who travelled the province by bicycle.