The ageing terraced house in Shanghai's former French Concession is filled with memories for Dr Liliane Willens, as fresh as when she left her family home nearly 60 years ago. Here is where the telephone hung on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. She raced to answer it when friends called to say soldiers of the victorious Communist army were sleeping on the pavement after entering the city in 1949. Here is the upstairs balcony, where she once found pieces of shrapnel embedded in the wall from US planes targeting Japanese-occupied Shanghai towards the end of the second world war.
Here is the area of the garden where her older sister, Riva, used to flirt with an officer in the French colonial army when Shanghai was still divided up among foreign powers.
The house on Route Delastre, now Taiyuan Road, is one of the small corners of the city of her birth she still recognises despite having spent the first 25 years of her life in Shanghai. 'To me, this was my home. Being stateless, I wanted to belong to something. I belonged to the French Concession. It was my city,' she said.
She was a 'stateless person', born to Russian Jewish parents who fled the Bolshevik revolution and took refuge in Shanghai around 1920. The creation of the Soviet Union left Russians like her parents without a country.
Nevertheless, the family lived a comfortable middle-class existence, especially in the 1930s because of the benefits of 'extraterritoriality', under which foreigners governed their own affairs and reaped prosperity from trade.
'It was a beautiful life, of course, in the '30s,' she said. Her father was a successful agent for Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada. He owned a Morris Minor car and the family employed a maid, a cook and a tailor.