In the spring of 1943, Audrey Watson, a spirited young woman from Churchill's spy agency, set out from London on a journey that would change her life. Her destination was Chungking, a squalid but strangely romantic city on the Yangtze River and the wartime capital of China. At a tea party given by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, she met Max Oxford, an intelligence officer in the Royal Air Force, who had escaped from Hong Kong after it fell to the Japanese. In the mountains of southwest China, Max and Audrey began a lifelong love that would sustain them through good times and bad - through war, separation, loss, and Audrey's speech for identity as colonial wife in postwar Asia.

At Least We Lived is the first book by Emma Oxford, Max and Audrey's elder daughter, and it is based on her parents' remarkable collection of letters and journals. Emma began the book when she lived recently in Hong Kong, and she supplemented her parents' eyewitness accounts of life in Asia with her own extensive research in the region. Emma grew up in Malaysia and England, and graduated from Oxford University. she has spent her career working in both the UK and the US, and now lives in Washington DC.