The Huang-De Juan sisters

Like many Spanish and foreign families living in Spain, the Huang sisters suffered the consequences of the Spanish Civil War. Their father, Huang Lühe was a Chinese diplomat who arrived in Madrid in 1898 to take up a post as chargé d’affaires in the embassy of imperial China. His marriage to the Belgian aristocrat Juliette Brouttá-Gilliard three years later caused an uproar in a society that was unaccustomed to mixed marriages. Living in Madrid, the couple socialized with such leading politicians, artists, and intellectuals of the time as the Count of Romanones, Pío Baroja, and Emilia Pardo Bazán. They also had their two daughters who they gave both Spanish and Chinese names: Nadine (Huang Neting), born in 1902, and Marcela (Huang Masai), born in 1905. Since the Chinese surname Huang (or Hwang as it was transliterated then) sounds like the Spanish name “Juan”, the family took the surname “de Juan”.

In 1913, following the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the proclamation of the Republic of China, the family moved to China. Huang Lühe held important positions in the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Economy, while the elder daughter, Nadine, became one of the few women to become an air force pilot. In Beijing, the family knew important politicians and intellectuals like Mao Zedong, Lin Yutang and Hu Shi, but when Huang Lühe died in 1926, they returned to Europe, first to Belgium and then to Spain.

The two sisters lived a bohemian life in the Madrid of the 1930s. (Both appeared in the popular magazine Estampa.) When the Civil War broke out, Nadine was in Paris living with the American feminist writer, homosexual activist and pacifist Natalie Clifford Barney. She endured the racism and anti-homosexual attitudes that were characteristic of the fascism of the time. She fought in the French resistance against the German occupation until she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944, where she met the woman who would become her partner, Nelly Mousset-Vos. She is shown here in a still from a newsreel shot in Malmo in April 1945, where she was taken after her release from Ravensbrück.

Marcela remained in Madrid, working as a translator in the Chinese embassy. At the start of the Civil War, the embassy, along with China’s consulates in Barcelona and Valencia, took a neutral position, as did most other diplomatic posts. The embassy tried to provide security for the thirty or so Chinese residents of Madrid.

In October, when the war looked like it would threaten the Spanish capital, the Chinese ambassador followed the lead of many of his counterparts in moving from Madrid to a neutral location: the French town of San Jean de Luz, a few kilometers from the Spanish border. A minimum staff remained in Madrid to protect the few Chinese who remained in the city. Unfortunately, in her memoirs, Marcela says nothing about her whereabouts during those key moments of the Civil War. She would later become one of the most important translators and popularizers of Chinese culture in Spain.