China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community

by Sonya Grypma

Overview

China Interrupted is the story of the richly interwoven lives of Canadian missionaries and their China-born children (mishkids), whose lives and mission were irreversibly altered by their internment as “enemy aliens” of Japan from 1941 to 1945.

Over three hundred Canadians were among the 13,000 civilians interned by the Japanese in China. China Interrupted explores the experiences of a small community of Canadian missionaries who worked in Japanese-occupied China and were profoundly affected by Canada’s entry into the Pacific War. It critically examines the fading years of the missionary movement, beginning with the perspective of Betty Gale and other mishkid nurses whose childhood socialization in China, decision to return during wartime, choice to stay in occupied regions against consular advice, and response to four years of internment reflect the resilience, fragility, and eventual demise of the China missions as a whole.

China Interrupted provides insight into the many ways in which health care efforts in wartime China extended out of the tight-knit missionary community that had been established there decades earlier. Urging readers past a thesis of missions as a tool of imperialism, it offers a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationships among people, institutions, and nations during one of the most important intercultural experiments in Canada’s history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554582372
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	315
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Sonya Grypma is a leading scholar in the history of nursing and global health and an associate professor of nursing at Trinity Western University. She has gained an international reputation for her work on missionary nursing in China, particularly through her groundbreaking book Healing Henan: Canadian Nurses at the North China Mission, 1888–1947.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents for
China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community, by Sonia Grypma

List of Illustrations

Foreword | Margaret (Gale) Wightman

Foreword | Geertje Boschma

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: China Interrupted

Chapter 1 Developing a Mishkid Elite (1910–1934)

Chapter 2 ''Call to Live Dangerously'' (1935–1938)

Chapter 3 The “New” Missionaries (1939–1940)

Chapter 4 Heeding and Ignoring Consular Advice (1941)

Chapter 5 Practising the Fine Art of House Arrest (1942)

Chapter 6 Adjusting to Columbia Country Club and Yangzhou Camp B (1943)

Chapter 7 ''The End of the World has Come'': Pudong Camp (1943–1945)

Conclusion Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community

Appendices

A Canadian Missionary Nurses in China, April 1941

B All Canadian Nurses Interned in China

Notes

Bibliography

Index