Year: 2012
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: In China Interrupted nursing scholar Sonya Grypma skilfully analyzes the intertwined social history of a Canadian missionary community and the personal story of missionary nurse Betty Gale, one of its members.Born and raised in China as a daughter of Canadian missionaries, and determined to continue her family's legacy of missionary work, Gale returned to China as a registered nurse in 1939, as did two of her nursing friends from this same community.Two years prior the Japanese had invaded China.Gale and her fellow nurses arrived in a war-torn country.Despite their professional commitment, religious calling, and personal determination, they never got the chance to take up their missionary pursuit among the Chinese population.Instead, they, with the new families they had formed, became imprisoned in a series of Japanese internment camps in China from 1941 to 1945.By probing the history of one Canadian missionary community in China, while foregrounding the life history of Gale, Grypma points out how this community's dramatic, complex, and contradictory life in China during the Japanese occupation not only represents a broader story of Canadian "mishkid" nurse internment but also a broader social Canadian missionary history.Therefore, this very fine historical account and clear analysis goes much beyond a personal story.It is a social history about an entire missionary community, about the end of an epoch in Canadian missionary history, and the end of an era in the history of Canadian nursing and health care.In foregrounding Betty Gale's multi-faceted China life, and in reconstructing the shared identity of an entire, albeit small, community of Canadian missionaries and their mishkids, Grypma depicts, in vivid detail, the broader social meaning of the internment of Western missionaries and nurses.The internment of many members of the missionary community by Japan in 1941 symbolically and in reality represents the coming to an end of Canadian missionary work in China.This work complements existing historical scholarship on the imprisonment of Western military nurses under the Japanese in Asia, and of internment experiences more generally.It also significantly adds to Canadian missionary history.To date, little has been written on civilian internment
Author: Sonya Grypma
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4391977956