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

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.

1

Developing a Mishkid Elite (1910-1934)

Sonia Grypma

Examines the childhood experiences of Betty Gale and her contemporaries at the United Church North China Mission between 1911 and 1934, exploring how a mishkid elite emerged from Henan province.

2

"Call to Live Dangerously" (1935-1938)

Sonia Grypma

Examines how mishkids’ decisions to return to China as missionary nurses reflected the expectations and realities of the sub-culture of second generation missionaries coming of age during the early war years in China between 1935 and 1938. 

3

The 'New' Missionaries (1939-1940)

Sonia Grypma

Explores mishkid nurses’ early experiences as part of the ‘new’ generation of China missionary between 1939 and 1940, suspended in exile in a protected world of parties, romance and marriage while the mission hospitals they had come to China to work in were attacked and evacuated.  

4

Heeding and Ignoring Consular Advice (1941)

Sonia Grypma

Critiques Betty Gale and other missionary nurses’ pivotal decision to remain in China against consular advice in the months leading up to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

5

Practicing the Fine Art of House Arrest (1942)

Sonia Grypma

Considers how Betty Gale and other “enemy aliens” adapted to life under house arrest on the Qilu campus as Japan experimented with its new role of prison camp administrators for a population of civilian prisoners.

6

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

Sonia Grypma

Examines Betty Gale’s search for meaning between 1942 and 1943 as she and her family were moved from North China to a Shanghai – not for freedom, as they assumed, but for internment, first at a Civilian Assembly Centre with 350 other enemy aliens, then as medical staff-prisoners in charge of a remote civilian camp in Yangzhou. 

7

"The End of the World has Come": Pudong Camp (1943-1945)

Sonia Grypma

Explores how two years of increasing privation and danger in a condemned tobacco warehouse in Pudong with 1200 other internees confined Betty Gale’s personal sense of mission to ever-constricting social circles as she slowly withdrew into herself during the months of incessant air raids over Pudong that preceded liberation in 1945.