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223 Conclusion Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community At the beginning we had thought that internment was going to be good for us all. We should learn through suffering and living together a better way of life. Now we saw that while some of the best among us had been made better, many were not refined but degraded, the thin cover of culture having fallen away.Internment had gone on too long. —William Sewell,Stanley Camp internee,in Austin,Saving China There were 300,000 Allied nationals in Japanese hands during the war.¹ Japan held 13,544 civilian men, women, and children as captives in China and Hong Kong, including 311 Canadians, ten of whom were missionaries.² Of the 189 Canadians who remained in internment after the 1943 repatriation, only six were missionaries—all of them women.Five had been North China missionaries; four were nurses; three were missionary kids—Betty Thomson Gale, Mary Boyd Stanley, and Georgina Menzies Lewis.³ Hamish Ion has argued that, although the numbers are relatively small, the significance of the Canadian experience in Japanese camps lies not in its scale, but in what can be garnered from it about broader issues.4 As a social history , the internment of mishkid nurses was not a discrete event, but rather an extension of the history of the United Church of Canada North China missionary community. Wartime reshaped this community from a fairly remote and insular group in the 1910s to a diaspora of relocated missionaries by the 1930s. While the dispersed missionaries kept in contact with each other through letters and visits, internment served to drive a wedge between them, cutting them off from the larger Canadian missionary community . Internment forced internees to mix with disparate communities of imprisoned strangers. However valiantly the missionaries adjusted to their changing circumstances in the early twentieth century, they did not—they could not—keep pace with concurrent political changes in China. By the time Betty Gale and the others emerged from internment, China and the missionaries had disengaged from each other. Conclusion 224 Japanese internment was the final chapter in the history of mishkid nursing in China. Less a story of the unravelling of the global missionary movement than of the resilience of individuals within it, the history of mishkid nurses before and during Japanese internment reveals something of the sustaining nature of missionary communities. It was their missionary childhood that set the stage for mishkid nurses’later, unreasonable faith in God, his mission, and their place in it. Here I use the term “unreasonable ” not with disapproval, but with thoughtful observation—for within the context of deteriorating wartime conditions and diminishing financial and moral support from the church at home, the decisions of missionaries to go to, and remain in, Japanese-occupied China were not reasonable by most Canadian standards. However, within the social context of a missionary community that viewed China as a place of intersecting humanitarian and spiritual transformation, such faith in God and such decisions were a reasonable response, despite the uncertainty and danger that accompanied them. Road to Internment The Canadian missionary community in China was well-established by the time China-born missionary kids returned to assist with the medical side of the missionary enterprise.Their parents were committed to China: on average , mishkids’ fathers and mothers worked with the North China Mission for forty years.5 The first mishkid (Jean Menzies) was born in China in 1896. Her return to China in 1923 after studying nursing in Toronto coincided with a shift in mission emphasis from spiritual to physical ministrations. Whereas preaching the gospel and nurturing the spiritual development of Chinese Christians had been a priority for the North China Mission in its first thirty-five years,now Canadians were turning their attention to care of the sick as an expression of the Christian gospel. Like many other mission organizations across China, they were taking up the challenge to develop modern hospitals and medical and nurses training schools that were rooted in a Christian ethos of care. After a generation of laying the groundwork by building relationships and infrastructure,the Canadian missionary community was poised to impact their corner of China’s health care landscape. In the meantime, however, public opinion of missions had taken a downward turn as Canadians started to question the value (and expense) of the missionary enterprise. In the 1930s China missions were under critical scrutiny at home. The Depression made it difficult for donors in...

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