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

I’m afraid this book, China Interrupted, is horrendously expensive so I haven’t got it but I also know that there are China Rhyming readers with access to university libraries who may have a copy. I haven’t got the spare change and I rather think that any missionaries reading this might prefer to give their money to some sort of “saving Chinese souls” fund. Anyway, it does sound like a potentially interesting story.

This 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 Canadas 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 socialisation 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.