The Canadians Who Went to China

Norman Bethune sailed for China in January 1938 without the language. The twenty-six-year-old Winnipeg nurse who travelled with him had been working in it for six years, and almost nobody here knows her name.

Norman Bethune left Montreal for Yan'an in 1938 and was dead within two years. Mao's tribute made him required reading for a generation of Chinese schoolchildren, while his own country took forty years to notice.