Norman Bethune sailed for China on the eighth of January 1938. He did not go alone, and he could not speak the language.
The person who could was a twenty-six-year-old nurse from Winnipeg named Jean Ewen, and she had been in China already for most of the previous six years. One commentary on her memoir puts the difference plainly: "unlike Bethune, Ewen had an excellent command of Chinese." She was his interpreter and his assistant, and for the first stretch of that journey she was the reason any of it functioned.
Almost nobody in this country knows her name.
She was born in Scotland on Christmas Eve 1911 and graduated from nursing school in Winnipeg in 1931, into the worst labour market the century had produced. There was no work. In 1932 she went to China to nurse with the Franciscan Fathers — some accounts say 1933 — and she stayed about four years. That is where the language came from. Not a course. Four years of working in it.
She came home briefly in 1937 and then went back with Bethune.
The two of them did not get on. That is not a secret and it is in her own account, which is one of the things that makes the account worth reading: Bethune was difficult, imperious and often drunk, and Ewen was twenty-six and unimpressed. They separated before long. He went north to the Jin-Cha-Ji border region and the fame that followed. She kept working.
Almost nobody in this country knows her name.
What she then did has no monument. She nursed at the front. She trained nurses, and she trained the village health workers who would later be called barefoot doctors, and she taught sanitation, which in an army without clean water kills more of the enemy than surgery ever will. The Chinese government gave her the Silver Shield for it.
Her own book is called, flatly, China Nurse 1932–1939. Not a memoir of the revolution, not a life with Bethune. A job title and a date range, which is about right for a woman who described the work and left the mythology to other people. She eventually went south, out through Hong Kong, and came home.
Then she said nothing in public for forty years.
Her memoir, China Nurse 1932–1939, came out in 1981 — more than four decades after the events, and six years before she died in 1987. She was seventy. By then Bethune had been a national historic site for five years and his face was in Chinese classrooms, and the woman who had translated for him published a book and was largely left to it.
It would be easy to turn this into a complaint about who gets remembered, and that would be the lazy version. The honest comparison is less flattering to the question than to either person.
Bethune is remembered because he died there, and that is most of it. He gave his life in a way that read as sacrifice, in a war the Chinese Communist Party went on to win. Mao wrote an essay about him five weeks later. Ewen survived, came home, worked, and got old in Canada. Nothing about that produces a tribute essay or a tomb in a martyrs' cemetery.
There's a second reason and it's the one worth naming. Bethune was a surgeon and Ewen was a nurse; he was a man and she was a woman. The work she did — translating, training, teaching people to boil water — makes everything else possible and leaves no single moment to point at.
The Chinese record, to its credit, kept her. By one account there is a stone near Bethune's grave inscribed as the grave of a Canadian friend, Jean Ewen. We have not confirmed that ourselves and offer it as what it is, a report rather than a fact. It would be entirely in character for the country that remembered Bethune to have remembered her too, and for us to be the ones who forgot.
So: four Canadians at least went into that war and into that revolution, and Bethune is the one we know. Richard Brown operated beside him and went back to his mission. James Endicott spent his life afterwards arguing with his own country about what he had seen. And Jean Ewen got them both through the door, in a language she had learned by working in it, at twenty-six.
This is the second piece in The Canadians Who Went to China.
