Nae Glaikit: Jean Ewen

I was admittedly ambivalent about Bock's Communist's Daughter but it led me to Jean Ewen, one of the woman on the right in this photograph (orginal here). [Revision: In looking at this image every once in a while, I've come to think that my identification of Ewen is wrong. My guess is that Ewen is in the middle and Agnes Smedly is the woman on the right. Someone out there knows for sure -- let me know.]

Bock, like most people who write about Bethune, includes Ewen as a peripheral character. Being cast as a bit player in Bethune haigiography must have been both tedious and annoying to Jean Ewen since she had been in China longer than Bethune, spoke Chinese, and came from a family with multi-generation involvement in communist and socialist politics (her father spent three years for sedition in Kingston along with Tim Buck).

Jean Ewen (1911-1988) recorded her memories of her years or wartime nursing in China Nurse 1932-1939 (1981). Her prose isn't as smooth and polished as Bock's but it reveals multiple layers of conflict when dealing with "authorities" of one sort or another. It's oddly fascinating as she tries to balance her frustration with Bethune's high-handedness with an acknowledgment of his medical skills. Agnes Smedley, like anyone who tried to manipulate Ewen by referring to her father's expectations, evokes a similarly conflicted response. The conflicts in her narrative voice are clear from her memoirs opening

My father and I had never been close. After my mother died in the flu epidemic of 1919, he took my brothers, sister, and me to live on a ranch in Saskatchewan where he worked as a blacksmith. While we lived there, the rancher's wife introduced my father to socialism, which she had studied at the Rand School of Socialism in New York. Before long, my father was reading Das Kapital, and by the time he left the ranch in 1924, he was ready for the Revolution, in which he could play a more interesting role than that of being a father to his four children.

Unlike Bock's novel, Ewen's unpolished memoir has made me more curious about China during the Sino-Japenese war and more curious about her life. She claims on multiple occasions to have been a coward but i doubt it. I suspect she was curious, sturdy, skeptical, and determined.

Comments

[Tamara]

completely off topic, but I've found you!

[Heather]

Wondered when you'd stumble on us as we babble among ourselves over here.