China Expat is a cultural and literary forum for expatriates interested in China and has been published by Asia Briefing Ltd since 2001. The sites resident China culture writers have included such expatriate luminaries as 
China Expat Salutes Canada Day
Happy Canada day! What’s that? Of course Canada is within the purview of China Expat. Why, go to any big city in China, and you can’t slap a puck without hitting a Canuck or two. Earthier than biffies, and warmer than a Chinook, Canadians are the gravy on the poutine that is Sino-Western relations. Hosers and neels alike, today we salute you, with the stories of some Canadians who made a difference in China.
Dr. Leanora King
Dr. King first came to China with the Methodists’ Women’s Foreign Missionary Society, and worked at the Peking Hospital. The original barefoot doctor, she commenced to tending the sick in remote villages with no medical facilities, across an increasingly destitute Middle Kingdom. After being summoned to Tianjin and healing the viceroy’s Lady Li, she established the Government Hospital for Women and Children, funded by her noble patrons.
Her courageous frontline treatment of Chinese soldiers during the Sino-Japanese War earned her the Imperial Chinese Order of the Double Dragon, a double honor considering it was bestowed by the anti-foreigner Dowager Empress. She was among the only three foreigners with the brass to stay in Tianjin after the Boxer Rebellion, and organized the Government Medical School for Women a few years after. Finding herself unwanted as nationalist sentiment mounted, she had no choice but to return to Canada. While arranging her trip, she died, a paradigm of the brainy, ballsy, big-hearted Canadian woman.
Dr. Henry Norman Bethune
Communist nothing, Dr. Bethune was first and foremost a humanist of the highest caliber. A witness to the horrors of the Great War and Spanish Civil War, Bethune realized that profiteers, not principals, drove people to war, and vowed to treat the social roots of disease and neglect. Traveling to the Soviet Union to observe their system of health care, he saw communism as the best available alternative to the system that kept the common man in self-forged chains.
Not that he stopped at theory. Bethune invented the first mobile blood transfusion service while in Spain, a service put to good use when he joined Mao and his PLA at Yan’an in the ’38. A war-movie-ready field surgeon, he performed makeshift frontline surgeries under nigh impossible conditions. During ceasefires, he organized training for doctors, nurses, and orderlies. Again, his cause was mankind; Bethune operated on Japanese casualties as readily as on Chinese.
If karma exists, its rewards do not necessarily come in this lifetime. He contracted septicemia from a finger cut during surgery and died in 1939.
Jan Wong
Now no one’s saying every Canadian that goes to China is a selfless hero, and we’re out to show you some Canadians have made a difference in China, not necessarily a humanitarian one. Trust a naïve young doofus to at least give it the old college try. Such a doofus was Wong, when she left McGill University in the early 70s, brimming with socialist ardor, to swell the ranks of China’s Cultural Revolution. Believe it or not, many other foreigners tried, but only she and one other succeeded in getting seats at Peking University during the upheaval.
Historically and numerically, it’s been the Chinese who dream of a better world in Canada. Wong met such a one during what passed for her studies, one who wanted to escape to the West, and caught up in the spirit of things, denounced the fellow student, who was later disgraced and expelled.
But media whores get to write their own history, and her book Red China Blues ameliorated the incident, as well as chronicling her disillusionment with Maoist China in general, an expensive eye-opening her parents could have given her for free. She penned another egocentric book, Jan Wong’s China, then went on to a long career with Canada’s Globe and Mail, ill-informedly shooting her mouth off over other sensitive political subjects. Beauty way to go for that Blochead, eh?
Edison Chen
Take off, he’s no Hong! He was born in Van before attending Hong Kong International School and finding out that in China, there’s no line between famous actors and famous singers, as long as you’re pretty. But you don’t muck with a Canuck, cutey-pie or otherwise. He’s punched out derisive street hecklers, as well as taxi drivers who don’t drive respectfully, upholding the rep of Canadians as a fair but bare-knuckled bunch.
Of course, Edison’s contribution to the world was unwittingly providing us with snaps of Mando-starlets such as Bobo Chan, Candice Chan Si-Wai, Gillian Chung , and Cecilia Cheung in flagrante delicto. Edison found a quick exit out of a superficial, cliché lifestyle, and we found out that nude modeling is best left to the professionals.
Mark Rowswell – Dashan
The only thing more astonishing than Dashan’s stratospheric Q-rating in China is the endless reserves of bile other foreigners here enjoy belching on his good name. May they choke on their sour grapes: Dashan – a salud. A million lao wais have come to these golden shores hoping that their white hides and modest good looks will be enough to catapult them to fame and fortune. They hate because you beat them to it. First, because you were studying Mandarin in the 80s, before it was cool, second, because you studied cross-talk, which still isn’t cool, and ultimately, because you have the will and heart of a mating-season caribou behind that self-effacing smile. Thanks for the free Chinese lessons, and thanks for giving every Canadian in China a leg up PR-wise.
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We learned about hime when we were still young and were moved by him. A great hero, I must say!
Yeah, Da Shan rocks.