Norman Slept Here

If you ever intend a trip to the Middle Kingdom where you range beyond the world of hotel clerks and tour guides, you had better brush up on Canadian history (assuming you are from the Great White North which is a stretch for a good many of you I know.) You will get enormous mileage from the very fact you share a native land with Norman Bethune. Free announcements on the radio, free beer, instant celebrity status, unfailing ice breaker etc. etc. On two successive trips to the mountains west of here the people have said "Norman slept here" which is in all likelihood correct. In the late thirties the Japanese were the bitter enemy and occupying power and this region was a scene of ongoing resistance. Mao Zedung and the Communists used the hills near here for a base in the ongoing fight. Norman was an unfailing hero who put his life on the line establishing the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH - move over Alan Arkin) he is renowned for. Mao has written texts praising the only foreigner whose statue stands in China and they are still required reading in school. The Chinese will always know more than you about Bethune. That is unless you check the facts. Despite his enormous legend, in fact he was in China less than two years before dying of blood poisoning from a surgical knife wound. He went to McGill so they can't have taught him the basics, don't operate on yourself! Many Chinese think he was here a decade and I enjoy tripping them up. I have been in the home of the son of a general who fought alongside Norman. Now who in Canada knows where he was born?