Celebrities face to face
Dialogue with the mountains
△ Big mountains
Oyama was born in 1965 in Ottawa, Canada. He began studying Chinese at the age of 19, and after graduating from the University of Toronto, he went to Peking University for further study in the Department of Chinese. In 1988, he first performed sketches and hosted programs on CCTV, and the following year, he studied under Jiang Kun and became the first foreigner in the cross-talk family tree. Four times on CCTV Spring Festival Gala, is the most foreign actors. He has starred in TV dramas and dramas and won the Magnolia Cup. He served as the special envoy of the Canadian national team at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the Canadian general representative of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, and was later awarded the China-Canada Goodwill Ambassador. For more than 30 years, Oyama has performed programs on stage and conducted cultural exchanges offstage. Strive to combine Chinese and Western comedy culture, so that the humor art of Chinese can better go to the world. The People's Daily commented that "Dashan is a foreigner, but not an outsider." ”
△ Oyama's homemade small recording studio
After the COVID-19 pandemic, Dashan, who stayed at home, made a recording studio in the stables to record an audio program based on the real experiences of others, "Memoirs of Guidefu". Oyama hired a professional translator, and together with his wife, proofread and recorded, repeatedly polished, and uploaded the program to the audio website after completion.
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Welcome to "Memoirs of the Return to The Cave Telling Stories". I am Dashan, and what I share with you here is the story of Dr. Guo Haibo, a Canadian doctor, who was in Shangqiu, Henan during the anti-Japanese war...
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In Guide Province, Henan Province, China, 100 years ago, there was a Canadian church hospital, São Paulo Hospital, known locally as Beiguan Hospital. From 1923 to 1925, Oyama's grandfather, Dr. Rao, was a doctor at the hospital. After Dr. Rao and his family left São Paulo Hospital, another Canadian doctor, Dr. Guo, came here and worked until the outbreak of the War of Resistance. Dashan's knowledge of Dr. Guo came from a casual conversation during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Dashan: During the Beijing Olympics, Dr. Guo's grandson was an official of the Canadian Council, and I was the special envoy of the Canadian national delegation of the Olympic Committee, and we met in one of our work. At a working meal, he said he was coming to China for the first time, but his grandparents had lived in China for a while, working as church doctors in Henan Province before liberation. I said that my grandparents were also working as church doctors in Henan Province, and the church doctors in Canada mainly went to Henan and Sichuan. Then he said that his grandparents were in a place called Guidefu at the time, and I was stunned, and I looked at him and said, "You are sincerely teasing me, do you know Guidefu?" "Because there are only three Canadian surgeons who have been to Beiguan Hospital in history, the first is my grandfather, the second is Dr. Guo, plus one Dr. Brown. As a result, by chance, at the Beijing Olympic Games decades later, Dr. Rao's grandson and Dr. Guo's grandson met again.
△ 2008 Beijing Olympic Games
Dashan: Dr. Guo's grandson told me that his grandfather left a memoir, and when I returned to Canada, I went to Montreal to visit his mother, Dr. Guo's daughter. She handed me the memoir herself, and I said I would find an opportunity to turn it into Chinese. Because my grandfather did not write a memoir, I regarded Dr. Guo's memoirs as a project for my grandfather, and I also wanted to show a kind of respect. The memoir was finally chosen to be disseminated in the form of a voicebook, which has now been published on the Himalayan platform. It took me more than a decade to finally fulfill this dream.
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Beginning in 1928, Dr. Guo Haibo came to the St. Paul's Hospital in Guide Province, and the main content of his memoir was the story of the hospital's preparation of a refugee camp during the War of Resistance Against Japan. On the eve of the fall of Shangqiu, the hospital opened a refugee camp in the name of the Cross of Nations, protecting more than 3,000 people from the ravages of war.
Dashan: St. Paul's Hospital is a church hospital established by the Canadian Holy Guild in Guide Province, and around the 1930s, it was presidented by Dr. Guo Haibo, a Canadian doctor. When the Japanese army invaded China, Dr. Guo temporarily converted the hospital into a refugee camp, protecting the lives of a large number of local residents. Because at that time, Japan did not dare to fight the property of foreigners, so the hospital gave full play to their foreign advantages and used their privileges to protect the local people and let them be sheltered in the hospital.
There are many stories in the memoirs, but what I think is most valuable is that it is particularly civilian. The memoirs do not talk about the tide of history from a macroscopic point of view, Dr. Guo only knows what happened in the hospital, and only represents his own perspective. For example, my grandparents, including Dr. Guo, worked in church hospitals for religious motives, which is their basic value, their Christian belief. Although I am not religious, I have retained Dr. Guo's perspective, such as his three sentences do not depart from the old line, all of which are thanks to God, silent prayer and so on. This is his character, and I have preserved all these things in its original form.
The camp lasted two months, and after the dissolution, the local people were grateful and erected five stone monuments to commemorate them. In 1939, under repeated coercion by the Japanese army, Guo Haibo returned to Canada with his family.
△ People erected monuments to show their gratitude
Dashan: The hospital is named St. Paul's Hospital and is related to a church in Toronto. Toronto's largest landmark church is called St. Paul's Church, and in order to open a church hospital in China that year, ordinary church members of St. Paul's Church donated 6,000 Canadian dollars. More than a hundred years ago, 6,000 yuan was indeed not old or young. The 6,000 blocks were used as a fundraiser to build a church hospital in China, which was then named St. Paul's Hospital. Around 1922, when my grandparents went to worship, a bishop who happened to be returning from Henan told everyone that the hospital that had been donated a few years ago had begun to operate, and now it needed medical staff to work. So my grandparents came to Henan in 1923 and stayed there for two years.
△ St. Paul's Hospital
In the Central Plains in the 1920s, the situation was turbulent and disasters occurred frequently. In 1925, after working in China for two years, Dashan's grandfather, Dr. Rao, fled with his family, but the two children died of illness on the way. After Rao and his wife returned to Canada, they gave birth to 4 more children, and Oyama's father was the youngest. When Oyama was still young, his grandparents died one after another.
Dashan: What my grandparents experienced in China, my family didn't know much about. My mom said that as a member of the family later, she soon realized that in front of her grandparents, she still tried to ask them as little as possible about things in China. Because everyone knew that they went to China with three children, but in the end they brought back only one. I had two uncles buried in China, one was 4 years old and one died just 1 year old, only my aunt came back. Losing two children is the biggest blow in life for any pair of parents. And it's because you chose to come to this place to develop a career, resulting in the unfortunate death of two children, which is definitely a reality that is difficult to bear.
Later, my father said that my mother's understanding was not quite right, because as long as I recalled this experience in China, my grandparents talked about happy things. Dad said that when he was young, if his grandparents wanted to whisper, they all said it in Chinese. But where my grandparents worked in China, Dad didn't know much about them. The family said that it was in a place called "Guide", not far from Fengfeng. Now there is a network that can be searched directly, but at that time there was no network, and I could not find a place called "Guide" on the map of Henan.
△ Dr. Rao's family is in China
In the late 1980s, Dashan came to China to study, because of the performance of sketches and cross-talk quickly became popular. At the same time, the desire to find roots in China and find the footprints of family members is also becoming stronger. In 2001, Oyama told a talk show about the "hometown" that could not be found on the map, Guidefu. After the program was broadcast, Dashan received a letter from Shangqiu, Henan, signed qiuying.
Dashan: Qiu Ying wrote to say that she was a reporter for the Beijing-Kowloon Evening News, telling me that Guidefu is now Shangqiu City, and the ancient city is called Guidefu. Around 2001, I took my children to Shangqiu for the first time, to the place where my grandparents used to live and work. I was still holding the photo I had left behind, and I wanted to ask Shangqiu's friends if they recognized the place in the photo. As a result, as soon as I entered the hospital gate, I directly saw the building where my grandparents lived at that time, and the tears flowed down.
In April 2021, the film crew embarked on a train from Beijing to Shangqiu. Today's Shangqiu First People's Hospital is the largest and most modern tertiary hospital in Shangqiu and the surrounding areas. Its predecessor is the St. Paul's Hospital, where Canadian doctors such as Dr. Rao and Dr. Guo once worked. President Han Chuan'en of the First People's Hospital of Shangqiu City is an old friend of Dashan. When the new crown was raging in 2020, President Han led the 11th batch of Henan Provincial Medical Team to work in Wuhan for more than a month. When the epidemic in Canada was in an emergency, President Han entrusted the "family and friends group" of Dashan and other St. Paul's hospitals to donate protective equipment to nursing homes, Chinese communities, and ordinary people in Canada.
Han Chuan'en: The nursing school of St. Paul's Hospital is now Shangqiu Medical College. At that time, there were two ambulances in the hospital of São Paulo, and in China in the 1920s and 1930s, there were not many hospitals with ambulances.
Dashan: When the hospital was established in 1910, the purpose of foreign doctors and missionaries at that time was to build the best and most modern hospital in eastern Henan. They should be very proud to see the hospital now 100 years later, because this dream has indeed come true.
△ The monument is engraved with a logo symbolizing different cultures
Han Chuan'en: The maple leaves on the monument represent Canada, and Tai Chi is a Taoist culture in China, as well as a symbol of Christianity and Islam. This reflects that people of different countries, different nationalities, different faiths, different skin colors, and different languages can overcome difficulties together in the most difficult periods, and reflect the great love of the hospital.
Five generations of the Oyama family have been alumni of the University of Toronto, and among the graduates of the University of Toronto School of Medicine, in addition to the famous Bethune, there are the three doctors from the previously mentioned St. Paul's Hospital, and many more, medical missionaries who have come to China.
Oyama: I think a lot of differences are superficial, and the deeper you dig, the more you will find that a lot of things are common. For example, Dr. Brown, as a missionary doctor in a church hospital, and bethune, an international communist fighter, had different values. But they still have something in common, they are all helpful and happy, and they regard human beings as one. When someone needs help, my values compel me to help the people who need it most.
Choreographer: Wang Jie
Assistant Choreographer: Yang Wenqi, Chen Wanfei
Edit: 612, Batam