As I thought about the 25 or so presentations I have made on Thursday mornings over the past 15 years, two unique and related talks came to my mind. They were each based on a book – House of Exile by Nora Waln and Two-Gun Cohen by David Levy.

Here is the briefest of summaries from my memory.

Waln was born around 125 years ago to a Pennsylvania family which had been involved in the China trade for centuries, largely working with the Lin family in China. A Lin family member traveled to the US when Waln was a teenager, inviting her to visit China, which she did in 1920, after her college graduation.

If you have been to China, or if you have followed modern China in the news, her description of China in the 1920s will shock you. It was indeed a totally different, and now lost, world. Waln visited the Lin family in their large, rural, walled compound where the family had lived for centuries and where she was the first non-Chinese visitor ever.

Her plan was to spend a summer in China. But she stayed over 12 years, first being treated almost as a Lin family member, and then as the wife of a British official stationed in Canton, which held a large number of foreign commercial establishments located on a condoned island on which Chinese citizens were, with very few exceptions, not allowed. Another fascinating place.

During her time in Canton, she met many Chinese officials, including President Sun Yat-sen. After his death, she reported seeing Mrs. Sun on a boat from Canton to Shanghai, Mrs. Sun traveling with a man she referred to as Two Gun Cohen.

Who? I could not ignore that simple reference.

Morris Cohen was born in Poland, but his family moved to England, where he grew up. A tough kid, hard to handle, he wound up in a new residential reform school. At some point, he agreed to go to Canada to get a fresh start, working on a farm near Edmonton.  He eventually migrated to Winnipeg. Winnipeg had a large Jewish population. It also had a large Chinese immigrant population, consisting mainly of descendants of the builders of the Canadian Pacific railroad. Yes, the Chinese community owned restaurants and laundries, but there was also a Chinese underworld. Cohen became involved with this part of the Winnipeg Chinese community, so involved that he learned to speak Chinese (I think it was Cantonese).

An opportunity came for Cohen to take a job with a Canadian company as its representative in China. Once in China, Cohen, clearly a man of considerable charm, met many influential people, including Sun Yat-sen. He charmed Sun Yat-sen, who quickly hired Cohen as a family aide and bodyguard. After Sun died, Cohen remained with his widow for a number of years, until the Japanese invasion in thev1930s. Cohen left China, came back to Canada, and then went back to England, where he lived a quiet life for the last decade or so of his life.

Why was he called Two Gun Cohen? It had to do with a stunt – maybe it happened, maybe not. A coin was thrown into the air. Cohen was able to hit the coin twice before it hits the ground, one from each of his two guns. True or false, I don’t know.

You may want to look at these two books. Both absolutely fascinating.