ZRight, Left and Centre: the Politics of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 43, Part Two.

    From California to Canada. One Woman's Journey to Adulthood by Dave Jaffe.


       Marion Lansbury graduated from the state university near San Francisco in the late 1960s. She'd never lived in a big city before. Yet she adapted. She met two men at different times and made love to them both. Yet these casual affairs didn't last. "Why do these men like me?" she often wondered to herself.
      Obviously Lansbury had a problem with her low self- image. Yet this didn't stop her academic progress. Having finished with her undergraduate work, she enrolled in a pre-med course at the same university she'd graduated from. Yet she didn't have the money to pay for all the required expenses. So she joined the Peace Corps.
    "Ask not what your country can do for you," President John F. Kennedy told his U.S. audience in his 1961inaugauration speech. "Ask what you can do for your country." Kennedy set up the Peace Corps to harness the youthful idealism that was floating around the U.S. of A. Thousands of young Americans flocked to the Peace Corps and ended up working  for two years in faraway lands.
     Lansbury joined the Peace Corps in the late 1960's. She took her training on another Californian university campus. She found the preparations and courses tough and grueling. "The psychological tests and exercises were very stressful," she recalled .Along the way a number of her fellow inductees dropped out. Yet  again, she survive and thrived.
    She chose to go to South Korea and for weeks on end she learned Korean, in a course given by a young male instructor. When her training ended, a big military plane whisked her  across the Pacific  Ocean. She ended up in a small village in South Korea where she spent two years teaching children.
    Sometimes she visited Seoul, South Korea's capital city. At one evening meal when she was in Seoul, explosions rocked the  city. North Korean soldiers and spies had sneaked into South Korea to kill the South Korean leader Park Chung Hee. The attempt failed and most of the infiltrators were killed. Marion could hear shooting and see streaks of tracer bullets flash around in the night time sky. "It was frightening," she said.
     Once out of the Peace Corps, Lansbury became a teacher in a primary school in northern California. On a summer trip to Mexico she met and fell in love with a short transplanted Englishman named Robert.  She followed him to Vancouver, B.C.  in Canada and ended up teaching there.
      At times, Canada disappointed her. The weather in coastal British Columbia  was often cold, rainy and dull. Some Canadians she met were hostile to Americans. "Americans run this county," one man told her. "And they don't run it very well." Others questioned why an American like her should come here and take jobs away from native born Canadians. To forestall this criticism, Marion became a Canadian citizen. Yet she also found that Canadians lacked the patriotism of Americans. "Your Canada Day celebrations are very tame," she once remarked.