紀念好友大衛.喬高
On the loss of my friend David Kilgour

David was six years older than my own father who died in 2013 in China, to whom I wasn’t able to pay the last visit due to the rejection to my visa application by the Chinese consulate in Toronto. The reason was obvious despite untold by the consulate—I  was doing journalism, a self-taught reporter, which is to the dislike of the Communist regime. Yet it was precisely because of my work that I had the opportunities to meet David, first in 2008 when he was holding the human rights torch in front of the parliament hill in Ottawa during a campaign that the international human rights community initiated to boycott the Beijing Olympic.

That event basically summed up the whole life of David-fighting for human rights, everywhere and tirelessly.

In his 70’s and this year 81, David woke up early in 5 or 6 in the morning, read and replied emails, then went out on his bicycle touring around his neighbourhood in Ottawa. When I stayed at his home for one night in September 2017, I bicycled with him the next morning, wearing his wife Laura’s helmet and jacket. That was the first time I rode a bike after 10+ years. On our tour, David showed me around the serene Ottawa River covered by early morning mist, and brought me to see the beautiful black horses of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police). He also treated me a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of cake at a cafe but he only sat there accompanying me—he and Laura had skipped breakfast for years. Before David and Laura went to the church later that day, he showed me his family album and told me, if I remember correctly, one of his daughters was born in the same year as I was. The day before, he came a local film festival with his wife Laura and a few friends to watch my film In the Name of Confucius 『假孔子之名』, and sat next to me on stage as a fellow panelist (the third panelist was Mr. Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former senior intelligence officer at CSIS). After the screening, David and Laura treated us with a Japanese style teriyaki. We had a very delighted evening.

Earlier that year in April, David went to Washington D.C., attending the US premiere of my film and gave a speech at an event hosted by National Association of Scholars. It was during that event that I was acquainted with him. When I finished making my documentary exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s Confucius Institutes in 2016, I reached out to David for a review and he generously watched my film and sent me some kind words. So later when the US premiere was scheduled, I again reached out to him asking if he could help to spread the event among his American friends—I assumed that he must have many friends all over the world. He turned out not only did what I asked him to help but also volunteered to be a speaker, whom the hosts both surprisingly and happily invited. After all, David was the former Canadian cabinet minister and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee!

Despite the event organizers’ budget running out, David flew to D.C. out of his own pocket and stayed at a friend’s place. He had been traveling like that after his retirement all around the world with his groundbreaking work on exposing the CCP regime’s forced live organ harvesting of the persecution Falun Gong practitioners in China, a cause David had been working on since 2006 and for which he was co-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize with his fellow Canadian, human rights lawyer David Matas.

At the D.C. event, I got to know some of David’s personalities, and one striking feature of him was humour—he liked to joke. I remember moments before the event at the rest room for guest speakers, we saw each other for the first time after quite some years. The first thing he said after “hi” was, “Doris, you are terrific!” I wasn’t expect that nor was I sure what he meant by “terrific”. He saw me puzzled and numbed without a response, he explained that he meant I looked terrific and my film was terrific as well. Immediately, I felt both encouraged and humbled and not anxious any more—it was the first public event in a more serious nature that I had attended as a film director and public speaker. I wasn’t so sure how I looked in the eyes of the elites in the capital city of the world’s strongest country. But such a positive comment was given to me by such a high-profile public figure who had attended numerous high-profile events and seen numerous high-profile people, I gained more confidence and it was much needed at that moment. After I gave my speech, David again gave me warm applause and I did find appreciation on his face.

After the D.C. event, David and I became good friends, although we only had saw each other for one more time in Ottawa later that year. In the years that followed, David and I were in frequent engagement on Facebook. He liked almost all my FB posts and left kind and encouraging words under many of them. He said, for a number of times on Facebook and on phone, he was a big fan of me—even my Chinese accent was lovely. It made me humbled to the moon. I told him I was a huge fan of him, sincerely! He was such a noble person!

David and I did not always share common point of views. At one time, David left message on Facebook asking me to give him a call to discuss our disagreement on Donal Trump, and I did. We chatted for a bout 20 minutes before he headed out of home. I assured him that he was still and will always be my best friend and the most respected one, no matter what views we held were different from each other. Again, he said he was a big fan of me and expressed his wish to talk further and meet in person someday.

I regret for not calling back to him after that chat and regret for not visiting him after my overnight stay at his place—he had asked me for a couple times when I would visit him again. I did think of going to Ottawa to see him but had never managed to do so—I was traveling intensively in 2018 and 2019 following the screenings of my film around the globe, and then came the covid. Painfully, now I have learned a lesson—when you think of doing something, go do it! And don’t wait until you don’t have a chance to do so.

David was among the kindest and most principled and energetic human beings I’ve ever known. I will be missing him forever.

R.I.P. David. You are now in God’s heaven.