MCLC: Isabel Crook

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Isabel Crook
***********************************************************

Source: China Daily (5/13/14):
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2014-05/13/content_17503360.htm

Canadian author pens China book at 98
By China Daily features staff

Many people would be happy just to be around at age 90. Then there is
Isabel Crook, who published yet another book a few months before turning
98. Crook began gathering material for Prosperity's Predicament: Identity,
Reform and Resistance in Rural Wartime China in 1940, but didn't start
writing it up until four decades later. In the intervening period, the
Canadian woman started a family, earned a doctorate and focused on
teaching English in China - seeing it as her part in nation-building
alongside the Chinese Communist Party.

A Party representative approached Crook and her British husband in 1948,
asking them to remain in China and teach English to future diplomats since
"the liberation war would soon be won, and they would be setting up the
People's Republic ofChina", Crook says in an interview at her Beijing home
in early spring.

"They desperately needed teachers, especially for English," she says. "We
promised to stay for at least a year or two."

They ended up staying permanently, becoming among the first teachers at
the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute (which later became the Beijing
Foreign Studies University, one of thecountry's leading foreign-language
schools).

From the outset, the couple asked to become "regular members" of the
teaching staff, whichmeant they could get involved in political study and
the various movements of the Mao Zedong era, Isabel said in 2008 in her
convocation address at the University of Toronto's Victoria University.

They found themselves no longer observers, but "participants in the
Chinese revolution at thegrassroots level", Crook told the audience.

"We belonged. This is why we stayed."

The couple made their home in the Chinese capital, where their three sons
were born, as wellas two of their great-grandchildren.

Crook, born Isabel Brown to Canadian missionaries in Chengdu, discovered
her own life'smission after meeting in 1940 the man who would become her
husband.

"I thought: 'They (my parents) live a much better life than I do,because
they had something.' So I wanted to find something todo, a cause," Crook
says during the Beijing interview.

"I wrote to my mother and I said: 'Please send me some of thosereligious
books so I could get a cause.

"I read them. I didn't get any cause. And it was just at that timethat I
met David Crook, and he was a communist. And when hetalked ... I liked
passion. I decided that my cause would be communism."

They were married in London in 1942. She joined theCommunist Party of
Great Britain, in which David was already a member.

Inspired by Edgar Snow's account of the Chinese revolution inRed Star Over
China, the couple returned to China from Englandin 1947 to write a book
about life in the Communist-controlledareas. Among their book
collaborations are Ten Mile Inn: Revolution in a Chinese Village (1959)
and Ten Mile Inn: Mass Movement in a Chinese Village (1979), which
chronicled land reform in Shilidian, a village in Hebei province, while
The civil war was going on.

In the almost 70 years since she came back to her birthplace, Crook has
maintained her faith in the ideals of socialism -- even after she and her
husband were detained for years during the "cultural revolution"
(1966-76), and now, as China has embraced a market economy.

"I think she is disappointed, but I think she is also very Chinese in this
respect -- she takes the long view of things," Constance Post, an
associate professor of English at Iowa State University, who is working on
Crook's biography, says in a phone interview.

"It's those ideals (of socialism) that she certainly wants to have
restored and have people embrace and realize that money is not and should
not be the be-all and end-all of life," says Post, who hopes to publish
Crook's biography before the elderly woman's 100th birthday in December
2015.

"I think she is very encouraged by a growing skepticism elsewhere in the
world about the capitalistic economic model," Post says. "I'm thinking
especially of the Occupy Wall Street movement."

Crook, now one of the most senior "foreign experts" in China, has given
speeches before state leaders, where she talked about matters of public
concern. The issues closest to her heart involve the Chinese countryside,
such as its rural preschool education, cooperatives and non-governmental
organizations.

As Crook nears a century of life, she'd rather remember her "good luck" in
having witnessed some of the most crucial moments in modern Chinese
history instead of her achievements. Fellow China researchers, meanwhile,
underscore her anthropological work's contributions to the understanding
of modern China.

"The thing that Isabel's work lets us get at is: 'What is the connection
between those big events and what happens to the daily life of rural
people on the ground?'" Gail Hershatter, professor of history at the
University of California, Santa Cruz and co-editor of Prosperity's
Predicament, says in an online call.

"And Isabel was sitting exactly at the connection between a big historical
event and daily lifein a village."

Crook provided eye-opening accounts of wartime life in the Sichuan village
of Xinglongchang,including its unique marriage and divorce practices and
the power held by a local semi-secretfraternal organization.

This work is particularly significant, Hershatter says, since at the time
Crook and a Chinese colleague conducted their fieldwork, 85 percent of
China's population was made up of farmers who were illiterate or barely
literate and did not leave written records of their lives.

Crook and her husband (who died in 2000) were among the rare foreign
scholars allowed to conduct local-level research on the Chinese mainland
between the 1950s and 1970s, Jeremy Eades, an honorary senior research
fellow in anthropology at the University of Kent, says in the paper The
New Chinese Anthropology: A View from Outside.

"I particularly appreciate her eye for detail," says Anna Lora-Wainwright,
an associate professor in the human geography of China at Oxford
University, who has also conducted anthropological fieldwork in rural
Sichuan province.

"Even though the reality Crook portrays is long gone, her storiesof
small-town life in Sichuan offer a valuable comparison to ethnographic
portrayals of rural China in the present."

In the early 1980s, Crook revisited Xinglongchang village to gather
material for another book. She is currently at work on this.

Tiffany Tan contributed to this story.