An Interview With Isabel Crook: Anthropologist and Canadian Educator in China

If you’ve ever studied China in any manner you’ll know that every statement and observation must be qualified as such: the country is astoundingly vast and has undergone incredible and rapid change. Very few people can proclaim to have witnessed a large portion of that change – let alone a Westerner – but Isabel Crook has and continues to till this day. Now 101 years old, Crook lives on the campus of Beijing Foreign Studies University, in the same third-floor apartment that she and her husband, David Crook, chose in 1955 because of its views across the sprawling fields, now entirely engulfed by concrete and all the other trappings of modernization.

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Talking to the softly spoken and enviably spritely Crook, and her son Michael (one of three sons born and raised in Beijing), I realized that to comprehend her story was to understand what draws any of us to stay in this beguiling, and often befuddling, land. Granted, her tale began much earlier than any of ours. Born in 1915 to Canadian missionary parents in Chengdu, Sichuan, Crook studied for an MA in anthropology in Canada before returning to China, where she was recruited in 1940 to conduct a survey on rural reconstruction among the 1,500 residents of a market township charmingly called Prosperity (Xinglongchang, now renamed Daxing Town in Bishan District).

Crook is an anthropologist in the truest sense – from the moment she returned to Sichuan she became completely wrapped up in her work, swept away by the kinetic energy of the rural reconstruction movement, working with David to each provide a new enterprise to get lost in entirely, a constant source of inspiration and analysis. During my meeting with her, Crook stated of her work, “I considered it to be very significant, as were the events that I was living through; experiencing the founding of a new society.” Crook’s commitment to the tasks that life in China at the time provided is evident, putting aside her research to teach English to diplomats in training upon the founding of a new nation.

That sense of duty also prompted Crook to wait until retirement before dusting off her notes and finally publishing her book Prosperity’s Predicament, 70 years after her initial research began. Michael explains, “My interpretation of why it took such a long time is that some people want to publish their own books because they need to get tenure or get a new job or get the royalties. They need the money, but with mum there was no rushing her. She loved the process so much that she wanted it to go on practically forever. She’d be writing this book and come to a word like “salt” [a ubiquitous necessity in Chinese households] and then suddenly say, ‘what was the salt production situation, the salt monopoly, and how did it affect the people?’” In this regard, Crook enjoyed the process of research so much that the outcome of publishing a book was merely incidental. In Michael’s words, “this is what gave meaning to her retirement.”

Crook has previously said that it was her inclusion as part of a team that found her at her happiest. She recounts an anecdote whereby she and her husband David were unable to set up a party group because, by themselves, they did not meet the three member minimum requirement. Upon asking to borrow a further member, to their giddy surprise, not one, but two of their Chinese comrades happily joined them to form an international party group. A photo taken by David shows Isabel and their new group strolling down a dirt path, accomplished and ready to begin drumming up support in the village.

Even as Crook’s memory begins to fade, she’s clear as to the legacy that her long and rich life will afford others who are curious about a China that now seems far removed from what we experience today. “My main contribution is that I always recorded what was going on and so although I may not remember everything, I have left very detailed records.”

You can read more about Crook and her family on her website here

This article first appeared in the Jan/Feb 2017 issue of the Beijinger.

More stories by this author here.

Email: tomarnstein@thebeijinger.com
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Photos: Uni You, courtesy of Isabel Crook