New biography chronicles Isabel Crook's story

Rare treat

In an interview when she turned 100, Crook recalled the mouthwatering stewed meat with soybeans cooked by Yangzom's aunt－a rare treat compared with the villagers' daily fare.

Crook was worried when the devastating magnitude-8 earthquake struck Wenchuan in 2008. Two years later in summer, the then-95-year-old returned to Bashinao with her sons and a grandson. They managed to find Yangzom, and the two families resumed their close ties.

In 2017, Yangzom, who was entering her 90s, visited Crook in Beijing, where they sang the nursery rhyme together again.

It took Tan, 79, former editor-in-chief of the Chengdu magazine Science Fiction World, three years to complete the biography. He retraced Crook's steps in a number of rural areas where she did research and taught. Tan also visited Crook's hometown in Canada and interviewed a group of the anthropologist's acquaintances.

Tan said, "It felt as though I was rereading China's modern and contemporary history, because Crook has experienced almost all the significant events."

Crook was born and brought up in Chengdu before going to the University of Toronto for her bachelor's and master's degrees, majoring in child psychology and minoring in social anthropology.

Returning to China after graduation, she traveled to Tibetan, Qiang and Yi villages in Sichuan for field studies. She also went to Xinglongchang, part of present-day Daxing town in the Bishan district of Chongqing, for research and rural construction experiments.

In Chengdu, she met her future husband, David Crook (1910-2000), a committed communist from the UK and friend of the Canadian physician Henry Norman Bethune (1890-1939).

He proposed to her on the Luding Bridge, which spans the Dadu River－a revolutionary site he had always wanted to visit after reading about in Edgar Snow's book Red Star Over China. He proposed shortly before the couple went to London, where they married and joined the war against Nazi Germany.

After World War II, Isabel Crook attended the London School of Economics and Political Science for a doctoral program tutored by renowned anthropologist Raymond Firth (1901-2002), but her studies were later suspended.

In 1947, the couple traveled to Shilidian village, Hebei province, where they observed and joined the land reform program and wrote anthropological studies.

The following year, the couple decided to stay in China and teach at what is now Beijing Foreign Studies University, at a time when the nation was in urgent need of English-language professionals.

Despite only having limited resources, they took part in pioneering work on teaching and helped develop a college English-language curriculum and compile learning materials.

On Oct 1, 1949, the Crooks were on the viewing stand in Tian'anmen Square for the founding ceremony of the People's Republic of China, but Isabel had to return home for a short period to feed their eldest son, who was less than 2 months old.

She was only able to revive her anthropological ambitions when she retired from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1981.

In August that year, she revisited Xinglongchang with her colleague Yu Xiji. In 2013, she summarized and published a Chinese-language version of their research report, Xinglong Chang: Field Notes of a Village Called Prosperity (1940-1942).