Canadian author pens China book at 98
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Crook makes Beijing her home, where her three sons and two great-grandchildren were born. |
"We belonged. This is why we stayed."
The couple made their home in the Chinese capital, where their three sons were born, as well as two of their great-grandchildren.
Crook, born Isabel Brown to Canadian missionaries in Chengdu, discovered her own life's mission after meeting in 1940 the man who would become her husband.
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"I thought: 'They (my parents) live a much better life than I do, because they had something.' So I wanted to find something to do, a cause," Crook says during the Beijing interview.
"I wrote to my mother and I said: 'Please send me some of those religious books so I could get a cause.
"I read them. I didn't get any cause. And it was just at that time that I met David Crook, and he was a communist. And when he talked ... I liked passion. I decided that my cause would be communism."
They were married in London in 1942. She joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, in which David was already a member.
Inspired by Edgar Snow's account of the Chinese revolution in Red Star Over China, the couple returned to China from England in 1947 to write a book about life in the Communist-controlled areas. 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.
