WENYAN LU - THE FUNERAL CRYER
Print by Neil Warmsley,.
Wenyan Lu had a fear of death even as a little child.
“In the past ,rich and powerful Chinese rulers had their servants buried alive with them. It was a fantasy of mine I wanted to explore. Then I discovered the Day of the Dead in Mexico. The photographs I saw of that looked very much like to what we call The Clear Bright Day in China, when we mourn the dead. And they had funeral crying there too. I realised it was not just about Chinese people.”
Wenyan looks and sounds rather like her protagonist in her new book, ‘The Funeral Cryer’ pretty neat slim and quite shy. Although she has lived in Britain for nearly twenty years, her spirit seems attached to China.” It is very rainy here in Cambridge’ she remarks rather like someone who observed the torrential downpours for the first time, “In Shang Hai, we have rain and wind just like this” her thoughts are there back home even in the weather.
And her intriguing book does evoke China, not of long dead cruel despots, but of everyday people. The Funeral Cryer of the title does a difficult job as well as she can. It was not a first choice, the Husband’s hopeless approach to money has ruined all their projects. She has taken on the strange practice of professional mourner to make ends meet. But at some cost. Her neighbours avoid contact with her; the job is a kind of taboo as if the contact with so much death might bring them bad luck. This doesn’t concern her overly. She takes pleasure in simple tasks, collecting herbs for cooking from a wasteland garden nearby, straightening and tidying her small home. Enclosed on account of her despised calling, she attempts to make the most of her life. She has little self-esteem, even less confidence but somehow, she manages to put her creative energies into the subtle job of praising the dead person before her and working herself up into a state of tearful half-pretend, grief.
“She is trapped as a middle aged woman : the book is a metaphor for the pandemic. Each person needed to survive by whatever means. There is no truth in real life, but there is in fiction”.
Wenyan admits she is her heroine. “But aren’t we all alike?’ she asks “we have the same concerns, children, our health, the same desire for the good life- although nothing is perfect and unhappiness is always, no doubt, there and the same destination.” She means death,.” We are lucky, we are educated people, but we have the same deep-down desires as poor people”.
Her story of rural China, its traditions and customs, the people in the village with their hopes for a large company to buy it up and compensate them with new flats and lots of cash. “Deep down desires are the same,”
Would that be money – and sex? I think she agrees.
“What I wanted to make was a story as a medium for my questions (about life) my own voice doesn’t fight back, I write what I know”.
What happens at the end of the book after the scandalous catastrophe in the heroine’s life - weirdly described by the publicist’s blurb as ‘things start to take a surprising turn for the better’? Wenyan smiles,
‘No that is quite wrong. Of course not. In the end, we don’t know what will happen. Will the couple get back together again? Will she take her mother’s advice about money and become independent? Or will she resume her life?
“I don’t know, it could be any of those things. This is a feminist novel so the heroine or protagonist should move on surely.”
“There are no names in the book. This is about nameless people with no privileges Some survive, some go bankrupt , like in the pandemic. In China the Last Outfit is very important. Nowadays people buy them from a shop, ready for their death. In the book the heroine makes a Last Outfit for her husband and for herself. We are all very similar, cavemen, dressed up “
The Funeral Cryer will be published in hardback and I book by Atlantic Books on 4th May 2023 at £14.99
Introductory Illustration is a print by Neil Warmsley, available from the Cambridge Drawing Society
