Review of The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu

*The Funeral Cryer* by Wenyan Lu (2024). Published by Hanover Square Press.

If you’re new here and stumbled on this blog through the mythical and magical powers of the Internet, or because of whatever the search engines decided was going to show up today when you Google something, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I made this blog in addition to my author/writer portfolio because I wanted to remember all of the books, shows, and movies I was coming across throughout the years.

I read and watch a lot, and I used to work as a professional film critic on the side when I was in graduate school. While I loved going to film festivals and ploughing through 500 pages of readings a week, on top of my regular fiction and nonfiction TBR list, I wasn’t remembering everything at the end of the day.

So I started writing little reviews and posts to keep an archive. It’s also pretty fun to return to a book or movie after a few years, then come to this website to see what I thought about it originally. One could call this a mind map, especially as you can literally track changes in the way we think throughout a set period of time through this kind of work.

Anyways, it was the Fall of 2024 when I fell into a period of unemployment that was pretty unexpected. I took a hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take off for some time, so I did. It was such an incredible privilege to do so, especially in this economy and state of the world. I focused a bit on my blog and traveling during this time, and I would say it was so worth it.

If you liked what you read here, feel free to click around. I make a few pennies here and there from the ads that hover in the corner of your screen, so it helps out during periods like this.

All of the exposition aside: I was wandering my local library one Friday afternoon when I spotted a copy of The Funeral Cryer in the fiction section. The title on the spine is what interested me and led me to pick up the book, and the synopsis is what convinced me to check it out. I read it in less than a day while applying to jobs.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know these can get quite long in the end.

A woman in rural China cries at funerals for a living, putting on quite a performance.

The main character in this novel is an interesting one, especially if you’re not familiar with rituals and customs in rural China. She’s middle-aged, her husband doesn’t work, and she brings in a decent amount of money by going to people’s funerals and acting like she’s grieving. Hence the title of the book.

She’s considered one of the better funeral cryers in the area, which means she’s able to provide for her family and herself while her husband is unemployed. However, in a superstitious culture, this means that there are some major drawbacks. The local village finds her to be a bad luck charm because of her profession.

Because of that, they have a tendency to avoid her. Her husband and she have a daughter, but the girl moved to Shanghai in order to find work in the bigger cities of China. She left her parents behind in the countryside, and while the protagonist wishes that her daughter would come and visit throughout the book, she tends not to do so.

The funeral cryer herself is starting to get quite lonely, especially now that she’s been ostracized from the rest of the village. The only person who is actually friendly with her is the local barber, which becomes a heated affair at one point when the two of them continue growing closer.

Being surrounded by thoughts of death, in addition to the fact she suspects her own husband is cheating on her as well, our protagonist spends much of the novel deliberating the current moment she’s living in, as well as some remnants of the past that shaped how we got to this point as readers, too.

I would describe this as a bit of a slow novel because of that. It’s really not about the plot, but instead taking in the surroundings of the protagonist and capturing the picture and daily life of this single woman with a remarkable profession in the countryside.

While she is able to make a bit of money off of what she does, at th same time it leads to major social consequences. But even if she had stopped doing the funeral crying, it probably wouldn’t have saved her marriage. Her husband would have also found himself continuing to not work, putting these two into deeper poverty.

Overall Thoughts

I don’t know how this happened, but I’ve been reading quite a few books lately set in rural contemporary China. It’s not a perspective we often get here in the United States, so I find these kinds of books as fascinating. We need more diversification of perspective when it comes to the literature and media we consume.

Anyways, I found this book to fine. It’s not a book you’d find yourself reading for the major plot events, as I mentioned before, but for the characters instead. I flew through the pages because it was pretty accessible writing that flowed well, but I couldn’t get fully invested in the protagonist.

Yeah, I felt for her, but I couldn’t imagine myself wanting to read more about her beyond this book. Sometimes in a really good book (to me) I get very invested; I do see the value in this book though. It’s an important one, as we need more writing about these kinds of women. It kind of reminded me of the work of the Chinese writer Fang Fang, but it wasn’t as deep as The Running Flame.

Pick up the book though if you’re interested! I think it’s worth reading at least once, so give it a chance.

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