Eternal Enthusiast

Fu started studying at Northeast People’s University in 1954. After graduation, he found a satisfying job at a provincial research institute in Jilin. He thought this would be a good platform to start researching folk culture, which had always been his dream, but shortly after he began, Fu was transferred to work as an editor for a periodical, and later as a journalist for a provincial newspaper.

Fu never gave up his dream, and quite unexpectedly, while working as a journalist, he encountered a fantastic opportunity to pursue it again. Evidence of a Manchu legend, Umesiben Mama, was found in Dongning County, Heilongjiang Province. Umesiben Mama is an epic about how the world began, passed down from the Nüzhen (Jurchen) ethnic group, the forebears of the Manchu. It tells of the legendary life of a shaman heroine who succeeded in unifying different tribes. It describes warfare in the tribal age and the work is considered a treasure of shaman culture. Fu traveled to Dongning County to track down the inheritor of this epic and together, they were able to save Umesiben Mama from the edge of extinction.

Fu is grateful for his decades-long career in journalism. “This job taught me a lot,” he pointed out. “I developed a habit of observing and analyzing and learned how to carry out surveys and research.”

In the winter of 1972, Fu met former president of Northeast People’s University, Tong Dong. A noted historian, at that time Tong was planning to set up a center for the protection of traditional culture heritage of ethnic groups in northern China. Knowing that Fu was interested in this field, Tong invited him to join the center. Fu still remembers how he felt when he received the invitation from Tong. “I said yes right away!” he recalled. Returning to the job that he had been dreaming of for so many years reignited Fu’s passion. He worked day and night, looking up archives and ancient books. He also started to do what his father had done before him – travel for miles through towns and villages to collect precious cultural materials from everyday people.