Asian American Folktales is a compact collection of popular and well-known tales from East Asia and Southeast Asia that have been translated into English. The author’s self-stated purpose is to provide educators, students, and general readers with examples of a range of traditional narrative types. It is loosely arranged into four general categories: Origins; Heroes, Heroines, Tricksters, and Fools; Society and Conflict; and The Supernatural. Each entry is preceded by a brief explanation. There are thirty-two tales, including nine from Japan, eight from the Philippines, six from Korea, five from India, and four from China. There is a mix of animal fables, legends based on historical figures, and excerpts from religious texts and literary classics.
This book is part of a series edited by Green that includes Native American, African American, and Latino American folktales. However, the title is deceiving, evoking expectations of tales of Japanese internment camps or stories of San Francisco Chinatown and the building of the railroad. Since the author’s intention seems to be to demonstrate which older tales from Asia are still known and told by Asians in America, a more appropriate title would have been Asian Folktales in America.
The first section professes to deal with "the creation of the world and its inhabitants," and includes two Filipino animal fables telling why dogs wag their tails and why monkeys and turtles despise each other. But a disjunctive excerpt from the Mahabharata dealing with a gambling match and a Korean tale about a geomancer leave the reader wondering what they have to do with origins or creation. The most confusing entry is the story of the Princess Kwan-yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion venerated throughout East and Southeast Asia, an incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, known in China as Guan Yin and in Japan as Kannon. Green gives little contextual background in his brief introduction to the tale, but does note that Canadian-American singer Alanis Morissette refers to "goddess" Kwan-yin in one of her pop songs. Having a story of a religious icon in a book of folktales seems a bit out of place, akin to having a story of the baby Jesus in the same text as “Cinderella.”
Green includes some of the most well-known and much-published Japanese folktales such as “Peach Boy,” “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow,” and “Urashima Taro.” He notes that “Peach Boy” “has made the transition to contemporary children’s popular literature.” In fact, all the Japanese tales in the book have been available in English at least since the popular illustrated volumes exported by Hasegawa Takejir? in the late-nineteenth century. Of the nine Japanese tales, eight are from Yei Theodora Okazaki’s Japanese Fairy Tales of 1906.
In addition to this source, Green uses few other resources. Twenty-one of the thirty-two tales come from just four sources. All of his resources date from the early-twentieth century, mostly produced by mass market American or English publishers such as Grosset and Dunlap or J.M. Dent. The author states in his preface that he intentionally kept his modifications to a minimum, resulting in an inconsistency of styles. Some tales use antiquated language such as "durst" or "thou shouldst now seek for thyself a husband," while others are quite breezy and contemporary.
Green rightly seeks to show that these traditional tales are still relevant for Asian Americans. In his introduction to “The Tongue-Cut Sparrow” he states that “this tale is said to be almost universally known in the Japanese American community of the West Coast.” However, he gives no citation for this vague claim, nor does he cite original fieldwork or interviews. He does say in his preface that the existence of some of the tales in the Asian American repertoire was verified through published sources or resource persons of Asian descent. His short bibliography includes Ronald Takaki’s well-known Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans.
Although he states in his preface that this collection does not reflect the actual demographics of Asian populations in America, there is a dearth of Chinese folktales. He does include perhaps the most wide-spread and varied folktale in Asia, that of the “Monkey King.” He does not inform the reader that it comes from the Chinese literary classic of the late Ming Dynasty, Journey to the West, but does point out that it was made into a film called The Forbidden City, starring martial artists Jackie Chan and Jet Li, perhaps to emphasize the contemporary popularity and relevance of the ancient tale. Throughout the book, Green uses the older Wade-Giles romanization system for Chinese instead of the more common Pin Yin system, resulting in the Pig character Chu Pa-chieh instead of Zhu Ba-jie.
As a collection for children, the design of this volume is not very enticing. Unlike some volumes of fairy tales, such as the Andrew Lang collections, it has small print and no interior illustrations. The one illustration on the cover is not credited, although it is obviously from the Golden Age of Illustration, having similarities to Arthur Rackham, Warwick Goble, and Katherine Pyle. As a scholarly edition, there is little research behind the book’s content. Even Lang used sources drawn originally from oral storytelling and had his own team of translators.
This volume is useful as a portable reference for some of the most common Asian folktales, but for a scholarly work, educators will have to look elsewhere.
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[Review length: 892 words • Review posted on June 23, 2011]