The Magic Lotus Lantern and Other Tales from the Han Chinese compiled by Haiwang Yuan presents fifty-four tales that are popularly circulated among the Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China, totaling about ninety-two percent of its entire population. With an American audience as its primary readers and its goal of building a bridge between two cultures, the book, before presenting the tales, includes “A General Introduction to China (Part 1)” and “Food, Games, and Crafts of the Han Chinese (Part 2)” to provide background knowledge on the history, society, and culture of China. The author balances traditionality and modern transformations of customs, performing arts, music, games, and storytelling to convey a dynamic picture of their historical development. The brevity of the first two parts, along with powerful illustrations, effectively draws an informative sketch of China in a limited number of pages. But it also unavoidably leads to a simplified and generalized description of such issues as minority nationality, religious freedom, and the unified history of China.
The main body of the book comprises fifty-four tales, divided into “animal tales,” “magic tales,” “tales of love and romance,” “myths, legends, and immortals,” “moral tales,” “tales of how things came to be,” and “proverbial tales.” Before each category as well as before most individual tales, Yuan gives a short overview of stories and the social-cultural context of China in which the tales originated or are told. For example, Yuan introduces the Chinese “animal tales” as “primarily fables” that use animal characters to educate or to advise. In the “tales of love and romance,” Yuan informs the reader of the practice of arranged marriages in traditional China. He highlights the tenacity and courage that the young couples, and especially the women, display in pursuing the freedom to love in the tales. “Myths, legends, and immortals” contains tales about gods, goddesses, immortals, super beings, and legendary heroes and heroines who are widely known to the Chinese. Yuan emphasizes the humanized character of these figures in Chinese folk narrative. He also mentions the highly regarded status of female legendary figures, such as the women warriors named Mulan and Mu Guiying, in a male-dominated society like China. Thus, the book not only collects the tales that are widespread among the Han Chinese, but also presents certain distinctive cultural characteristics of Chinese tales. This could be helpful both to the readers who do not have knowledge about Chinese tales and to folklorists who are interested in knowing the cultural-narrative features of Chinese tales or locating the Chinese tales in the international tradition from a comparative perspective.
“Appendix B: Motifs and Tale Sources” also speaks to folklorists. In this part, Yuan includes AT tale-type numbers and motifs of individual tales. This appendix shows the author’s attempt to bring the Chinese tales and the international tradition into a single frame. As can be seen from the bibliography of the book, this attempt may be influenced by the seminal work of Aarne and Thompson and Nai-tung Ting, who produced detailed and thorough classification of Chinese folktales based on the European Aarne-Thompson tale-type system. However, Yuan does not clarify which tale-type system he follows when listing a tale’s number. For example, in Nai-tung Ting’s index, an asterisk after an AT tale-type number indicates this subtype is unique to Chinese folktales, whereas it means supplementary numbers added to a tale type in Aarne-Thompson’s index. When Yuan uses “888C*” to label the tale “Meng Jiang Wails at the Great Wall” without specifying that he uses Ting’s index, it may not fully convey the culture-specific feature of this tale. In a few cases, motif numbers or AT tale-type numbers are not accurate or thorough, which compromises the effort to connect Chinese tales to the international tradition to some extent. For example, the tale “Wolf ‘Mother’” that Yuan collected from his mother is listed as “a variant of Type F913 Victims rescued from swallower’s belly.” But “F913” is only a motif number, and this widespread Chinese tale is a non-gender-oriented contrastive variant of “Little Red Riding Hood (AT 333C).”
When it comes to the sources of the annotated tales, Yuan traces their earliest written records in classical Chinese documents (usually, literary sources) and provides the tale sources he has used to compile this book. The readers can easily notice that, among fifty-four tales, six are collected by Yuan in Geng Village, a village well-known for its storytelling tradition in Hebei province in northern China, and one is told by Yuan’s mother. The remaining stories in the collection come from written sources, the performing arts (regional operas), and mass media sources (film, Internet, etc.). But, interestingly, almost all of these tales can be traced back to their written literary records produced hundreds or even thousands of years ago. This reflects a long-standing tradition of the mutual nurturing of written and oral lore in Chinese history. For folklorists, this book provides valuable data on the origin of the tales, which will facilitate further research on the transformation of the tales from a historical perspective.
But this cannot be mistaken as the representation of the whole repertoire of Chinese tales. The selective focus in this book is related to Yuan’s goal in writing the book, which is to share tales that are well-known and popular among the Chinese. “Popularity” seems to be the key standard for this collection, including for the seven tales collected directly from storytellers. In his introduction, Yuan specifically points out one exception to this rule because “it is a rarely heard version of a story very well known to the average Chinese,” but “its regional flavor…has its merit.” This also explains why the written or other sources Yuan uses are predominantly popularized literary or cultural sources, including modern selective re-writings of stories in classical literature, the adaptation or reproduction of folktales in film, drama, or regional opera, popularized reading/picture books for children, and Internet sources related to folktales.
The potential problem of using such resources for the sake of “popularity” or “recognition” is to overlook regionally or orally circulated tales that may not be known on the national level, which occurs with some frequency. It also risks designating “standardized” versions of the tales by granting them the authority of “popularity” or “recognition.” Further, excepting the seven tales from storytellers, it is difficult to read these tales in their living contexts. The popularized versions of tales have experienced complicated re-writing and re-creating processes, including translation from one language to another. One example is the tale “Frog in a Well,” which is an idiom and fable whose literary record goes back two thousand years. It tells of a frog who boasts of his happy life in a well to a turtle in the East Sea. In the version selected by Yuan from a children’s literature source, the tale features a sea turtle asking the frog if it has seen the sea. The frog asks if the turtle means letter “C,” a seemingly Westernized detail. Without any context, ethnographic data, or notes on English translations of the presented tales, such crucial questions as to how representative a version is compared to others, who has adapted the tale, and why or how it has been adapted are impossible to answer.
Overall, this collection as a volume in “The World Folklore Series” contributes to the introduction of well-known Chinese tales to a general audience. It also makes an effort to follow the scholarly tradition of collecting tales through fieldwork and bringing Chinese tales to the international tradition through the tale-type indexes of Aarne-Thompson and Ting. The collection also shows certain cultural-narrative features and origins of the presented Chinese tales through background information and annotation, although the annotations could be more refined, thorough, and accurate.
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[Review length: 1295 words • Review posted on April 2, 2008]