Poor Guo Dingxiang, fate has given her a dud of a husband named Zhang Wanliang. While she toils in the fields returning his family estate to its past glory, he imagines preposterous schemes to obtain instant riches and fame. While she dotes over his aging mother, he is gambling and carousing in the city, extending his studies as long as possible, and refusing to return home for years on end. While she is clement, earnest, patient, and self-sacrificing, he is irascible, dithering, selfish, and mordant. And worst of all, while she loves him deeply despite all of his flaws and yearns for him to finally notice her, he pines for another woman, the lascivious adulteress, Wang Manxiang, who is married to his cousin but scheming to ruin Wanliang’s marriage. Talk of fate in this tragic pairing is not a tired bromide but reality. The star-crossed lovers are, in fact, the latest human avatars of the spirits Golden Page and Jade Maiden. Three hundred years ago, they offended the celestials and so they were cast down to earth, fated to reincarnate into seven doomed relationships—this is number seven, and it is a doozy. Their souls have likely grown accustomed to the pain, but these mortal manifestations must experience it anew and both are destined for tragic ends. Nevertheless, be it comforting news or not, all of this will culminate in an apotheosis.
After Dingxiang is abused and divorced by her reprobate husband, Wanliang’s new bride casts him into destitution, infirmity, and blindness, losing her own life in the process. He faces too late the reality that everything good in his life stemmed from his first wife. When he is ready to repent, she is already enriching the life of another husband. A shame-filled recognition during a chance reencounter precipitates Wanliang’s lamentable suicide. He casts himself into a stove, leading to his deification as the variously translated Stove/Hearth/Kitchen God, a figure in Chinese folklore—half European house-spirit, half Hermes-style messenger of the gods—whose image is pasted on the side of every kitchen stove. In ritual custom, the Kitchen God is contented with offerings of meats, sweets, alcohol, and money, which are left before his image. These oblations encourage him to deliver good news about the family to the gods above at a year-end (or month-end in other tellings) accounting and so bring boon onto the household. Quite humorously, in modern practice, he is most commonly given sugary and sticky foods to seal his lips so that he cannot convey any news of inappropriate conduct.
This narrative song (or “epic on folk life”) about the god’s origin was declaimed from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century in long-form verse (changzao “stove singing”) by carpenters in the Gushi region of the southeastern Henan district of China, whence it spread to the neighbouring Anhui and Shandong provinces. The song (really songs, v. infra) was collected in the late 1970s and first committed to print in 1981 by Chinese scholar Cao Jiazhen. Wilt L. Idema, professor emeritus at Harvard University, has now brought the charming morality play into a lively English-language translation that rounds out a recent string of publications acquainting English-speaking audiences with Chinese folk epic (most notably Anne McLaren’s 2022 book, Memory Making in Folk Epics of China, Cambria Press).
The song of the Kitchen God has enjoyed great popularity and multiple publications in China and been deemed by many as the national epic for the Han majority—epic as a genre in China is more often associated with minority groups. According to Idema, this is largely because it avoids the overly “superstitious” content and the lax views on adulterous love of some of its contenders. Some readers will already be familiar with the major beats of this story since it served as a thematic metaphor in Amy Tan’s award-winning 1991 novel The Kitchen God’s Wife (G. P. Putnam’s Sons). However, Idema’s translation is the first to render the full epic (all of the more than 4,800 lines of the 2007 “Reading Edition”) into English.
Idema’s translation is commendable. It is highly readable, poetic, often moving, and truly immersive. It is also complemented by nineteen pages of end notes which are indispensable for understanding what John Miles Foley called the “traditional referentiality” of the piece. In short, this text is steeped in cultural, literary, and linguistic information that the uninformed reader could never untangle without the translator’s competent guidance. Metaphors are deployed in an elusive emic manner due to homophony in the language, vignettes mentioned in passing reference detailed narratives drawn from famous literature and local folklore, and the singers assume their audience’s familiarity with every unique type of noodle and soup from the region.
The English-language reader will inevitably secure a second bookmark to allow for fast and effortless returns to the end notes, but this quickly becomes a labor of love. It is a joy, while following the adventures of the main characters, to be introduced at turns to a panoply of other cultural and literary figures drawn variously into the narrative. My personal favourite is Lü Dongbin, said to have been a student during the Tang dynasty. Having passed his qualifying exams and begun the journey to his new job in the central bureaucracy, he dreamed the tedium of his entire working career in one sitting and so abandoned his plans and became a forest sage instead (190-91, n. 50). We also learn provocatively that he is a master of sexual techniques that increase his longevity at the expense of his partners but was bested in this behavior by the courtesan Baimudan (White Peony) (191, n. 60).
The book is rounded out by a brief introduction (pages 1-14) and a useful first appendix detailing the textualization history of the folk epic (145-63). A second appendix provides translations of various sections of the song included in the 2009 “Complete Edition” (expanded, but more heavily edited and of suspect integrity) but absent from the more cohesive 2007 edition that acted as this translation’s source (165-84). Folklorists sensing from vague comments in the introduction that this is a composite or amalgam text patched together from the songs of many singers must wait until appendix 1 to have their fears confirmed and to learn just how messy and opaque the collection history of this song is. Hopefully, enough documentary evidence will be retained from Cao Jiazhen’s field and work notes to allow for a careful reappraisal of this tradition in the future under the same type of scrutiny once dedicated to unraveling the collecting and editing practices behind Elias Lönnrot’s Kalevala. For now, much of this information appears unavailable to researchers.
Also unfortunately neglected is any detailed discussion of the form of the poetry of stove singing. We learn in one short paragraph that the songs are composed of hepta- and occasionally decasyllabic verse lines, and that the entire song maintains a single end rhyme (on the syllable -ang), but no scansion is offered and no further poetic features are outlined. There is also no discussion about the choices made in the process of translation that an academic audience would normally expect in such a work. The book, thus, provides a pleasurable translation with some necessary context but leaves a scholarly reader with a few unanswered questions.
A woodblock print from Shandong Province depicting the stove god has been recast in a charming and almost cartoonish line-drawing on the front cover of the text. It is a fantastic image that jumps off the page and catches the eye. The copy entrusted to me is the softcover edition, and I must admit that my fingers still recoil at the texture of these modern bindings that feel as though they are made of recycled tire rubber. Personal tactile aversion aside, the book is well bound, sized, and designed, and smart looking. The price point for the softcover is a reasonable $29.95 USD while the hardcover is a little more of a burden on the pocketbook at $145.00.
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[Review length: 1331 words * Review posted on April 20, 2026]