Part 1 (1/2)

Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies.

Roberts, Moss.

Acknowledgments.

I would like to thank first of all Professor C. N. Tay of New York University for his sustaining encouragement and for sharing his extraordinary knowledge of language and literature; the Pantheon editor, Wendy Wolf, and the copy editor, Mary Barnett, whose excellent judgment in matters of literary taste and English style improved my ma.n.u.script in countless ways; my wife, Florence, and my children, Sean and Jennifer, who read the ma.n.u.script with care and made many valuable suggestions; our friend, s.h.i.+rley Hochhausen, who listened to these tales with a keen and appreciative ear; the students in the East Asian Studies Program at New York University, who have stimulated so much of my research into Chinese literature.

A Note on the Ill.u.s.trations.

The ill.u.s.trations were taken from the Ming encyclopedia San Ts'ai T'u Huei, or Compendium of Ill.u.s.trations for the Three Orders of Heaven, Earth, and Man (1608). I am grateful to Mr. Jack Jacoby of the East Asian Collections of the Columbia University Libraries for permission to use their reprint edition. I also wish to thank Mr. David Tsai, Curator, and Ms. Alice Chi of the Gest Oriental Library of Princeton University for their a.s.sistance.

Introduction.

The tales, fables, and fantasies in this collection blend the everyday life of mortals, the fabulous kingdom of birds and beasts, and the supernatural world of G.o.ds and ghosts. Like Western folk and fairy tales, they spring from the deep wells of a civilization's history and imagination, and their cast of peasants, philosophers, virgins, kings, judges, tigers, and parrots may sometimes remind us of characters in more familiar legends. At the same time, these stories bear the stamp of the society and traditions that originally produced them. They illuminate the Chinese social order through the structured relations.h.i.+ps that defined it: emperor and subject, father and son, husband and wife (or wives), official and peasant, human and beast.

The Confucian philosophers who dominated the Chinese state conceived these relations.h.i.+ps as a harmonious balance of obligations, and a number of pieces in this collection ill.u.s.trate their view of order and authority. By and large, the Confucians were the voice of the superior orders-emperor, father, husband. The majority of our tales, however, speak for the other side, for they come from the Taoists, philosophers and social critics who represented the subordinate orders and historically opposed the Confucians. The Taoist view found vivid expression in popular literature-novels, plays, and the tales and legends we read here. Indeed, one of the purposes of this genre, typically scorned and even banned by Confucian authorities, was to publicize the crimes of the mighty and the injustices suffered by the subordinate order, including children, women, and animals. As the conflict between those above and those below gave shape to Chinese history, the rivalry of these two great philosophies gave shape to Chinese culture.

In Confucian doctrine, the emperor sat at the center of the political, social, and natural realms. He ruled with a mandate from heaven, and his spiritual authority radiated outward in concentric circles; he received in return the allegiance of humans and the submission of creatures and things. The Chinese saw him as both Son of Heaven and father of the people, thus fusing the Western roles of king and pope into a single, semi-divine figure. As the descendant of the founder of his own dynasty, the emperor had charge of the filial wors.h.i.+p of his ancestors and the wise governance of his own family-in particular the careful arrangement of marriages and the proper education of the son who would succeed him. In Confucianism, the hereditary principle was foremost, because the imperial family was the heart of the state.

The emperor transmitted his influence across the land directly through the imperial bureaucracy and indirectly through the great landowning clans, sometimes called the local gentry or n.o.bility. Official positions (the goal for every clan's sons) were obtained through a series of qualifying examinations based on the sacred books of Confucian doctrine, ritual, ethics, metaphysics, and history. An ambitious young man could rise by pa.s.sing three successive levels of examinations, the county, the provincial, and the metropolitan. Each of the degrees brought its holder various immunities, exemptions, and privileges, though not always an actual office. The system was designed to delegate the responsibilities of government to upright and learned men, to scholar-officials who would rule with judgment.

However, these tales deal with practice, not theory, and in reality the bureaucracy was a c.u.mbersome, often corrupt structure in which official appointment was determined by a mixture of factors that included patronage and bribery as well as scholars.h.i.+p. A tale like ”The Scholar's Concubine” is meant as a scathing satire on the sale of office to the unqualified.

The official that appears most frequently in this collection is the county magistrate, the lowest official of the imperial bureaucracy and the direct governor of the people in his jurisdiction. He usually held a ”metropolitan” or ”provincial” degree, and was addressed as ”parent of the county.” Even so, he was usually a sorry caretaker of the peasants' fortunes, and rarely loved. ”A Wise Judge” and ”A Clever Judge” pay tribute to good magistrates; but ”Social Connections” tells how a vicious official ruins a prosperous farmer, and ”Underworld Justice” goes further to show how little justice there is in this world or the next.

The closing selection of this book, chapter one of the eighteenth-century novel An Unofficial History of the Confucian Academy, satirizes the entire official realm. In it, the hero, w.a.n.g Mien, refuses to take office despite his enormous talents and the wishes of the emperor, taking to heart his mother's dying wish: ”Take a wife and raise a family; care for my grave-and don't become an official.” Such criticism rarely touched the emperor himself. An exception is the opening tale, ”The Cricket,” in which the whole bureaucracy mobilizes to cater to the court's newest fad.

The great clans ruled locally, little models of the imperial family. Here too, hereditary right was enforced to a.s.sure the smooth transmission of property and status; and to that end the arrangement of marriages was essential. If a young n.o.ble and his first wife had little choice in the matter, secondary wives or concubines had none at all. Generally speaking, in a society that makes the family a political as well as a social unit, freedom of love and marriage cannot be tolerated; personal preference and appet.i.te must be overruled by the social virtues. The response to this demand-the struggle for freedom to love and marry-became the spark in much of Chinese literature, as we see in ”The Divided Daughter,” which describes with compa.s.sion the sorrow of couples who want to marry for love, not duty, and in ”The Waiting Maid's Parrot,” where a young concubine who loves a scholar finds that help can come from an unusual source.

The control of emotion lies at the heart of the Confucian's perception of human nature. The Confucians defined human beings solely in terms of a set of obligatory relations.h.i.+ps, in which the essence, the fundamental act, was obedience: children obeyed parents, peasants obeyed lords and officials, wives obeyed husbands. This was the primary force in behavior-leaving pa.s.sion and instinct as attributes not of humans but of animals; we encounter an official who has fallen into this savage state in ”The Censor and the Tiger.”

Master storyteller P'u Sung-ling, who sets the dominant tone in this volume, attacks this entire tradition in a set of tales in which animals and other ”subordinate” creatures set the standards for virtuous conduct that their superiors would do well to follow; in ”The Loyal Dog,” ”The Snakeman,” and ”A Faithful Mouse,” he shows eloquently where love and compa.s.sion are truly demonstrated. Twenty-one of the tales here come from P'u's Record of Things Strange in a Makes.h.i.+ft Studio, a collection of over four hundred tales which is the culmination of the Chinese short-story tradition. The ma.n.u.script of this work was probably completed toward the end of the seventeenth century and circulated widely, though it was not formally published until the 1760s, some fifty years after P'u's death.

The literary countertradition of which P'u may be the princ.i.p.al figure has its roots in Taoism, a philosophy as old as Confucianism and the one most consistently critical of it. Tao (literally ”the way” or ”the main current”) is the universal ancestor and the universal annihilator. As the ultimate leveler of all living creatures, it creates all things equal, giving no one of them dominion over another by virtue of birth or any other inheritable power. Tao's authority is absolute; it transfers no authority to what it creates-quite unlike the Confucian heaven, which gives its ”son” the emperor a mandate to rule. As destroyer, Tao gathers up again all it has produced; none of its myriad creatures can transfer influence, property, or status beyond its ordained time. Animals and all other creatures exist on the same level as humans, and each exists for one lifetime alone, free of obligations to either ancestors or descendants. According to the Taoists, the artifices of civilization only lead people away from the original and benign state of nature. Thus at one blow the Taoists shattered the fundamental premise of the Confucian order: the social hierarchy founded on hereditary right.

More than twenty pieces in this collection come from the great Taoist philosophers Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu. Two brief selections, ”The Fish Rejoice” and ”b.u.t.terfly Dreams,” imagine how the human and animal realms are part of the same whole. Chuang Tzu, in particular, sought a state of personal transcendence in which the spirit would be free to rove among the entirety of creation, becoming one first with this, then with that. This interplay between the human and animal worlds connects Taoism to the Buddhists, who believed that the spirits of the dead may reappear in animal form to atone for the sins of previous lifetimes. The transmigration of souls figures dramatically in ”Suited to Be a Fish” and ”Three Former Lives.” Both tales also teach the importance of compa.s.sion toward all living things, the essence of Buddhist ethics.

The humanization of animals in these tales reflects yet another cultural a.s.sociation: the relations between the Chinese and the non-Chinese. Confucian historians were often outraged by the marriage and burial customs of the innumerable Asian peoples, some non-Chinese, some partly Chinese, who lived around China's borders. Concerned with preserving the purity of Chinese ethnic and cultural ident.i.ty, the Confucians often referred to these peoples with unflattering animal names like ”hound” and ”reptile.” The Taoists and Buddhists, on the other hand, had a far more tolerant view. Lieh Tzu's ”Man or Beast” voices this challenge in a powerful way, recognizing in mythic terms the contributions non-Chinese peoples had made to Chinese civilization.

But the Taoists did not deal only in imaginative metaphors. The Taoist priests whose magical powers are displayed throughout the tales spurned the teachings of the Confucian cla.s.sics and the careers of bureaucrats in order to study alchemy, astrology, botany, pharmacology, meteorology, zoology, and so forth. Rebels as often as recluses, they lived in the mountains where tigers reigned and outlaws hid. As critics of the social order, they often joined the peasants in resisting and at times overthrowing the dynasty in power, thus translating their egalitarian view of creation into social and economic reality. Antidynastic movements such as the White Lotus (a society of peasant rebels active from the twelfth century to the nineteenth) often made use of the ”heresies” and ”black arts” the Taoists taught them. ”White Lotus Magic” and ”The Peach Thief” afford us a glimpse of their activities.

The Confucian social order was threatened from yet another source, the supernatural world. In the Confucian view, the dead commanded an authority that could be invoked only in the ancestral temple, and only by their living-and n.o.ble-descendants. These rituals had enormous social and psychological influence over the common people, whose unt.i.tled and often homeless dead were silent and impotent. A rival and contemporary of Confucius, the philosopher Mo Tzu, devised an ingenious way to reverse this concept. Ghosts, Mo argued, are not the agents of the privileged living; rather, they are agents of heaven. As the collective common dead, they are the enforcers of a universal, objective justice and can compensate for the defects in human justice. The City G.o.d who plays an important role in ”Underworld Justice” is criticized for neglecting this duty. The City G.o.d had a public temple in the city which gave anyone who entered and sought it access to the world of the dead. The local deity in ”Drinking Companions” is a variant of the same idea. Many of the other tales in the section Ghosts and Souls poke fun at those who believe in ghosts that are creations of mere superst.i.tion, not agents of justice.

These, then, are a few of the social themes that come into play as the tales unfold. Together the collection spans over twenty centuries of Chinese literature, from the fifth century B.C. to the eighteenth A.D. Yet each tale has its own voice, speaking to us with vivid honesty of common feelings about human life.

TALES OF ENCHANTMENT AND MAGIC.

The Cricket.

During the Ming reign known as Pervasive Virtue cricket fighting was very popular at court, and each year the populace had to supply crickets for the n.o.blemen to test in battle. In Floral Shade, our county in western Shensi, the cricket is not common. But our magistrate wanted to curry favor with his superiors, and he managed to find them one that proved to be a mighty warrior. As a result Floral Shade was appointed a royal supplier of crickets to the court.

Naturally the magistrate then s.h.i.+fted the responsibility down to the neighborhood heads, and crickets became rare and valuable in the county. In hopes of pus.h.i.+ng the price up, the young bloods in our towns often h.o.a.rded the outstanding specimens they caught. Cunning local officials were quick to use cricket h.o.a.rding as an excuse for searching people's houses. And whenever they looked for cricket collections, they confiscated so many other goods that they ruined several families at a time.

In Floral Shade there lived a man called Make-good. He had spent years as a candidate for the lowest degree, but it still eluded him. Make-good was somewhat pedantic and una.s.sertive, and crafty officials maneuvered him into the post of neighborhood head. Once there, he was stuck in the job; a hundred schemes and tricks would not have extricated him. When he could not extort enough taxes from the people, he had to make up the money out of his own pocket. Within a year the whole of his property was exhausted.

The same thing happened when it came time to collect crickets: Make-good could not bring himself to take them from his neighbors, even though he could not fill the quota set by the higherups. Trapped in this frustrating situation, he wanted to die.

”What good will dying do?” his wife asked. ”Go out and look for crickets yourself. Maybe you'll have some luck.”

To this Make-good agreed, and day after day he left home early and returned late. Carrying his bamboo tube and bra.s.s wire cage, he searched among crumbling walls and clumps of wild gra.s.s. He probed every rock and flushed every hole, but nothing came of it. Although he managed to find a few specimens, they were inferior and weak, far below the standard.

The magistrate, however, held Make-good strictly to schedule. After ten days the unlucky man could furnish no crickets and had to face the punishment of one hundred strokes. He was beaten until the blood ran down both legs and he could not have moved to catch a simple worm. Tossing on his bed, he wished only to make an end of himself.

It happened then that a hunchbacked fortune teller who could read the future came to the village. Make-good's wife took some money for a fee and went to consult her. Crowds thronged the fortune teller's door; Make-good's wife entered the house along with the rosy-cheeked, the grey, and the old. Low incense tables stood in front of an inner chamber screened by curtains. Those who had come with questions were lighting their incense for the crucibles and offering their respects with low bows that ended with the forehead pressed to the floor. The fortune teller stood to one side staring at the sky and chanting to bring the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude good luck. Her lips opened and closed but formed no intelligible words. The crowd listened with reverent attention. Every few minutes a piece of paper, bearing words that spoke perfectly to a pet.i.tioner's concern, would slip out of the curtained chamber.

Make-good's wife placed her money on the stand and performed the same obeisance as her predecessors. In the time it takes to have a meal, the curtains began to quiver and then issued a slip of paper, which fell to the floor. It bore not a single word but only a picture: a sketch of a neglected shrine behind which a small mountain rose from grotesque rocks. The rocks rested amid clumps of vegetation, and a prize greenhead cricket lurked there. Beside it was a frog that seemed about to leap and dance.

Puzzled, the woman scrutinized the picture inch by inch. When her eyes came to rest on the cricket, she gazed with rapt attention, folded the paper, and went home to show it to her husband.

Make-good examined it and mused: ”This has to be a way of telling me where to catch a cricket!” He looked long at the scene. It reminded him of a Buddhist temple east of the village. Painfully he arose, supporting himself on his staff, and hobbled with sketch in hand to the temple. At the rear of the building were many ancient graves, and he threaded his way through them. In one spot, strangely shaped rocks appeared virtually as the sketch showed. Alert, cautious, searching minutely, he pushed farther into the thicket. There was neither trace nor echo of what he had come for, but he groped onward.

Then a frog leaped out of the bushes. Make-good was stunned. He swiftly followed it, and the frog dove into the gra.s.s. Right behind, Make-good parted the clump of gra.s.s and stared. An insect was crouching at the base. He pounced; it slipped into a crevice of the rocks. He tickled it with a sharp blade of gra.s.s but could not make it come out. At last he flushed it with the bamboo tube, and the bug appeared, a magnificent specimen. Make-good pursued and caught it. The insect had a large body and a long tail. Its neck was a dark green, its wings the color of gold.

Elated, Make-good caged the cricket and returned home, where his whole family rejoiced as if he had brought great treasure. They placed the cricket in a tub, fed it all kinds of grain, and guarded it against the time when Make-good would have to meet his next quota.

Now, Make-good had a nine-year-old son, who stealthily uncovered the cricket's tub one day when his father was out. Up the bug leaped and was gone like a shot, so swift that no man could have caught it. By the time the desperate boy hunted it down and trapped it under his hand, a leg was torn off and its belly was split. Moments later, it died. The boy cried out in panic. Then he told his mother, and her face turned deathly pale. ”Evil Karma!” she swore. ”Now comes the day of ruin! When your father gets home he'll settle with you!” The boy left in tears.

Shortly the father returned, and when his wife told him what had happened he felt as if he had been drenched with ice and snow. In a rage he looked for the boy, but the child was gone without a trace. Afterward they found him in the well.

The father's rage was turned to grief. He pounded the ground and cried out; his one wish was for his own death. Husband and wife were desperate and desolate. Their cottage sent up no smoke. Silently they regarded one another-they had nothing to live for.

As dusk approached they took the boy to be buried. Yet when they caressed him there was a slight sign of breathing. Overjoyed, they laid him on the bed. As the night wore on, the child seemed to revive. Husband and wife took comfort. But the boy's vital spirits did not rally; his breathing was low and suppressed, as if he wanted to sleep. Then Make-good turned to look at the empty cage and was again overcome by despair over the lost cricket. He could give no further thought to his son.