In pre-contemporary China, folk epics performed at village level helped to construct a sense of regional as opposed to national identity. The following is an excerpt from the introduction of Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture by Anne E. McLaren. This is the first book-length study in the West on the folk epics of the Han Chinese people, who are the majority population of China. These folk epics provide an unparalleled resource for understanding the importance of “the local” in Chinese culture, especially how rice-growing populations perceived their environment and relational world.

In the 1920s, leading intellectual figures such as Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛 (1893‒1980) participated in a folksong collecting movement across multiple regions of China, including the Wu-speaking zone of the lower Yangzi Delta. Gu and his fellow enthusiasts concentrated on the songs they themselves were most familiar with, those sung by women and children in their own families or by acquaintances in their local area. The collections of the 1920s consisted of short lyrical songs of one or more stanzas. In the 1930s, folklorists were surprised to uncover several narrative songs of over one hundred lines.

The focus of this study is the narrative songs of several thousand lines that were “discovered” in the late twentieth century. These “folk epics” were performed by men and women while working in the rice paddy or boating along the waterways in the regions bordering Lake Tai in southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang provinces. Some narrative songs deal with culture heroes, supernatural figures, and rebel leaders. But the vast majority feature amorous encounters between men and women that lead to social opprobrium, punishment, and death. Contemporary Chinese folklore scholars, like their predecessors, have been somewhat disconcerted by the erotic material found in these songs of passionate love. […]

Gu Jiegang and his circle of folklore collectors were very aware of the crucial role of one’s mother tongue in expressing intimacy and identity from one’s earliest childhood. It would be more accurate to state that the educated classes of the imperial and early Republican era were taught from a young age to look with disapprobation on the “crude” songs of the unlettered and to distance themselves from the vulgar herd. The conventional view ignored the fact that it was oral traditions transmitted in regional languages that resonated most strongly with the majority of the population and that performance arts in manuscript and print served as the major reading material of the semiliterate. […]

Memory making played a crucial part in forging local identities. In the songs explored here, it is local memories that are recalled in all their density; the history of cosmopolitan pan-China appears distant and remote. Some folk epics even offer an implicit challenge to canonical ideas from cosmopolitan China.

In studies of Chinese culture, it is the epics of borderland minority groups that have attracted most scholarly attention. It was formerly held that the Han Chinese people did not transmit songs of epic length. In the 1980s Chinese ethnologists were surprised to discover that amateur singers in Jiangsu and Zhejiang province could sing lengthy narratives over the course of days. Close to forty folk epics have now been identified in the Lower Yangzi Delta.

The folk epics were sung by illiterate farmers while working in the rice paddy or boating along the waterways. It was believed that singing promoted crop fertility and that the rice-plant embodied a female rice spirit whose growth and development paralleled that of human sexuality and procreation. Regarded as “vulgar” due to its erotic content, this song tradition was marginalized and little understood. The erotic content is often removed in editions directed at a national readership.

Employing perspectives from memory studies, eco-criticism, and the study of oral traditions, Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture examines in detail five iconic folk epics. This book will appeal to readers interested in Chinese performance and regional culture, comparative world epics, eco-critical studies, and Chinese folk religion. It would be of benefit to readers beyond China studies with an interest in the interaction between song, ritual, and the natural and constructed environment. This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anne E. McLaren is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China and Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables. Her edited and coauthored works include Environmental Preservation and Cultural Heritage in China and Chinese Women: Living and Working. Dr. McLaren’s work has appeared in journals such as Asian Ethnology, CHINOPERL, Modern China, and T’oung Pao. She researches Chinese performance culture, popular narratives, fictional works, and theatre of the late imperial and modern periods.

BOOK REVIEWS

“Pioneering and extremely important: it offers insights into the regional diversities of the Han Chinese culture and the relationship between local and the pan-Chinese culture … McLaren’s study shows, however, that labouring songs are also a type of ‘ritual technology’ that provides a meaningful framework for collective action by coordinating the organization of communal labour. Moreover, these agricultural songs contain rich imageries of sexuality and women’s fertility and possess sacred power that is supposed to make the crops grow and invoke good harvest … Private love affairs are another important dimension of shange in Lake Tai … McLaren provides a very convincing analysis … With its lucid writing style and the diverse topics treated, this book can be used for college courses on Chinese and comparative literature, Chinese social history, Chinese cultural studies, Chinese gender studies and folklore studies. It should also appeal to general readers interested in world literature and folk culture.” —The China Quarterly

“Utilizing a cross-disciplinary methodology, McLaren investigates both the oral and the written transmissions of folk songs mainly performed in the Wu dialects, charting the historical metamorphosis of regional folk voices that express romantic, sexual, gendered, and social sentiments across significant historical eras. The book contributes to Chinese literary and cultural studies by bringing scholarly attention to the traditionally neglected topic of ethnic Han folk epics…In studying both the textual and aesthetic features and the social life of regional folk songs, this book presents itself as a valuable source to scholars interested in Chinese regional cultures and will contribute to any Chinese and Asian culture classroom that seeks to engage students in the rich intersections of oral literature, performance, and the social function of the ‘text.’…The dual function of the rice paddy as both a place of labor (farming work) and a place of sexual imagination plays itself out in the following chapters of the book…Showcasing a wide range of local variations in the song traditions, the author depicts the seductions and attractions… [and] transgressive sexual liaisons that threaten the stability and honor of the family unit…presents wide-ranging materials and a plethora of perspectives across different historical periods to engage the reader…It is an inspiring volume that invites the reader to examine the tensions between the elite and the folk, the personal and the public, and love and morality, all of which are long-lasting themes in the study of literature and culture.” —Journal of Asian Studies

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