Ethnic ChinaLit

What has happened since 2001 when Zhongdian (中甸), a traditionally Tibetan village in Yunnan Province, changed its name to Shangri-la after the “lost paradise” immortalized in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon?

Minnpost.com has just published Manufacturing Shangri-la, a 3-part series, that explores that question, particularly the seemingly inevitable impact of tourism, not just foreign but domestic too:

Across China, minorities not seen as a threat (Tibetans, Uighurs) are generally portrayed as colorful people who sing and dance and love to entertain visitors.

This stereotype is visible at Yunnan’s ethnic tourism sights. Strolling around Lijiang, a tourist-mobbed town south of Shangri-la, can be shocking for many Americans accustomed to political correctness. Women in “native” costumes—many of them Han—wave clappers outside a raucous strip of bars, where patrons watch dancers in neon headdresses perform Tibetan, Lisu and Yi moves to thumping music.

“The different cultures have different standards of what’s a good tourist time,” says Ed Grumbine, an American professor who studies botany in Yunnan. “In the US, if you had a bunch of Hispanic people dressing up and doing a Navajo dance and claiming it was legitimate, it would be an outrage. In China, it’s not an outrage, it’s business as usual.”

Indeed, commercializing the culture is the whole point. And rather than being a source of tension, the added income is a key ingredient in Shangri-La’s peaceful coexistence.

In the latest edition of Oral Tradition (Processing Epics), Mark Bender explores—via highly readable notes on his field-work—how the Miao myth-epic Mai Bang (Butterfly Mother) and the Nuosu’s creation-epic Dragon-Eagles have gradually been rendered in written form:

My title also contains the word “processing”—and by that I mean the process through which traditional texts are performed and received by local audiences. It also refers to the process by which some versions of stories are recorded, transcribed, translated, edited, and released in print or electronic format—a process the late Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko called the “folklore process.”

The term “processing” also carries, at least for me, a sense of the sorts of compromises and distortions inherent in the manner in which the recorded texts are preserved and communicated to new audiences. Just as natural foods or textiles are processed and marketed into products for consumption by target audiences, so too are items of oral literature. We now have genetically engineered corn, soybeans, and hemp. A box of “heart healthy” oat cereal may contain a whole list of additives, supplements, and fillers—sometimes mimicking original, truly wholesome products and directed at consumers open to healthy, natural, and eco-friendly foods.

But we increasingly know it is necessary to read the fine print—just as Lauri Honko reminded us that it is necessary to understand the process of the “processing” of oral texts that occurs behind the book or website banner.

He notes the tendency for compilers in China to strive for what they term a “complete” (完整), official version that involves “negotiations” and even deletion of “taboo” content:

Although the appreciation of multiple versions gathered in specific performance contexts has a growing place in folklore circles in China, there is still a strong tradition of creating “complete” versions of a given song cycle or story tradition that will serve as part of an ethnic group’s official tradition of oral literature. These versions usually combine several versions collected from a number of singers.

In some cases the participating singers and elders may be involved with editors in the negotiations concerning the makeup of the final master version. In theory, such master texts—which might be best described as “collective versions”— are intended to reflect and preserve the richness and completeness of the tradition in a format that can be read and appreciated to its fullest by present or future generations without access to multiple live versions. In the past, much more so than is usual now, this stage of editing also allowed for selection or omission of content deemed crude, backward, divisive, or otherwise taboo.

Several interesting issues and factoids have emerged from the recent 9th China Nationalities Forum (第九届民族文学论坛) held in Xinjiang’s Kashgar, according to Liu Daxian (刘大先) in his Dec 12 round-up of the event (九届):

• China may be celebrating Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, but “We Uyghurs have not yet been able to read his works,” lamented an award-winning Uyghur author (亚生江·沙地克), in a reference to the fact that relatively little literature is being translated into—or out of—Uyghur. “In Uyghur creative literary circles, we are talking to ourselves.”

• “In reality, there are actually two systems of Chinese literary criticism: one called ‘the Han language system’ (or ‘Hanzi system’), and one ‘minority ethnic literature system’,” emphasized Xinjiang Normal University’s Professor Wang Youfu (王佑夫). “This is an undeniable fact. China literary criticism history texts now in use in higher education are actually histories of Han Chinese literary criticism.”

• Prize money for China’s most prestigious awards for minority ethnic literature, the Junma Ethnic Literary Awards (骏马奖), has now skyrocketed to 100,000 renminbi—up from just 3,000 when they were first handed out in 1999. Read the rest of this entry »

The 10th Junma Ethnic Literary Awards (骏马奖) have been announced. Open to works published in the PRC during 2008-11 by members of ethnic groups other than the majority Han, the competition is a politically correct affair co-organized—predictably—by the state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association, which claims more than 1,000 non-Han writers among its 8,000+ members, and the State Ethnic Affairs Commission. One of the judges is the omnipresent Li Jingze, editor-in-chief of People’s Literature (人民文学) and the new quarterly of Chinese literature in translation, Pathway (路灯), and also a long-time judge for China’s most prestigious literary competition, the Mao Dun Literature Prize (矛盾文学奖).

Here’s the list of the winners:

《碧色寨》 书 评

(赵敏：annie.zhao2010@gmail.com)

小小的碧色寨随着火车和洋老咪（洋人）的到来发生了巨大的变化。宁静的生活被打扰、彝人的神灵被激怒，洋人们用火车带来了西方的工业文明、洋火、洋皂、洋布，同时送走了一车有一车的矿产。

刚来昆明时，听范先生介绍滇越铁路感觉在听天方夜谭。读完小说后才知道一直记忆深刻的剪子形状的那座桥叫“戈登桥”，是滇越铁路的一部分。我曾多次感叹：为什么在昆明、大理到处可以见到法国人？云南的咖啡文化如此盛行，昆明、丽江、大理、西双版纳走到哪都能喝到 cappuccino、espresso、cafe latte , 还有正宗的西式点心。法国人真把这当家了，喝杯咖啡、学学中文、泡个吧、交交女朋友，不亦乐乎。

从希腊的克里特岛乘坐“澳大利亚人”号来到碧色寨淘金的大卡洛斯和弟弟小卡洛斯，在碧色寨做了工地主任、哥胪士洋行的主人、各自面对了一段不幸的爱情。印证了：在西方做流浪汉的白人，在碧色寨这样的地方却做上了老爷。

我不知道碧色寨曾经怎样辉煌过，到今天还会不会还有燃烧过的残渣。搜到了一片叫《碧色寨之恋》的小说。简介是这样的：小说讲述了一个十七岁法国少女丽莎和一个三十多岁的中国男人周亦然之间的爱情故事。我倒是对所谓“中国男人第一次获得了全部的主动权”不感兴趣。让我好奇的是：在白人作为上等人的时期，一个法人少女是怎么喜欢上一个中国男性。而这个设定和比杜拉斯的《情人》何其相似。 Read the rest of this entry »

Kunming-based Fan Wen (范稳), author of  a trilogy set on the border of Yunnan and Tibet, has launched a new novel exploring the history of the Yunnan-Vietnam railway that linked Haiphong with Kunming in 1910. Bisezhai Village (碧色寨) portrays the clash of cultures between the French, then colonial masters of Indochina just south of Yunnan and the driving force behind the new railway, and the indigenous Yi people (彝族).The completion of the railway through the mountainous terrain was an incredible engineering feat at the time, and its famous gravity-defying Wishbone Bridge (人字桥) is still firmly intact with nary a repair to date.  Estimates are that the project cost more than ten thousand Chinese laborers their lives.

Annie Zhao, a recent emigrant to Kunming, has written a brief book review of Bisezhai Village. Click here for the review in Chinese (中文书评), and for the English version  Read the rest of this entry »

These two Chinese-language tomes have not, to the best of my knowledge, been translated into English:

The Little Train that Traveled Afar: The Century-old Yunnan-Vietnam Railway (远去的小火车：滇越铁路 100 年) documents the history of the railway the French designed to link Indochina’s Haiphong with Kunming in southwest China, with a colonialist’s eye on Yunnan’s tin.  Lots of black-and-white pix and factoids too: completed in 1910, the railway was China’s premier international rail-link; lacking sufficient labor in Yunnan for this massive project that snaked through mountainous terrain and required 173 bridges, the French imported ‘migrant workers’ from as far away as Hebei and Shandong; thanks to Siemens equipment shipped in via Vietnam, Yunnan was the first province in China to have its very own hydropower plant; and a slew of imports from Indochina in the early part of the 20th century equipped some towns in Yunnan—known today for its relative impoverishment—with running water, movie theaters, telephones, automobiles and French-style hospitals at a time when much of the interior of China had few of these amenities.

I’ve only just started The Secret History of the Mongols (蒙古秘史), annotated by Yu Dajun (余大钧) and published by Hebei People’s Publishing House (河北人民出版社). This is an annotated rendering in modern Chinese of a late 14th century text (<元朝秘史>, Yuáncháo mìshǐ) consisting of Chinese characters that were themselves a phonetic transcription of a (now-lost) Mongolian text in a Uighur script.

Famous Sinologists in the West, such as Paul Pelliot and Arthur Waley, tried their hand at translating the transliterated text. According to Yu Dajun’s introduction, translations of the 282-chapter text are now also available in modern Mongolian (Cyrillic), Japanese, Russian, German, French, Hungarian, English, Turkish and Czech. Besides his own translation, Yu Dajun’s volume includes another full translation into Chinese set down in the early Ming Dynasty (<明初音写、译注本 《元朝秘史》总译>). However, nowhere in Yu Dajun’s work will one find a copy of the original transliteration (see 1908 edition, below), or any commentary on it in Mongolian. Which is a bit odd, since the original text is Mongolian, albeit in Chinese characters.

According to Wikipedia, “The ‘Secret History’ is regarded as the single significant native Mongolian account of Genghis Khan. Linguistically, it provides the richest source of pre-classical Mongolian and Middle Mongolian. . . and is regarded as a piece of classic literature in both Mongolia and the rest of the world.”

Currently popular Chinese historical novels, like The Legend of Mongolia (蒙古往事) by Ran Ping (冉平), and histories like Genghis Khan (成吉思汗) edited by Zhang Jialin (张家林) and Li Guofang (李国防) widely quote The Secret History of the Mongols, but we are never told which version they are citing: their own rendering of the reconstructed Mongolian text transliterated in Chinese (at left)? A translation done during the Yuan or the Ming Dynasties, when excellent Mongolian scholars were likely in plentiful supply? One of several 20th-century renditions, such as Yu Dajun’s?

The answer is important because no definitive text has survived in Mongolian, and therefore the Chinese-language version is, for Chinese readers at least, an authoritative window into the Mongolian world. But there are actually several translations into Chinese, each giving a unique description of Genghis Khan and the ancient Mongol tribes who eventually ruled China for a century. This leaves today’s Chinese authors, screen writers and historians free to choose whichever one best suits the image they wish to portray.

Fan Wen (范稳), the Chinese Catholic author who recently completed his fictional trilogy spotlighting cultural and religious collisions in the “multicultural wonderland” of the Yunnan-Tibet border, now has another historical novel in mind.

The first book in the published series, Harmonious Land (水乳大地), recounts the tale of a multi-ethnic settlement in Lancangjiang Canyon (gateway to Tibet), beset by battles between arrogant French Catholic missionaries, incompetent officials and their marauding troops, Naxi Dongba Shamanists, and the dominant Tibetans, not all of whom lead pacific, vegetarian lives in the local lamasery.

Chinese Books, English Reviews spoke with Fan Wen about his new work-in-progress:

Q: Word has it that you’re working on a new novel about the rail line linking China’s Kunming and Vietnam’s Haiphong that was constructed during French colonial rule of Indochina. How are you preparing for this project?

A: Yes, it’s about this railroad that’s soon to be completely abandoned. I rather enjoy the ‘history of decline’. It gives one a certain sense of desolation. After the Yunnan-Vietnam railway was completed [1910], it actually brought with it the collision and fusion of two distinct civilizations. The railway passed through the lands of several of Yunnan’s ethnic minorities, whose cultures were more backward than that of the Tibetans, and even more vulnerable. I intend to use several French nationals who were working on the railroad as the main characters. I’ll write about their lives in a foreign land, and their experiences against the backdrop of that alien culture, including the dangers they faced, their loves and their fates.

I’ve already read a lot of background material, conducted interviews along the line, and even stayed in the old train stations. I’m conceptualizing the story right now. [end]