Chinese Short Stories

Guest speaker: Prof. Robert Ashmore, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, rashmore@socrates.berkeley.edu

Reading for Working Group:

Ssu-ma Ch'ien. "Nieh Cheng" in Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch'ien, trans. Burton Watson. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1969. pp. 50-54. (Han Dynasty)

Po Hsing-chien. "The Story of Miss Li" (Li Wa chuan) in Anthology of Chinese Literature Vol. I, ed. Cyril Birch. N.Y.: Grove Press, 1965. (Tang Dynasty) See Discussion Questions below.

Feng Jicai. "The Tall woman and Her Short Husband" in The Time is Not Yet Ripe: Contemporary China's Best Writers and Their Stories, ed.Ying Bian. Beijing: foreign Languages Press, 1991. pp. 85-98. (People's Republic of China)

Other Selected links and references:

Lu Xun. "Ah Q -- the Real Story" in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.

Ding Ling. "When I Was in Xia Village" trans. by Gary J. Bjorge in I Myself Am A Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, eds. Tani E. Barlow, Gary J. Bjorge. Beacon Press; Reprint edition (September 1, 1990)

General Area Background:

Concise Political History of China and Literary History compiled by by Paul Halsall from Compton's Living Encyclopedia on America Online (August 1995) - Internet East Asian History Sourcebook
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/eastasia/eastasiasbook.html

Timeline and Maps (from China the Beautiful )
http://www.chinapage.org/main2.html

China Dynasties Map (Paul Noll's web site) http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Dynasty/history-maps-dynasty.html

Study/Discussion Questions for "The Story of Miss Li" (Li Wa chuan) from Robert Ashmore:

1. The institution of the pleasure quarters in the Tang capital is at the center of much of the period’s literature of romance. This may seem odd, but we should remember that for members of elite society (including the authors and audience of this sort of classical tale) romantic commitment based on mutual choice could only occur in this sort of context, since real marriages were determined by parents, primarily on the basis of solidifying their families’ social and political standing. In the world of the pleasure quarters, men pay not so much for sex as for the playing out of courtship and marriage based on mutual appreciation (in this sort of play-acting, the madam acts as “mother-in-law,” other courtesans act as “sisters,” etc.). Money marks the boundary between the fiction of romance and the real world outside, but the fiction requires that monetary exchange be euphemistically disguised. How do the protagonists of this story appreciate each other, and what are the stages of transformation through which this appreciation evolves on each side? How does the story handle the relation between the fictive world of the pleasure quarters and the real world of politics, civil service exams, and family prestige?

2. In the Chinese title of this story, “Li Wa chuan,” the term chuan, rendered simply as “story” here, is borrowed from the vocabulary of historiography, where it means “tradition,” and as applied to individuals, something like “biography,” in the sense of “the authoritative version” of what is known and important about a given figure. The use of this term here is part of a complex of questions about writing, authority, and expression raised by the story. Whereas the “normal” subjects of chuan are socially prominent men, this chuan is about someone who is both female and of low or even degraded status (the suppression of the actual name of the man and his family is interesting to note in this connection). The tale begins with the male protagonist at the point at which in conventional terms he is supposed to show himself worthy of being noted or remembered: by succeeding in the civil service examinations---that is, by showing his mastery of authoritative modes of writing---he will go on to an official career that will make him notable and useful to the society as a whole. By the end of the story, he has indeed become someone likely to be taken as the subject of a conventional “chuan,” but his trajectory to that point is notably different from the conventional one. What does he learn in addition to or instead of the standard array of textual skills of the exam candidate? How does he create or express an identity of his own? Why is it that this story remains the “chuan of Li Wa” and not of “the young man”? How do Li Wa and “the young man” negotiate and/or transgress expected categories of gendered behavior?

ORIAS Working Groups are established to provide professional development support for K-14 teachers with shared interests in international studies. The working groups provide teachers with the opportunity to extend their content knowledge by participating in seminars with University scholars; meet with colleagues to share resources and experiences; and work independently or collaboratively on classroom materials with ORIAS staff.

Co-sponsored by the Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS), the Bay Area Global Education Program (BAGEP) at the World Affairs Council of Northern California and the Robbins Collection at the School of Law, U. C. Berkeley.

For further information contact Michele Delattre at ORIAS: 510-643-0868 or orias@berkeley.edu