Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation

Despite more than a decade of collaborations between the Chinese Folklore Society and the American Folklore Society, English-language studies of Chinese folklore by Chinese folklorists are relatively rare, and the influence of Chinese folklorists on Western and global folkloristics remains muted. Juwen Zhang attempts to address this lacuna in his new book, Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation. Through weaving the history of folklore collection and tradition (both before and after the creation of the folklore discipline), with close readings of individual texts and traditions and a theoretical view of folklore as an “inherent cultural self-healing mechanism” (p. 37), Zhang seeks to include Chinese traditions and Chinese scholars within our understanding of folklore's past, present, and future.The project's complexity is evident from the opening pages of Part I, “Introduction: An Interpretive Framework for the Continuity of Traditions.” The first chapter demonstrates the project's daunting scope by sketching a 2,000-plus-year history of folklore collection in China culminating with the creation of the folklore studies discipline in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter also introduces key terminologies and theoretical contributions from Chinese folklorists. Chapter 2 then summarizes the theoretical questions with which Zhang has grappled in recent publications, and defines concepts like the cultural self-healing mechanism, vitality and validity, core and arbitrary identity markers, and folkloric identity. The concept of the cultural self-healing mechanism, focusing on how a given tradition's alignment with key cultural values impacts the transmission of traditions, is central to Zhang's argument for why China has managed to modernize without sacrificing cultural identity despite assaults and humiliations from colonialist powers. The focus on values is simultaneously innovative and consistent with major trends in Chinese folklore studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.The remaining three parts of the book follow umbrella categories around which Chinese scholars in post-Mao China have organized a massive folklore collection project: gushi (stories), yanyu (proverbs), and geyao (music). In Part II, which focuses on the umbrella term “gushi”—“the most general concept in Chinese for categorizing various forms of storytelling narratives” (p. 53)—Zhang begins by tracing how Chinese folklorists treated fairy tales as tonghua (children's tales). This imperfect translation of an etic concept, localized into Chinese academic contexts, has greatly influenced the development of Chinese cultural concepts and illustrates the ways that Chinese culture has successfully adapted external concepts into the local cultural ecosystem—a key feature of Chinese culture. In chapter 4 (the second chapter of Part II), Zhang demonstrates this further by examining how the Chinese adapted “The Predestined Wife” (ATU 930A) featuring the “Moon Man” through enduring plot elements. The tale's inclusion of core identity markers ensures that it has continued to be transmitted for years, and its arbitrary identity markers maintain its relevance to audiences in the present, giving it validity. Zhang's work with an individual storyteller helps to elucidate this point.Parts III and IV follow a similar structure with a brief introduction to the umbrella genre being studied as the focal point of that part, followed by a more general historiographical chapter, and then a chapter examining a single text or practice. Part III examines yanyu and pays special attention to “the older ginger is spicier” as an example of how traditions linked to a culture's fundamental beliefs and values are more likely to be transmitted. Part IV focuses on geyao, with the first chapter on the interplay of oral, written, and musical media in the life of Chinese ballads, before looking at the localization of xun, a kind of flute made from clay. The adaptation of external musical styles to Chinese culture creates what he calls a “third culture” (p. 196) that is itself essential to understanding the cultural self-healing mechanism.Throughout the book, Zhang combines deep knowledge of Chinese oral and literary traditions with the history of Chinese folkloristics and perspectives on Western folklore theory. His tremendous expertise and breadth of knowledge shines through as he moves seamlessly between historical exposition and detailed description of individual intellectuals. His careful translations of texts introduce a variety of Chinese traditions to the anglophone reader and demonstrate important nuances and variations as texts develop over time and across media. Most importantly, the theoretical concepts of folkloric identity, validity and vitality, and the cultural self-healing mechanism are innovative and worth considering by all in the folkloristics field.Despite these many strengths, readers will find points that might generate further discussion. Firstly, readers less familiar with Chinese language and history may have difficulty approaching the historically and linguistically complex world that Zhang presents. Linguistically, the use of Pinyin Romanization and simplified Chinese characters privilege the People's Republic of China's (PRC) Standard Mandarin in a way that flattens the tremendous variations in dialects and minority languages used for the traditions represented in the book. More problematically, the concepts of folkloric identity and intrinsic values seem particularly open to reappropriation, with the potential to naturalize a country's incorporation of groups that maintain historical, linguistic, and cultural identities distinct from the majority, like the PRC's claims over the citizenship and homelands of Mongolians, Tibetans, and many more.These concerns aside, Oral Traditions in Contemporary China makes an important contribution to scholarship on Chinese folklore studies and to folkloristics in general. As the latest title in the Studies in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities series and the winner of the 2022 Chicago Folklore Prize, the book is an impressive and wide-ranging study of Chinese oral traditions. It is the first book-length work to make Chinese folkloristics available to anglophone audiences, while the concept of the “cultural self-healing mechanism” has promise for understanding folklore's place in communities recovering from dispossessions and traumas of imperialism and globalization. To this end, this book is valuable for all students and scholars of Chinese folklore. Its theoretical perspectives might also usefully find a place in graduate-level classrooms looking at the transmission of traditions. Whether in the classroom or beyond it, the book should generate important conversations within North American folkloristics about how we engage and collaborate with other national disciplines and bring new impetus to questions of cultural transmission.