Performing Grief 1McLaren_i-x.indd i 5/27/08 11:58:18 AM 1McLaren_i-x.indd ii 5/27/08 11:58:18 AM Performing Grief Bridal Laments in Rural China anne e. mclaren university of hawai‘i press honolulu 1McLaren_i-x.indd iii 5/27/08 11:58:18 AM © 2008 University of Hawai‘i Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McLaren, Anne E. (Anne Elizabeth) Performing grief: bridal laments in rural China / Anne E. McLaren. / Anne E. McLaren. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3232-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Marriage customs and rites—China. 2. Arranged marriage—China. 3. Brides—China—Social conditions. 4. Women—China—Social conditions. 5. Rural families—China—Social conditions. 6. Laments—China. 7. Oral tradition—China. 8. Country life—China—Social life and customs. 9. China—Social life and customs. I. Title. GT2783.A2M35 2008 392.50951—dc22 2008010175 An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBN for this book is 9780824887667 (PDF). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Contents Preface • vii Introduction • 1 PART I The Bridal Laments of Nanhui 1 Imagining Jiangnan • 21 2 The People of the Sands • 34 3 The Hollow Cotton Spool: Women’s Labour in Nanhui • 53 4 Seizing a Slice of Heaven: The Lament Cycle of Pan Cailian • 65 PART II Lament Performance in China: History and Ritual 5 Weeping and Wailing in Chinese History • 83 6 Shaking Heaven: Laments and Ritual Power • 104 Afterword • 116 appendix 1 Nanhui Lament Transcription • 119 appendix 2 Translation: The Bridal Laments of Pan Cailian of Shuyuan, Nanhui • 121 Notes • 155 Glossary • 185 Bibliography • 189 Index • 201 v 1McLaren_i-x.indd v 5/27/08 11:58:19 AM 1McLaren_i-x.indd vi 5/27/08 11:58:19 AM Preface In pre-modern China and even in the present day it is the girls and women of rural China who are the least likely to be literate and to compose works recognized as ‘literature’. Scholars trained in sinology, that is, in the skills needed to interpret the texts of Chinese civilization, all too rarely ask questions about the experience of non-literate people. Nonetheless, as we know from recent discoveries, unlearned women of rural China are the inheritors of a vibrant tradition of oral and ritual performances. The most striking example that has come to light over the past two decades is that of the Women’s Script culture of Jiangnan County, Hunan Province. Women’s Script is considered to be the world’s only known gender-specifi c script. Women’s Script compositions are almost invariably composed in rhyming verse and comprise stories and songs derived from a rich tradition of performance arts transmitted over the generations in this remote rural region. With the discovery of the Women’s Script writings, one could begin to talk for the fi rst time of a female line of oral transmission relying on poetic genres to convey the insights, experi- ences, and grievances of one of the most dispossessed sectors of Chinese society. Women’s Script is no doubt unique, but the oral performance complex that sup- ports it derives from traditions prevalent more broadly in Chinese society. It was curiosity about the little-known oral culture of Chinese women that led me to write this fi rst monographic study of Chinese bridal laments. I have long had an interest in the storytelling and folkloric culture of the lower Yangzi delta, and have completed a study of a type of song-prose narrative called ‘chan- tefable’ that was very popular in both performance and in print with women in the late imperial period (McLaren 1998). However, very little is known about the oral performance arts of women of the region. I was excited to learn from Shang- hai folklore specialists that women in ‘backward’ coastal communities in Nanhui County outside Shanghai had continued to perform bridal and funeral laments well into the twentieth century. Furthermore, a substantial corpus of laments had been taped and were available in Chinese transcription. vii 1McLaren_i-x.indd vii 5/27/08 11:58:19 AM viii Preface In August and September 1994, I visited Nanhui County accompanied by Professor Chen Qinjian, a specialist in Chinese folk performance and customs from East China Normal University (ECNU), Shanghai. We interviewed mem- bers of the Nanhui Culture Bureau and listened to the laments and songs of local practitioners. I was given booklets of transcribed laments, but was largely unable to comprehend these due to the use of non-standard characters to record the Wu dialect spoken in the area. In July 1996, Chen Qinjian, who is a native of the Pudong-Nanhui region, visited Melbourne for several weeks and began to explain and translate each line of the transcript of Pan Cailian’s laments into Mandarin Chinese. On a further trip to Nanhui in December 1997, accompanied by Chen, I decided to investigate the material culture and kinship structure of Shuyuan, the home area of Pan Cailian, whose lament cycle is translated here, and other practitioners. A trip to Shanghai in December 1998 allowed for another period of intensive interpretation and translation work on the laments. In June 1999 we returned to Nanhui, this time to interview generations of women in Sanlin and Shuyuan about bridal laments and marriage customs. This has been followed by subsequent visits to Shanghai in November 2000, December 2003, and August and November 2004. In these activities we were assisted by members of the Nanhui Culture Bureau, staff members and postgraduates of the Folk Performance Section of the Chinese Department of ECNU, and the Foreign Offi ce of the ECNU. This project has received funding from the Australia Research Council and the Univer- sity of Melbourne Grant-in-Aid Committee. The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation paid for my trip to Taipei and visit to the Academia Sinica. Chen Qinjian’s visit to Australia was funded by the Australia-China Council. I record my appreciation here to all the above. I would like to express my particular gratitude to Chen Qinjian for arranging my fi eld trips and meetings with women of the region, for opening up various lines of enquiry with regard to bridal laments and marriage practices, and, not least, for elucidating the lament cycle of Pan Cailian. He constantly encouraged me in this project over many years and his assistance was indispensable in com- pleting this study. Chen introduced me to Jiang Bin (at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), a veteran researcher in the folk culture and belief systems of the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region. My thanks for hospitality at his home and important references on local bridal laments. Ren Jiahe, the chief editor of the lament transcriptions, and his daughter, Ren Liping, were of great assistance during my fi eld trips to Nanhui. I would also like to thank Pan Wenzhen of the Nanhui Region Culture Bureau for arranging for me to listen to laments performed by the Nanhui women Wang Xuehong and Ji Shunxian in August to September 1994, and for explaining the local marriage practices. Wang Jingen, a talented carver of stone crafts, and his wife, Huang Huoxian, provided many insights into the material culture of coastal 1McLaren_i-x.indd viii 5/27/08 11:58:19 AM Preface ix Nanhui, including cotton spinning and weaving, and provided me with meals in their home in Shuyuan. In Sanlin township in the western Pudong region, I learnt much about women’s lives and marriages from the women introduced to me by Chen Qinjian. My warm thanks to all the people of Nanhui who have played a role in the making of this book. My thanks to Cynthia Brokaw for forwarding to me a printed text of bridal laments she discovered at the Chengdu Municipal Library. These curious texts appear to be laments revised along Confucian lines for publication as instruc- tional texts for women, and bear little relationship to the oral laments examined in this volume. Nonetheless, they are valuable as rare examples of bridal laments in print in the late imperial period. I also am grateful to M. S. Chan of the Chinese department of the University of Hong Kong, who offered me hospitality while I was in Hong Kong in 2001 as well as access to the Fung Ping Shan Library, where I came across the valuable lament transcriptions of Hong Kong laments by Cheung Cheng-ping. I would particularly like to thank Liu Fei-wen of the Ethnology Institute at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, for meeting me in December 2004 and sharing her experiences of doing fi eldwork with Women’s Script practitioners. Dr. Liu is one of the few scholars who are conducting an ongoing investigation into this extraor- dinary community of women, and her studies of Women Script culture place her at the forefront of this fi eld. Also at the Academia Sinica Ethnology Institute, I was delighted to meet again Teri Silvio and learn more of her work in women’s operatic performance in Taiwan.