Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

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  Mouse vs. Cat

  in Chinese Liter atu r e

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  Mouse vs. Cat

  in Chinese Liter atu r e

  Tales and Commentary

  Translated and introduced by Wilt L. Idema

  Foreword by Haiyan Lee

  A Robert B. Heilman Book

  U n i v er sit y of Wa sh i ngton Pr e ss

  Seattle

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  Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature was published with the support of the Robert B. Heilman Endowment for Books in the Humanities, established through a generous bequest from the distinguished scholar who served as chair of the University of Washington English Department from 1948 to 1971.

  This publication was also supported by grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the Harvard-Yenching Institute.

  Copyright © 2019 by the University of Washington Press

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  Composed in Arno Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach

  Cover illustration: Paper-cut illustration by Yu Ping 于平 and Ren Ping 任平, from the The Marriage of Miss Mouse (Beijing: Sinolingua, 1993)

  23 22 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  U n i v e r si t y of Wa s h i ngton Pr e s s

  www.washington.edu/uwpress

  L i br a r y of Congr e s s C ata l ogi ng -i n-Pu bl ic at ion Data

  Names: Idema, W. L. (Wilt L.), author. | Lee, Haiyan, writer of foreword.

  Title: Mouse vs. cat in Chinese literature / Wilt L. Idema ; foreword by Haiyan Lee.

  Other titles: Mouse versus cat in Chinese literature

  Description: First edition. | Seattle : University of Washington Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Identifiers: LCcn 2018023657 (print) | LCcn 2018032514 (ebook) | ISBN 9780295744841 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780295744858 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780295744834 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Chinese literature—History and criticism. | Cats in literature. | Mice in literature. |

  Rats in literature. | Tales—China. | Fables, Chinese.

  Classification: LCc PL2265 (ebook) | LCc PL2265 .I34 2019 (print) | ddc 895.109/362—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023657

  The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, a nsi z39.48–1984.∞

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  Contents

  Foreword by Haiyan Lee vi

  Acknowledgments xv

  Chronology of Dynasties and Historical Periods xvi

  I n t roduct ion 3

  Ch a p t e r 1. Thieving Rats and Pampered Cats 22

  Rapacious Rats 23

  Deserving Mice 27

  Performing Mice 28

  Revered Rats 31

  Wildcats and Pussycats 34

  Buddhist Cats 38

  Good Mousers and Lazy Pets 41

  Demonic Cats 48

  Cat Lovers and Cat Lore 53

  Ch a p t e r 2. The White Mouse and the Five Rats 56

  The White Mouse 57

  The Five Rats 65

  The Execution of the Fiv e Rats 70

  Ch a p t e r 3. A Wedding and a Court Case 82

  The Marriage of the Mouse 82

  The Court Case 90

  Other Genres 102

  The Mutual Accusations of the Cat

  and the Mouse 103

  The Scroll of the Accusation of the Mouse

  against the Cat 108

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  Ch a p t e r 4. A Tale without Shape or Shadow 114

  Expanding the Court Case 114

  Prequels: Creation and Pride 118

  Prequels: The Crashed Wedding 123

  Prequels: The War of the Mice against

  the Cat 127

  A Tale without Shape or Shadow 131

  Ch a p t e r 5 . Peace Negotiations and Dystopias 154

  Actualized Versions of the Court Case 156

  Modern and Contemporary Authors on

  Cats and Rats 163

  e pi l ogu e: Cats and Mice in Love and War from East

  to

  West 175

  Glossary of Chinese Characters 183

  Notes 189

  Bibliography 215

  Index 239

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  For e wor d

  The Lives and Troubles of Others

  H a i y a n L e e

  I n a m e a n de r i ng, o cc a s ion a l ly s n a r k y e s s ay t i t l e d

  “Dogs, Cats, and Mice,” written in 1926, the great Chinese writer Lu Xun

  reminisces about a thumb-size mouse he once rescued from a snake and kept

  as a pet when he was a young boy. The cute little rodent, known as a yinshu (literally “shadow mouse,” or mole rat), enjoyed his tender affection because he was able to fasten onto it his enduring fascination with a New Year print near his bed called The Wedding of the Mouse. He describes the picture this way: “From the groom and the bride to the best man, bridesmaid, guests, and attendants, each sported a pointy chin and slender legs, looking rather

  refined like scholars; nonetheless, all were decked out in garish clothes. I thought, who can mount such a pageant but my favorite shadow mice?”1 The

  young Lu Xun longed to witness an actual mouse wedding—an event that

  was believed to take place annually on the eve of the Lantern Festival, the fourteenth day of the first lunar month. He would stave off sleep to wait for a procession to emerge from under his bed, but all that greeted his bleary

  eyes were a few ordinary, unclothed mice, scurrying about and giving off

  hardly any festive vibes. Invariably, he would doze off and wake up the next morning to these musings: “Perhaps mouse weddings do not entail sending

  out invitations to solicit presents and have no use for spectators. This may well be a rodent tradition, and it’s not for us to object.”2

  In many parts of China well int
o the twentieth century, a minor ritual

  observance during the monthlong New Year celebration consisted of retiring

  to bed early on a given evening (the date varies according to the locale) owing to the folk belief that on such a day mice conducted their matrimonial affairs v i i

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  v i i i

  For e wor d

  and that it was prudent not to disturb them, or else there would be endless mice trouble in the year to come. An environmentally minded modern

  reader may well consider this custom indicative of a bygone way of life that embedded humans in a cosmological order that included the divine as well

  as the nonhuman and that fostered an attitude of proper respect, even deference, toward the teeming lifeworld beyond humanity. Although in some

  quarters there is a tendency to simplify this attitude as the Eastern way of living harmoniously with Nature, one cannot deny that a tradition that

  extended consideration to as lowly and universally detested creatures as

  mice and rats at least one day a year was animated by a cosmology radically different from the one that fueled the mass campaigns launched by Mao

  Zedong to exterminate the “four pests” in the 1950s. In the latter case, it was all about giving no quarter. Most notoriously, people turned out in great

  numbers in the open to bang loudly on pots and pans to prevent sparrows—

  labeled as pests for “stealing” grains—from landing, until the hapless birds dropped from the sky from exhaustion and fright.

  Surely, the status of mice and rats as vermin is less in doubt than that of sparrows, and since ancient times they have been the object of contempt,

  resentment, and disgust. Most memorably, they are invoked in The Book of Odes (Shijing) as an allegory of the rich and powerful who plunder the common folk to fatten themselves. Yet during the New Year festivities they are given a wide berth and their arguably parasitical way of life is granted a measure of legitimacy and even dignity. It certainly helps that they seem good at mimicking human sociability and organizing their society through the

  orderly exchange of females. Apparently, they, too, lead a civilized life, even if it cuts across that of humans in pesky ways. The ambivalence is unmistakable, enough to give wings to the fantasy life of a young boy growing up in the

  twilight years of imperial China.

  For readers reared on a diet of Disney cartoons, there is perhaps nothing

  novel about anthropomorphizing mice into adorable icons of human desires

  and foibles. But there are interesting differences, and they become clear when we examine the rich repertoire of folk narratives revolving around the clash between the cat and the mouse showcased in this collection. Many of these

  tales tell of an elaborate sequence of events meant to explain why the mouse has a reasonable grievance against the cat, which usually has to do with the cat’s raid of the mouse’s wedding party. In doing so, the tales raise profound questions about the moral hazard of anthropomorphism: If animals serve so

  well to illustrate human morals, on what grounds do we justify excluding

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  i x

  them from moral concern? Is there a bright line between animals as symbols

  and animals as creaturely beings?

  Wilt L. Idema, the compiler and translator of these fantastic tales, points out that there is a relative dearth of talking animals in traditional Chinese literature, and that the present collection presents some of the most notable exceptions. Indeed, the archetypes of animal symbolism that populate our

  contemporary global popular culture are derived mostly from non-Chinese

  folklores and literary genres: the prideful hare, the cunning fox, the loyal dog, the conniving snake, and so on. As historians of science Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman maintain, this is the predominant way in which humans

  think with animals—by reducing animals to stick figures to stand for quin-

  tessential human attributes.3 In this parabolic mode, animals live out human dramas, and there is little animalness left in them save for superficial features.

  Most animal fables (Aesop’s Fables, fairy tales, Disney cartoons) fall into this category, and so do modern classics such as Lao She’s Cat Country (1932–33) and George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). A more realistic mode emerged in early modern Europe in which animals began to appear in narrative fiction

  as themselves, driven largely by species-specific instincts and needs. This convention has given us many memorable animal stories, notably Black

  Beauty (1877), White Fang (1906), Flush (1933), Lassie Come Home (1938), and

  The Incredible Journey (1961). To be sure, a great deal of human thoughts and feelings are still projected onto the animal characters and their lives invariably revolve around human activities and projects; moreover, they commu-

  nicate with each other effortlessly in sophisticated language, but they do not speak to humans. The conceit, of course, is that the author has special access to the animal world and can transcribe or translate their thoughts and conversations for our sake.4 Nonetheless, these furred, feathered, and finned

  characters hold our interest because they are more than animals; instead,

  they are almost always cast in moral molds, either having to partake of human moral conflicts or having to navigate their own moral dilemmas, or both.

  Not surprisingly, it is the dog and the horse that are the darlings of this genre, given the ease with which they are incorporated into morality tales about

  loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice.

  Traditional Chinese narratives have largely refrained from availing them-

  selves of the animal trope in either mode, the parabolic or the quasi-realist (the most well-known exception is of course the sixteenth-century novel

  The Journey to the West [Xiyou ji]). One possible explanation is the awareness of the moral complications of using animals to illustrate human values and

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  x

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  precepts. Animal tales can create a wrinkle in the canvas of the traditional holistic worldview that encompasses all living things and assigns each to

  a proper place in the cosmic hierarchy. In theory, what is natural is necessarily fair, and it is the nature of things to be unequal. But how can the

  continuous massacre that goes on in the animal kingdom be called fair?5 If

  the stalked, chased, and terrorized can speak, might they not protest their lot? In allowing animals to stay silent and in fact mostly absent from the

  storyworld, traditional Chinese literature draws a faint line between humanity and alien kind. Morality is recognized as a human artifice that may not be pertinent to other beings. The line is faint because it is routinely crossed by certain animals, such as the fox and the snake, which are believed to

  aspire to human civilization, but they must undergo an assiduous regime of

  cultivation and transformation and then insinuate themselves into human

  society in disguise. And when things go wrong and they are expelled from

  society, they invariably revert to their beastly shape. There are few tales of human-animal bonding resembling that between Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Ed

  the talking horse, and Seabiscuit on one side and their human sidekicks on<
br />
  the other. When it comes to thinking with animals, Chinese tales tend to see them as food and utility (livestock), servants (draft animals), or dangerous strangers (wild beasts). It is only in modern times that the newer metaphors of family (pets of all kinds), friends (dogs, horses, birds), and neighbors (endangered species, charismatic megafauna) have acquired currency under

  the impact of globalization.

  Consider the story of the Wolf of Zhongshan recounted in the introduc-

  tion. At one level, it is an allegory about political ambition and backbiting.

  At a more literal level, it is about the misapplication of moral sentiments: in shielding the wolf from hunters, the scholar errs in extending pity and compassion to a creature whose modus vivendi is biological, not moral. He fails to see that nonhuman animals are stuck in a trophic order in which the only operative principle is eating and being eaten. When the wolf begs to eat

  the scholar, it is not acting out of malice but merely doing what it must do to survive. Gratitude has no place in the trophic order, and it is pointless to berate a hungry beast for needing to fill its empty stomach. That is why the tree and the water buffalo, when asked to adjudicate the pair’s dispute, concur with the wolf through the analogy of their own fates: to humans, they serve only utilitarian purposes to be exploited till the last twig and last drop of blood. They do not see why humans are exempt from the food chain. The

  tutelary god, the third elder approached by the pair, settles the dispute by tricking the wolf back into its hiding place and instructing the scholar to This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:17 UTC

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  make a swift end of it. The point is made loud and clear: in dealing with an amoral being, only Machiavellian manipulation is called for.

  Of course, the Wolf of Zhongshan is still anthropomorphized in that it

  politely requests permission to eat a person and is willing to submit to third-party arbitration. The allegorical thrust serves to score a Confucian point against the Mohist doctrine of universal love.6 Indeed, Confucianism prides itself on moral discrimination, a granular scheme of moral franchise that

  thins out as one moves from close kin to distant strangers. Animals, as either servants or strangers, ought to be treated humanely but must not disrupt the cosmic moral hierarchy that, as the sixteenth-century Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming spells it out rather schematically, authorizes us to feed plants to animals and animals to our parents, guests, gods, and ancestors.7 In ancient China, there were no dystopic fantasies along the lines of Planet of the Apes (1968) and Open Season (2006) in which animals turn the tables and teach us a lesson about the brutalizing effect of inequality and oppression. An eccentric genius like Dr. Dolittle ( Doctor Dolittle, 1967) who prefers animal to human company and who goes to great lengths to free a