Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

  li is a little more than one-third of a mile.

  32 Other texts specify that Vat City is the home of the bride-to-be.

  33 Perhaps this line should be read as a commentary.

  34 In the manuscript this line is written in the margin of the main text as a commentary.

  35 A white cat with a black patch on its back is traditionally called Sending Coal in Snow.

  36 “A golden leaf or jade branch” refers to a member of the imperial family. The yellow marten qualifies because the words for “yellow” ( huang) and “imperial” ( huang) have the same pronunciation.

  37 An “eight-immortals table” is an eight-sided table. A “zither table” refers to a rectangu-lar table.

  38 The Dashing King (Chuangwang) is the rebel Li Zicheng, who in 1644 toppled the Ming dynasty when he entered Beijing with his troops. He would soon be defeated by the invading Manchus, who founded the Qing dynasty.

  39 Duke Huan of Qi (d. 643 BCE) and Duke Wen of Jin (697–628 BCE) were two of the Five Hegemons during the Zhou dynasty. Confucius compared the moral qualities of both men in Lunyu XIV, 16.

  40 Traditional Chinese military literature knows a great number of battle formations that often carry fanciful names referring to the shape of the array and the magical powers embodied by the troops. Here the Peach Blossom will refer to the shape of the array, while the Eight Trigrams refer to its magical power.

  41 The disposition of the troops conforms to the Five Elements and the stars, embodying in this way their numinous power.

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  42 According to Chinese mythology, the sun is inhabited by a three-legged crow.

  43 The night of the fifteenth of the First Month is the night of the Lantern Festival.

  44 I have been unable to identify these two ghosts. Perhaps the “Yellow-Oriole Ghost”

  should be rendered as “Brown-Eagle Ghost.”

  45 The text writes that he was placed in a “mountain.”

  46 Tail-Fire Tiger is one of the twenty-eight lunar lodge gods.

  47 The text writes 東斗, which I take to be a mistake for 東京.

  48 Kaifeng’s Star of Literature probably refers to Judge Bao. Judge Bao is known for his black face, so perhaps the Black Lord also refers to him.

  49 The Perfected Person Zhang from Jiangxi is the Heavenly Master Zhang.

  50 “The road to fire and water” refers to the accessibility of the shops that sell water and fire.

  Ch a p t e r 5: Pe ace N e got i at ions a n d Dystopi a s

  1 Li Mengyin, Xiaolaoshu gaozhuang (n.d.). This text was uploaded by Liu Dengxin, a Taiji specialist from Jize District (Hebei), who in his introduction describes Li Mengyin (1903–1981) as a traditional-style scholar from his home village. The text was recorded on the basis of a contemporary performance by the professional storyteller Duan Zhidi.

  2 Hung (1985). The large collection of popular literature accumulated by the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica in the 1920s and 1930s is now housed in the Fu Ssu-nien Library in Taipei. Several Japanese scholars also built up substantial collections in those years; some of these collections are now accessible in public repos-itories that have made them available on the web.

  3 Recordings of traditional and modernized performances can be easily watched on the web.

  4 Chen Yiyuan and Ke Rongsan (2013, 111–13); Su Yurong (2011). Li Shuru (2016) reads this introduction as a reflection of the chronic feuding of lineages in southeastern China.

  5 In traditional China, the month was divided into three ten-day weeks. The “first fifth” refers to the fifth day of the first week of the month. The day was divided into twelve hours, each twice the length of modern hours. Mao referred to 5–7 a.m., you to 5–7 p.m.

  6 Zuixin Maoshu xianggao quange ([ca. early 1920s], 1a–b).

  7 Zuixin Maoshu xianggao quange ([ca. early 1920s], 8b–9a).

  8 Chen Hongbin (2009, 559).

  9 As the text hails from the Northeast, “the war against the fake” most likely refers to guerrilla activities against the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932–45), which was supported by the Japanese. There may be a reference here to the Japanese experiments at the time in bacterial and biological warfare involving rats and mice.

  10 Dongbei dagu: Haozi gaomao (n.d.).

  11 Kang Yunxiang (2009, 23–33).

  12 For this earlier, anonymous ballad from Linxian, see Wang Hongyan (2009, 230–32).

  13 Kang Yunxiang (2009, 29).

  14 Kang Yunxiang (2009, 31).

  15 Ruan Shichi et al. (2007).

  16 Ruan Shichi et al. (2007).

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  17 A modern play with a rather similar content was already performed in Guizhou in 1987.

  18 “Wenzhou guci Laoshu gaozhuang” (n.d.).

  19 Laoshu gaozhuang ertong shige (n.d.).

  20 Chinese essays on cats by twentieth-century authors are collected in Chen Xing (1991). In his short story “The Best about Cats” (Maoshi huicui), Mo Yan interweaves his boyhood memories of his family’s cat with stories about cats that were told to him by his grandmother (Mo Yan 1994, 148–76).

  21 Quoted in Chen Xing (1991, 3). This little piece may well have been written in condemnation of those officials of the Song dynasty who, following its demise, eagerly sought employment with the Yuan dynasty.

  22 Shuzi is one of the modern terms for “mouse” and “rat,” and as such it is also a curse word of long standing. The element zi in words like these is in origin a diminutive affix, based on its meaning of “son” or “child.” The same word zi also referred to the lowest rank of rulers (here translated as “baron”) under the kings of Zhou.

  23 Bao Youfu (1908, 60–61).

  24 Bao Youfu (1908, 62–63).

  25 Bao Youfu (1908, 49–50).

  26 The author’s positive view of the role that Japan and the United States could play in the regeneration of China may well have contributed to the neglect of this text in contemporary China.

  27 Bao Youfu (1908, 57–58).

  28 Yeh (2015, 223–25) translates the title of Bao Youfu’s work as The History of the Rats’ Revolt and provides a detailed summary. Bao Youfu may well have chosen rats as the image for his countrymen in order to shame them into self-awareness, but one wonders whether he may have been influenced in doing so by those Japanese prints of the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) that depicted the Chinese as rats (see the epilogue). A well-known Japanese print of a cat made up of seventeen kittens may well have suggested the image of a cat’s hide filled with rats.

  29 Capehart (2016, 441–48); Jin Xinlai (2010, 112–18); Sun Kecheng (2007, 17–21).

  30 Haft (1989, 276–84; 2000, 32–63).

  31 Lu Yaodong (2004, 89–90) credits the humorous quality of “The Admonishment by the Cat” to the influence of “comparable poems from England” (90), but does not mention any specific works.

  32 When Zi Zhang had put a question to Confucius, he wrote the master’s answer on the belt of his gown ( Lunyu XV, 5).

  33 Yao and Shun are sage emperors who ruled the world in a mythic past. When San Miao rebelled, he was defeated and banished to the South.

  34 Zhu Xiang (1925, 2–3).

  35 Zhu Xiang (1925, 5). The name of the young cat, here translated as Love, in Chinese is Ren’er. Ren is the Confucian concept of graded concern for one’s fellow human beings and is not used to refer to romantic love at all. The name must have been chosen with ironic intention. />
  36 The father’s insistence on the duties to one’s forebears and the son’s infatuation with Third Sister are a perfect, but ironic, example of the contrast between the “vertical”

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  emphasis in traditional morality and the “horizontal” discourse of romantic love in the first half of the twentieth century, as discussed by Lee (2007). See also L. Pan (2015).

  37 Zhu Xiang (1925, 6).

  38 Zhu Xiang (1925, 6).

  39 The dog here represents John Bull, and the dog’s aggressive behavior most likely is a reference to the May 30 incident of 1925, when British troops in the International Con-cession of Shanghai opened fired on Chinese demonstrators, killing eleven. This event caused a huge outcry all over China.

  40 Zhu Xiang (1925, 8).

  41 Wu Fang and Yue Ning (1994, 211–16) indicate which lines have been cut from the revised version.

  42 Xie Mian and Li Chu (2009, 454).

  43 Liu Qinlong and Zhao Ming (1988, 2:436). When discussing the poem’s political message, critics often compare this poem to Lu Xun’s Story of A Q of 1921. For an analysis of the discussion of China’s “national character” in the early decades of the twentieth century, see, e.g., Foster (2004), Lee (2004), L. Liu (1995, 45–76), and G. Wu (2007).

  44 Imamura (1986, 6–7). The poem has also been included as a fairy tale in a collection of children’s literature (Wang Quangen 1989, 1:109).

  The contrast between the pontifications of pedantic but ineffective intellectuals and the anxious thoughts of an inexperienced young man in love is also encountered in Qian Zhongshu’s (1910–1998) short story “The Cat” (Mao; first published in 1945), which is set in Beiping (Beijing) on the eve of the Japanese occupation of 1937. The cat in this story does not speak; it is the pet of the young man’s employer’s wife, with whom the young man has fallen in love and to whom this lady is compared (Qian Zhongshu 2010, 107–52).

  45 Lao She (1970). See also Prado-Fonts (2014, 202–9). Cat Country could not be printed in the People’s Republic for many years. It was only reissued in 1993.

  46 Imamura (1986, 5–6).

  47 Liao Bingxiong (1999, 55–57). Liao drew a second series of Maoguo chunqiu while stay-ing in Hong Kong.

  48 On the internet one may still find the claim that the Chinese translation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was prohibited in China in 1931 because the work featured talking animals, but this is an “urban legend.” This claim was first reported in the New York Times of May 5, 1931. That report elaborated on an item in the Shanghai press that an official in the provincial administration of Hunan had complained about the number of animal stories in modern primary school textbooks (Burnstein and Feng 2015). Burnstein and Feng create their own urban legend when they claim that that same official had accused the textbooks of his day of not conforming to Communist standards. Actually the official had complained that the neglect of proper forms of address in these same textbooks was conducive to the spread of Communism. The 1933 movie Alice in Wonderland, however, was banned in China because of its “strangeness” (Z. Xiao 1999, 190).

  49 Barmé (2002, 323–24, 332).

  50 One early example is a short animation movie of 1983 titled Laoshu jianü. In this movie a young poor mouse tries to meet the ever-higher financial demands of the snobbish This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:51 UTC

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  parents of the mouse girl he hopes to marry. The many adaptations of Laoshu jianü in children’s theater of recent decades usually focus on the tale of the selection of the groom. A more detailed discussion of Laoshu jianü and Laoshu gaozhuang in contemporary children’s literature lies outside the scope of this study.

  51 Mo Yan (2006; 2008). For a detailed discussion of this novel, see Lee (2014, 92–100).

  For the conception of this novel, Mo Yan may have been inspired by a short story of Pu Songling titled “Three Lives” (Sansheng), in which a man narrates how he had subsequently been a horse, a dog, and a snake in earlier reincarnations (Pu Songling 2000a, 1:102–5).

  52 Shan Bei (2009).

  53 In a cartoon of 1995, one of the last he produced, Liao Bingxiong showed a large cat goring on a fat fish and provided the following inscription: “Fifty years ago, between a black sky and a dark earth on a mountain slope (i.e., in Chongqing), cats and rats banded together to commit evil, turning the people into fish. So I produced ‘A Chronicle of Cat Country,’ which I exhibited to vent the people’s frustration. Nowadays, sky and earth have changed, but in our country we again witness a close cooperation of cat and rat, so the people gnash their teeth” (quoted in Harbsmeier 2010).

  54 Fang Hao (2010, 173).

  e pi l ogu e

  1 Probably the earliest depiction of mice attacking a castle defended by cats is included in the famous Papyrus 55001, which is kept at Turin (Omlin 1973).

  2 Brunner-Traut (1954; 1979, 11–17; 1980, 29–33); Essche (1991). Also see Babcock (2014, 26–30), who very much questions whether these pictures can be arranged into one single story in view of the time separating them.

  3 West (1969) claims that the Batrachomyomachia was written under the influence of the Egyptian story of the war between the cat and the mice. Also see Morentz (1954).

  4 Whereas in the Chinese tradition the weasel as a small furry animal is classified with mice and rats, ancient Greek does not systematically distinguish between weasel and cat until quite late.

  5 Schibli (1983); West (2015, 258–61). At least one classicist believes these fragments deal with a battle of cats and mice (Janko 2004, 284), but apparently cats and weasels as predators of mice were not clearly distinguished.

  6 Schibli (1984).

  7 Visnu Sarma (1993, 290–97). The conflict suggests the dispute over an abandoned nest between the swallow and the sparrow in the Yanzi fu.

  8 On the depiction in stone, see Carroll (2015, 72).

  9 The cat Lomasa and the mouse Palita make their appearance in the ancient Indic epic Mahabharata in a fable that recounts how the mouse, threatened from two sides by the owl and the mongoose, for their common safety frees a cat caught in a net by chewing through the ropes, but afterward declines the cat’s offer of friendship, preferring to keep its distance from its archenemy.

  10 Hunger (1968, 66–70). Hunger shows that the fresco cannot be an illustration of Prodromos’s Katomyomachia. Augsburg, too, once housed a fresco of the battle between This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:51 UTC

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  the cats and the mice from 1295. Frescoes on the same theme from circa 1400 have been preserved in Castle Moos-Schulthaus in Eppan (Italy). The theme is also illustrated in the marginalia of manuscripts (Bobis 2006, 128; Schubert 1986–87).

  11 Ladis (1986); P. Watson (1954).

  12 Marsh (2015, 399).

  13 For a summary of the poem, see Rüdiger (1897, 7–13), who also lists Dazzi’s borrow-ings from Virgil, Ovid, and Silius Italicus (12–13) and provides a comparison with the Batrachomyomachia, which was widely reprinted in Renaissance times and also circulated in a free Latin adaptation by Eliseo Calenzio (Elisius Calentius; 1430–1503?) as De bello ranarum.

  14 Schubert (1986–87). This small-beast epic apparently satirized the doge and other powerholders in the city.

  15 For a survey of the prints on the war of the cats and the rats, see O’Con
nell (1999, 49–50, 122–24). Spanish prints are recorded in the inventory of the inheritance of a son of Columbus. The Schlossmuseum Friedenstein Gotha holds a one-page colored woodblock print of circa 1500 showing an attack of the rats on the castle of the cats.

  The Rijksmuseum Amsterdam owns two eighteenth-century prints made from a

  sixteenth-century woodblock titled The Ship of Rats (Het Rattenschip), showing a very similar scene but including a boat filled by rat soldiers (the printing block is also preserved in the museum). The rats also arrive by boat in a woodcut published in 1610

  in Lyon by Leonard Odet and titled The Great and Wonderful Battle of the Cats and the Rats, an Al egory of the Struggle between the Great Scoundrels and the Little Ones (La grande et merveilleuse Bataille d’entre les chats et les rats, qui est la figure d’entre les gros larrons et les petits). The picture in this woodcut is accompanied by a poem, mostly consisting of a dialogue between the king of cats and the king of rats; according to the poem, the battle ends in the defeat of the rats. In France, the theme of the battle between the cats and the mice was also taken up after the French capture of the city of Arras in 1640. Arras was so strongly defended by the Spanish that the saying circulated “If the French will take Arras / the rats will eat the cats.” Accordingly, the Spanish officers are depicted as cats and the French troops as rats in contemporary copper engravings. The Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nürnberg holds a copy of a copper engraving titled The War of the Mice against the Cats (Der Maus und Katzen Krieg) of circa 1652. The British Museum holds an etching produced by John Overton in 1660

  titled The Cats Castle Besieged and Stormed by Rats (BM 1953.0411.70; 217 × 295 mm.).

  On this print and later British adaptations of this theme, also see Jones (2007).

  16 In this work, the theme of the war between the rodents and felines is combined with the medieval theme of the cruel ruler devoured by rats.

  17 Hunger (1968).

  18 Davis (2012, 217–23); The Mice and the Cat (2011); Zakani (2012). Schimmel (1989, 53) refers to a late Indian version in which the mice are victorious. This probably refers to the Deccan manuscript of circa 1800 in her possession, from which the book reproduces some colored illustrations.

  19 A frequently occurring topic in the popular Russian woodcuts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that of mice burying a cat, which used to be seen as a satire on the funeral of Czar Peter the Great.