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Jesus of Zhumadian

I’m a big fan of cross-cultural mashups of folktales, myths, and legends, and of creative misreadings that twist familiar tales into strange shapes. The ancient story in Liezi of the craftsman Master Yan who built an automaton for King Mu of Zhou has the compelling ingredients—a skilled engineer, a sophisticated mechanical man who seduces palace maidens, a jealous monarch—that make it ripe for reinterpretation by present-day science fiction and fantasy writers interested in exploring robots, love, and AI.

The following piece takes a more folkloric approach, concocting a wonderfully off-the-wall story (masquerading as a folktale from Zhumadian, Henan) out of a blend of Liezi’s account and several other well-known elements. The story diverges from Liezi right from the start by reanalyzing 偃师 Yǎn shī [“Master Yan”] as the ancient settlement of Yanshi, now a district of Luoyang. It hit a sweet spot for me when I first read it on Christmas, 2017, and I’ve pulled the translation out every Easter and Christmas since then to tackle the bilingual puns. It’s coming up on Easter again and I’ve finally accepted the fact that I won’t ever crack them. So here’s an English version that doesn’t quite capture the clever humor of the original.

This translation is posted with permission from the author, a folklore scholar who posts on Douban under the name Misandao 蜜三刀.

A Story of the Birth of Christ

by Misandao

Liezi tells the story of the wooden puppet of Yanshi, describing how King Mu of Zhou passed through Yanshi in Henan on an inspection tour and was introduced to a carpenter, Yuese [“Joseph”] by name, from the Western Regions. This carpenter made for the king a mechanical man that could talk, sing, dance, and make all manner of expressions. Delighted, the king brought his beloved concubine Sheng Ji to see the curio, but to everyone’s surprise, when the wooden puppet saw how beautiful she was, it made a pass at her. The king was incensed and ordered the carpenter killed. Yuese was forced to flee that night with his wife Ma Liya [“Maria”]. The torrential Yellow River lay to the north of Yanshi, so they had to flee south, traveling in such haste that they had made no arrangements for lodging along the way but could only find refuge for the night in the stable of a large inn.

When he awoke the next morning, Yuese the carpenter saw the inn’s name on the sign hanging outside: Zhumadian 驻马店, “Horse Garrison Inn.” He knew this was a sign from heaven, for his wife’s surname was Ma [“horse”]. And so he settled there under the assumed name “Lu Ban” and made a living building houses and tool handles. Lu Ban’s superb carpentry skills and attractive, sturdy handles made his work popular with the locals. The couple bought a house and property and lived a decent life with just one imperfection to speak of: hunted as they were by the king’s army, the carpenter’s wife had lost a child well into a pregnancy and was never able to conceive again.

Lu Ban’s wife wanted children, and Lu Ban hoped for issue to carry on his craft. Every night after work, the two of them would lie in bed and sigh in despair. One day, Lu Ban’s wife said to him, “With all your skill at woodworking, why not make us a child?” Inspired, Lu Ban went into a frenzy of work shut up inside his shop where no one could see what he was making.

On the sixth day, which happened to coincide with the winter solstice, Lu Ban proclaimed, “Woman, come quickly and take a look. We have a child!” His wife hurried over but saw nothing but her husband lying exhausted on the floor of a workshop covered in sawdust and paint (this is why all carpenters thereafter have rested one day of every seven). She was just about to help him to his feet when all of a sudden a plump, naked baby tumbled into her arms with a cry of “Mama!” She looked closer: Oh! What an adorable child. She was beside herself with joy.

When the people of Zhumadian heard that Lu Ban had a child at long last, they came to offer their congratulations, and the village head even brought gifts of eggs, millet, and solstice dumplings fresh from the pot so the carpenter’s wife could take her month’s rest. However, a few gossipy married ladies kept talking behind her back about how they’d never seen her pregnant, so how had she given birth to such a big baby all of a sudden?

Rumors and gossip spread, and it was even suggested that the carpenter’s wife had gotten involved with a monk at the temple. Naturally, Lu Ban couldn’t reveal that their son was the work of his hands in wood rather than his wife’s biological child, so he simply told people that on one occasion when he had been asked to craft a statue of Guanyin for the local temple, the very night the statue was finished the two of them had dreamed an identical dream of Lady Guanyin saying that she would send a child from heaven as their reward.

When the carpenter’s son grew up, he followed in his dad’s footsteps as a skilled woodworker, building homes and making furniture for people far and wide. The lack of clocks in ancient times was a major inconvenience, but the young carpenter rose early for work and returned home late, giving him time to observe the heavens and granting him the knowledge of the changing of days. And so at the gate of every town and village, he erected a crossbar to mark the time by reckoning the sun’s shadow. He made them tall and sturdy enough to withstand the wind and rain, and over time these crosses became the emblem of Zhumadian’s carpenters.

Since the crosses were used as a standard basis (“jīzhǔn”) for inspecting and monitoring (“dūchá”) the passage of time, they were known by the abbreviated term “jī-dū crosses,” but as the years passed and the story was handed down, people ended up calling the carpenter who invented the crosses “Jīdū” [“Christ”], and his original name was all but forgotten.

From A Collection of Folk Stories, Songs, and Proverbs from Zhumadian, mimeographed edition.

Source: 蜜三刀《基督诞生的故事》,豆瓣,2017.12.25.

Notes

The spurious citation provided in the story is to a nonexistent edition of an actual collection, part of a series devoted to local folk tales and songs throughout China.

The story of Master Yan and King Mu of Zhou is found in the “Questions of Tang” 汤问 chapter of Liezi 列子, a 4th century Daoist text. The 1912 translation by Lionel Giles is a popular one, but Graham’s 1960 translation doesn’t appear to be online. Lu Ban 鲁班 was a craftsman in the Zhou dynasty who lived around five centuries after King Mu, and was the legendary inventor of several carpentry tools and a cloud ladder for siege warfare, among other devices. Notably, Liezi’s account of Master Yan concludes with a mention of Lu Ban, declaring that his cloud ladder and Mozi’s wooden kite both pale in comparison to the automaton.

The author informs me that after he wrote this story, he discovered that according to the scholar Feng Shi 冯时, there is indeed a connection between the oracle bone character for 督 “monitor” and the sun’s shadow.

Dress-up officials

The 1915 edition of 戏迷传 “Opera Fanatics” by 海上漱石生 “Hermit of Shanghai” (Sun Yusheng 孙玉声 1862–1939) has some of my all-time favorite cover art: colorful, lively poses that turn ridiculous the moment you discover the novel has nothing to do with opera.

It’s actually a satire of corrupt officials into which Sun, a huge opera fan, embeds more than 700 opera titles as names for characters, places, and scenarios, “Because bureaucracy is like theater. Officials seem like they’re play acting rather than serving their office.” There’s a similar show-offy cleverness in Sun’s 1927 wuxia novel 嵩山拳叟 “The Old Fighter of Mt. Song”, whose chapter titles are apt lines from Tang poems. A storyteller’s trick, rather than the sort of plot device Jin Yong 金庸 would later use in 连城诀 “A Deadly Secret”.

戏迷传 was first published in 1903 under a different acting-related title, 优孟衣冠传 “In Costume” or “Playing Dress-Up”; a reprint in the ’20s used the more direct 如此官场 “Officialdom!”

There’s no signature visible, but an advert in Sun’s magazine 繁华杂志 “Prosperity” promises “two comic watercolor covers by Shen Bochen 沈泊忱.” Shen (沈泊尘, 1889–1920) was a prolific political cartoonist also known for illustrations of actors and modern women.

The official singing while playing a tennis racquet like a pipa reminds me of one particular Thangka image of Dhṛtarāṣṭra 持国天王. Would that make the hatless, bearded official Virūḍhaka 增长天王? A mustache comb for a sword, sure, but is he ever shown with a mirror?

It’s probably just fanciful thinking, but I do like the possibility of an additional layer of symbolism: actors playing officials who are themselves just sham guardians of the realm.

Originally posted to Twitter, 2021.09.18.

Foreignized hanzi

The “Year’s Best 21st Century Foreign Fiction,” 2010 edition, published by People’s Literature Publishing House, embeds several foreign scripts into the series logo:

XK110406ks.png

Detail from the cover of Kaltenburg.

Scripts/languages represented: Latin (L), Japanese (), Korean (), Cyrillic (Π), and Spanish (ñ).

See also: Tibetan-style Chinese on Danwei.

Image from Bookuu.com.

Bob Dylan’s body doubles come to China

“Bob Dylan’s coming,” announced the March 4 edition of the Xinmin Evening News. He’ll perform in Beijing on April 6 and in Shanghai on April 8.

Xinmin Evening News, March 4 2011, A17

The page layout proved irresistible to meme-hungry netizens, who replaced Willie Nelson with an array of other people who were not Bob Dylan:

Click for many, many more.

via @ELLE网站Taxloss6.

Overlooked in 2010

As part of Sina Books’ year in review feature, critic Xie Xizhang (解玺璋) introduces some worthy books that did not receive the attention they deserved last year. The article’s title, “Overlooked and overexposed literature of 2010,” extends the promise of some deserving take-downs, but the only overexposed title Xie mentions is Han Han’s ill-fated literary journal Party (独唱团). Here are his underexposed titles:

Heaven/Tibet (天·藏) by Ning Ken (宁肯). A philosophical novel by the author of the well-received City of Masks (蒙面之城, 2001), which was nominated for the 2009 Newman Prize. Xie writes,

Seriously overlooked, it came to the attention of just a small minority despite being an extraordinarily good work. Apart from showing the history and culture of Tibet, the author how Wang Mojie internalized Tibet; one could say that this is Ning Ken’s own process of internalization. In this novel he writes of a thinker, and he inspires the reader to think as well. Some writers today call themselves word-slingers, and their novels are formed by piling words together. Not so with Ning Ken. His fiction is formed from thought. He is an author who is  willing to think, and his works are heavily imbued with logical thinking. In this novel his “thoughts” are numerous and profound, and even contains an essential reflection and suspicion toward thought itself.

The author discussed his writing in an interview with the Beijing Evening News in October, and Paper Republic has more English-language information about the novel.

Flowers of Purgatory (炼狱之花) by Xu Xiaobin (徐小斌). A fairy tale about a princess from an undersea kingdom who tries to navigate the unwritten rules of the modern entertainment industry. I picked this up mid-year but Xu’s narrative rhythm wasn’t what I was looking for at the time and I put it down two chapters in. I’ll have to take a second look. Xu’s family epic Feathered Serpent (羽蛇, 1998) has been translated into English, and Dunhuang Dream (敦煌遗梦, 1996) is forthcoming this year from Atria.

Judas in Bloom (犹大开花) by Du Chan (杜禅), a writer from Henan, is a satire about the intellectual establishment. Critics quoted on the cover call it a modern version of The Scholars (儒林外史, 1750) and a prose version of the ground-breaking TV series “Stories of an Editorial Board” (编辑部的故事, 1991). Before reading Xie’s article, which praises the novel’s memorable characters, I’d never even heard of Judas in Bloom.

Canticle to the Land (大地雅歌) by Fan Wen (范稳). Fan began his “Tibetan Land” trilogy before the Tibet craze of the past few years. This, the third volume, tells an engaging love story involving a Tibetan storyteller, French missionaries, domestic turmoil in China, a living Buddha, and the engagement between different cultures and religions.

Lu Xun’s Mustache (鲁迅的胡子) by Jiang Yitan (蒋一谈) is a collection of short stories told in simple, direct language that stands in conscious opposition to the massive, overstuffed novels that excite newspaper book reviewers.

The Legendary Huang Yongyu (传奇黄永玉) by Li Hui (李辉) is a critical biography of the early 20th-Century artist.

Wang Meng’s Dream of the Red Chamber (王蒙的红楼梦) by Wang Meng (王蒙), who distilled a lifetime of reading the classic novel into twenty-seven lectures.

Xie also picks one translated book: The Red Wheel (红轮) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.