Changing Stories in the Chinese World (review)

Reviews 103 Mark Elvin. ChangingStories in the Chinese World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. xv, 265 pp. Hardcover, isbn 0-804-73090-3. Out for a walk along a river, Zhuangzi remarked on the happiness ofthe frolicking fish. Huizi retorted, "You are not a fish. How do you know they are happy?" Zhuangzi shot back that since Huizi was not he, Huizi was in no position to challenge him. Mark Elvin's book calls this story to mind. He interrogates stories for a sense ofwhat it has meant to be Chinese in the last two centuries. I have no quarrel with his assertion that all ofus live in and through stories. I thinkwe probably do. But: whose stories? And who decides whose stories we live in? Elvin's book is stimulating, demanding the reader's active engagement. As one reads this book, one tests, weighs, measures. Are the stories presented here stories that Chinese people would plausibly have lived in? Can an outsider convince other outsiders that these were the stories lived? For this reader, the answer is both yes and no. For the elite ofthe early nineteenth century, Elvin selects Li Ruzhen's Destinies ofthe Flowers in the Mirror. He asserts that this book tells us that "the educated Chinese oflate-imperial times could look at themselves with an element of both self-criticism and ofan almost anthropological self-understanding" (p. 48). Li Ruzhen unquestionably could do so, but to generalize from Li to other educated Chinese is probably to say too much. Part ofthe reason that Westerners are drawn to Li's book is that it is unusual. Ifit is to represent the views of educated Chinese in general, then at least a few supporting examples from other writers would be useful. For the lives and emotions of the ordinary people, Elvin draws upon literati poetry from Our Dynasty's Bell ofPoesy. Despite being penned by the elite, these poems do, indeed, seem to speak for those who could not write about their own lives. The poems include a "farmer's calendar," shot through with the delight— and relief—in finding that hard work and the magnanimity ofNature are yielding enough surplus to free the peasants ofworry about either food or fuel for the rest of the year. Other poems dealing with peasant circumstances reveal the hardships —unseasonable snow, scorching drought, gods indifferent to desperate pleas, the loss of one's children to merciless rent collectors. Set side by side, these poems ring with authenticity—joy dashed by despair, the way things shouldhe in a well-ordered realm undermined by the way things often were.© 1999 by UniversityIn diis chapter on the ordinary people, Elvin also includes poems focusing on ofHawai'i Presswomen—poems primarily reflecting the Confucian worldview ofwomen as subordinate. But Elvin also includes poems portraying the strength ofwomen in work. That women contributed to their families through their labor allows Elvin 104 China Review International: Vol. 6, No. ?, Spring 1999 to make a particularly telling point: "Work . . . has its own mystique: the gift of work shows more than anything else that you care for the person to whom you give it" (p. 77). That suggests to me a genuine love, reciprocity, and perhaps equality between husband and wife. Noting the psychological strength ofwomen, as well, Elvin quotes a haunting poem showing not just a woman's psychological strength but also—and perhaps more important—her husband's depth of feeling for her (pp. 81-82). Finally, for this chapter, Elvin selects poems reflecting the lives ofthose on the lowest rung of society—servants, conscripts, and prisoners. Although I find this chapter the most compelling in the book, I also think that most of these poems could have been written at almost any time in China's past. Elvin argues that, in contrast to the work of earlier poets, the poems included here reveal "an empathy that is possessed of an acute understanding" (p. 49). I would argue that some ofBai Juyi's poems are at least as empathie as some of Elvin's selections.1 With China lashed by political turmoil in the twentieth century, Elvin argues that the familiar structures ofmeaning were ripped apart...